Strategic Working Groups

The Townsend Center’s Strategic Working Group program (SWG), generously funded by The Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, is designed to concentrate on foundational questions and emerging conditions in the humanities. The expectation is to reconnect the fundamental questions of the humanistic disciplines with changing historical circumstances and emerging areas of knowledge; to bring basic humanistic questions to bear on a world shaped by new social and scientific developments; and to explore the ways in which dynamic historical forces in turn compel humanists to re-think fundamental questions.

SWG 2011-2012: Experience of Value

Double Portrait attributed to Giorgione The old-fashioned role of the critic—to establish a hierarchy of value in the arts, literature, and even in philosophy—became subject to important critiques in the last 40 years. Many have pointed out the ideological work of such value judgments and the ideologically inflected presuppositions inherent in the processes of evaluating. These critiques utterly refashioned the humanities. The 2011-2012 Strategic Working Group on Experience of Value will investigate a renewed engagement with questions of value and valuing—one that can learn lessons from critiques but can also counter the various hermeneutics of suspicion with feasible accounts of what positive work the humanities can do in relation to questions about values.

The Strategic Working Group will study enough economic thinking and moral philosophy to recognize the challenges these disciplines impose on any approach more insistent on individuation, affect, and performance, while also striving to become more sophisticated in articulating those alternatives. After beginning with works that offer examples for using economic models of value to think about social and personal issues, the group will then turn to philosophical critiques of those models and philosophy’s attempts to stabilize discourses about values under the same versions of skepticism facing the humanities. Finally, the group will consider examples in philosophy, criticism in the arts, and literary theory to test what is possible for shaping alternatives that offer the humanities a public face.

Co-Conveners: Charles Altieri (English) and Susan Maslan (French).

Participants: Whitney Davis (History of Art), Dorothy Hale (English), Robert Kaufman (Comparative Literature), Niko Kolodny (Philosophy), and Kate van Orden (Music).

More information/apply for a Strategic Working Group

Strategic Working Groups

2011-2012:
    Experience of Value
2010-2011:
    Inflections
2009-2010:
    “Old Things”
2008-2009
    Forms/Stakes/Circuits
2007-2008:
    Religion
2006-2007:
    Regeneration
2005-2006:
    When is Art Research?
2005-2006:
    New Media
2004-2005:
    Redress
2004-2005:
    Critical Theory
2003-2004:
    Human Rights