From May 28-June 1, 2024, the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley will host the CHCI’s Annual Meeting. On 30 May, the CHR’s Professor Maurits van Bever Donker will chair a discussion on ‘Humanities at Risk’.

The panel, which includes Jack Chen, (Director, Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures, University of Virginia), Kader Konuk (Director, Academy in Exile, Institut für Turkistik, University of Duisburg-Essen), Ato Quayson, (Chair Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Stanford University), and Mario Telo, (Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), coalesces around:

the concept of a wager, a risk, the potential that what is endeavoured may well produce something unexpected. The anti-fascist philosopher, Walter Benjamin, referred to this wager (in his quasi-theological language) as “messianic time”, while warning against the simple sense that this might equal a positive hope. Rather, this arrival, l’avenir, carries with it a radical hope, one whose form of arrival cannot be anticipated and yet requires that we keep watch, that we prepare ourselves to be adequate to what might arrive. In this framing, what does it mean to convene/hold/curate Critical Humanities Spaces? Does it help us to think of the humanities, as such, as a wager? And what might this look like in a time that is defined by precarity, risk, and being at risk? The future of the human has been the humanities’ abiding concern, and the possibility of producing this, its wager. At the same time, when we do the humanities – when we read, write, produce, translate – this activity itself is in the form of a wager, a risking of the unknown, a risking of the self; a welcoming, perhaps, of the stranger. And then in practical terms, perhaps, humanities centres and Institutes are, themselves, a wager within the higher education landscape, one which University executives no doubt read differently to the people that occupy these spaces. Our session will seek to abide by and interrogate these questions, asking what it means to hold the critical humanities space as a site of and for, wager/risk.