Economic Humanities: What’s That?

About

This event explores how economic questions are invigorating new research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Structured around three short research presentations followed by an open discussion, it casts the economic as a thread linking geographies, disciplines and scholars in the kind of common conversation that the siloes of academia today render altogether too uncommon. In the spirit of collaborative inquiry, the organizers invite the audience to join the presenters in stretching the limits and testing the premises of the economic humanities.

Brian Hurley (Asian Studies) opens the presentation portion of the event by examining how the aesthetics of beauty frame the economics of inequality in the Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari’s famed novel Snow Country (Yukiguni). Youjeong Oh (Asian Studies) then explores how money can sustain rather than commodify the commons by tracing how monetary flows enable the protection, care, and reproduction of Jeju’s gotjawal forests in South Korea. Finally, Jason Cons (Anthropology) considers how the economic frames questions of both the politics of future making in the Bengal delta and the imaginations of land and value central to the problem of feral hogs in Texas.

In the role of discussant, Lalitha Gopalan (Radio, Television and Film) and Rebecca Lee (Asian Studies) elaborate the economic threads that tie this wide-ranging panel together before opening the dialogue to audience participation.

Sponsored by the Humanities Institute, the Center for East Asian Studies and the South Asia Institute.