The Power of "Why": Inaugural Humanities Research Lab
Professor Jane Desmond (Anthropology) is teaching the inaugural humanities research lab course "Humans and Animals: Friends or Food?" (ANTH 126), a class that engages undergraduate students in interdisciplinary humanities research while posing questions about the non-human world.
She answered five questions for us on the research lab course, the importance of public engagement, and the complexity of human-animal relationships.
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Creating pathways to understanding is critical to an engaged citizenship, no matter what profession our students choose down the road. Research is about the power of asking "why?"
-Jane Desmond
How did the idea for ANTH 126 originate? As a general education course, how do you see it benefiting humanities and non-humanities majors alike?
This course had its origin in the marvelous "Grand Challenges" campus-wide initiative a few years ago, which sought to develop new coursework on some key issues facing our planet and communities in the future. I was fortunate to receive a course development grant to help build the sustainability studies options on campus. "Humans and Animals: Friends or Food?" was selected as a new Grand Challenge course in the sustainability track. We also received General Education certification for this course. When that initiative wound down, and instructors were urged to integrate these new courses into departmental structures, I placed the course in my home department of anthropology this year, since it builds on other courses pertaining to the cultures of "nature" that I offer.
Additionally, this academic year, I was honored to be invited to offer "Humans and Animals: Friends or Food?" as the first "humanities lab" course. This is all due to its fundamental conception as an interdisciplinary initiative uniting the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Ever since its conception, the course has been assertively "hands on" and "student centered," with an interdisciplinary bent. Over the past few years, I’ve increased the emphasis I place on project-based learning, and also on the focus of teaching students the power of research to impact the broader world, even as undergraduates. The invitation to conceive this course as a humanities-based "lab" of collaborative learning was a logical next step, and a thrilling one. It also allowed me to subtlety shift the emphasis of the course, with increased focus on what it means to design and carry out research, and how research can impact our contemporary world. As a #100 level General Education certified course, this class strives to introduce the power of research into education for students at the earlier stages of their training. This is precisely when students solely see themselves as "consumers" of research and not as active producers. This shift in self-understanding is one of the key contributions of a humanities lab course. And ultimately, of course, we wish to underline the power of humanities research and our ability to not only understand it as a singular individual enterprise, as it is has often been pursued historically, but as a potential for collaborative research in the service of contemporary humanities' most pressing issues. Such issues, which the humanities can provide special lumination, include fundamental humanities-based questions like: How do communities understand and act on the world? How do expressive practices make a difference in daily life? What is the relationship between symbolic practice, communication, interpretation, and political change? This understanding of the power of humanities research to change the world is one that both majors and non-majors will find essential in their education. It is fundamental to an engaged citizenship.
Why is it important for students to recognize that animals serve different purposes in life: friends when coexisting with humans, fauna who reside in outdoor settings, and food for livelihood?
Our relations with animals shape every dimension of our daily lives, yet only recently has academia recognized this importance and begun, across the disciplines, to take the analysis of human-animal relations as a serious topic of study. For example, for many of us, the presence of animal bodies on our plates, or as part of national cuisines is taken for granted. Animals provide fur for our jackets, wool for our mittens, and even feathers for our pillows. They saturate our stories for children and our animated films. They substitute humans in our fables, and provide entertainment on racetracks, zoos, and in circuses. They snuggle up as pets on our sofas, and fly into space as human surrogates, while also serving in labs as substitutes for medical research. They even help us develop COVID-19 vaccines and lead us to understand the intimate relationship between humans and animals that result in zoonotic diseases, the transmission of which we struggle with in this current moment. Understanding the complex, and often contradictory dimensions of our relations with animals and how those vary widely across history and across contemporary cultural communities, is a key focus of the course.
Is there an overarching message behind your ANTH 126 course that you hope students will take away from the experience?
The overarching message is that "animals" are central to human life, not peripheral to it. No matter the discipline (i.e., urban planning, AI, medicine, or even the study of racialization in the U.S.), we should be bringing our most highly developed analytical skills across multiple disciplines to help us understand these relations and their importance. Beyond that the urgent, foundational ground of the course is to foster a sense of curiosity for interdisciplinary engagement, I hope this experience will help students come to see themselves as researchers, problem-solvers, and active change-makers in the world, from a very young age to adults, no matter what career they ultimately pursue. Social challenges are multi-factorial and will continue to present "wicked problems"---that is, problems that have no one solution and are ever-evolving.
What public engagement opportunities are built into the course, and why was this important to include?
Normally I have guests from on-campus groups and from the community (including non-human animals!) come right into the classroom. We might visit a local farm or talk to a vegetarian chef for greater opportunities too. With COVID restrictions, I am trying to capture some of these lived experiences by having an undergraduate R.A., Grey Sherwin, funded by HRI, go out and create "virtual fieldtrip" videos. Guests (human at least) can still Zoom in, but I really miss the presence of animals in the classroom. The effect, whether the animals are from the local animal shelter, or the Wildlife Medical Center, always brings an electric charge to the discussions. Even if we cannot be "live," the final portion of the lab will focus on the process of defining a research question that is relevant to our local community in order to figure out ways to engage with those questions and contribute solutions to build more robust, healthier and resilient communities, empowered by research-backed knowledge provided by the university. Our current reality is charged with human-animal issues, including the widely noted COVID-related impact of illnesses in the workforces of meatpacking plants. Workers who are disproportionately immigrant and members of communities of color are impacted more than other industry sectors.
Is there anything else you would like our readers to know about this course?
Collaborative, creative research is thrilling! This course, structured as a lab that seeks to articulate research questions and paths to the future, recognizes how closely linked human and non-human animals are in nearly every dimension of our lives, helping students embrace the power of research. Creating pathways to understanding is critical to an engaged citizenship, no matter what profession our students choose down the road. Research is about the power of asking "why?" So much of what we take for granted in our daily lives, like the dog in the living room or the chicken leg wrapped in cellophane in the grocery store, is always worthy of and subject to investigation. Why are things the way they are? How did they come to be that way? What costs (visible and invisible) are tallied to maintain this status quo? Who benefits and who doesn't? Is the status quo what we, as citizens, desire moving forward? What assumptions make some practices normative? Could we imagine a different, a better future? One that is more fully responsive to the needs of human and non-human animals alike? And if so, what would it look like and how can the humanities, with its deep commitment to grasping, analyzing, and articulating—how we see the world, in all our plurality—help us understand how to get there? More specifically, what are our relations with the non-human world and what might we wish it to become? These are the underlying commitments of the course and its ultimate goal—to create researchers of us all and inquisitive life-long learners.
By HRI Intern Maya Moucharrafie and Erin Ciciora