A night with good food, great weather, and some of the most important scholars in the humanities in the Southwest, this is how the “Next” Tucson Humanities Festival started this year. At an uncanny location too: the Playground, a downtown bar in Tucson usually full of music and young people dancing until late hours, transformed into a delightful, peaceful rooftop in the middle of Tucson with a cool breeze and great company.
The night started with the words of the Dean of the College of Humanities of the University of Arizona, Dr. Alain-Philippe Durand, who tackled the theme of this year’s festival: Next. This year, the Humanities Festival will be discussing the future of humanities and the direction that humanities scholarship will take in the following years to maximize its impact during the digital age. “We don’t want the machines in charge, we want humans to be in charge,” said Dr. Durand during his speech
This year’s festival was inaugurated by the talk of Dr. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman titled “Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City”. In it, Dr, Crisman offered a refreshing point of view on several of the most critical urban challenges of our time.
The Humanities Festival is a yearly month-long event that started in 2009 through a series of outreach events. This year, the festival includes fourteen events with topics like “transforming lives”, “politics and poetry”, and “space and wondering”. The acclaimed author Sandra Cisneros will also be part of this years’ festival with a reading on October 24th.
The talk was introduced by Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, who enthusiastically talked about the many events that the city hosts, emphasized the importance of the festival: “events like this are why we live here… What a great city we have!”. And I agree with the Mayor. Tucson does have a rich cultural and intellectual life, and it is thanks to all the people who make this and other events happen. However, the city of Tucson just got better. Allow me to introduce to you the newly appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Public & Applied Humanities and the Institute for LGBT Studies, Dr. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman.
Dr. Crisman is an expert urbanist who focuses on the intersection of art and urban design. He is the proposer of the concept of imminent speculation, which is “the practicing of an inherently unknowable future in order to create the conditions for that future to unfold”(Crisman: Practicing the Future, 2016). A concrete example of this would be a project called “Peatoniños” ( I will tell you about this project in the near future) where Dr. Crisman worked as part of a research team from UCLA. “Peatoniños” is an answer to the high mortality rate of children in Mexico City due to preventable traffic accidents. In this case, the practice of immanent speculation would ask: what kind of conditions do we need in order to create a future where children are safe on the streets of Mexico City?
The concept of Immanent speculation comes from what Dr. Crisman calls “the projective imperative”:
“As scholars and as people living in society we have an imperative to really think about the future. Especially in academia, we often have a tendency to be very comfortable engaging with the past […] or perhaps the present […], but what does it mean to actually engage with the future? It’s a little scarier; it’s a little more open-ended; it’s a little more abstract. And nevertheless, I think there is still a moral-ethical obligation to actually engage with the future.”
Speculative humanities do not need to be intimidating. Although it is not common practice to look at the future within the disciplines of humanities, there are firm reasons to believe that applied humanities is the fertile ground where much of the seeds for the future of the world may be planted. The practice of immanent speculation draws from the knowledge of the concrete culture and places where it needs to be applied. The future already stems from these places and cultures; it is immanent to them.
Dr. Crisman provided case studies of how many modern urban practices are far from being new “modes” of urban life, like the use of bicycles or the reinvention of buildings into high-end markets, for instance. Long-standing cultural traditions are being reimagined into new practices. This is the case of street vending, a practice that has resulted in the birth of Uber Eats or the legalization of street vendors in Los Angeles. And it is precisely this knowledge of cultural traditions, urban spaces, and the human condition that provides the humanities with the tools to speculate and reimagine the future.
The talk ended with a round of questions for Dr. Crisman, the announcement of a possible future project for improving bicycle culture in Tucson, and a great selfie moment (below) in which you can appreciate the excellent work that the Playground, the College of Humanities and the sponsors did into turning a night club into an academic space.
It is clear that designing urban spaces based on our understanding of the present is a necessity, but how applied humanities can contribute to this and other conversations about our collective future is the very topic of this year’s Humanities Festival: Next.
Resources
- If you would like to learn more about Dr. Jonathan Jae-an Crisman, you can visit his profile at the University of Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities.
- If you want to learn more about the Department of Public and Applied Humanities, where Dr. Benjamin Fraser, Chief editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies and this blog is an affiliated faculty member, you can visit their website here.
- To learn more about other projects from Dr. Crisman and the Urban Humanities team at UCLA, make sure to visit their website here.
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