In October, Professor Jaimey Fisher (UC Davis, Professor of German and Chair, Cinema and Digital Media) joined the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) for a five-year term as director.
Located at UC Irvine and working across the entire University of California system, UCHRI facilitates multi-campus and interdisciplinary research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
What does the future look like for humanities research?
This is a good question, and I am glad you led with it. Humanities research will continue to move in many different directions, which is one of its great strengths. I think of humanities research as syncretic. Humanities researchers can uncover unlikely correspondences and connections in cultures far and wide. This kind of research will not be replaced by machine learning, because it is creative research, creativity backed with intuitive and qualitative senses of the evidence.
One of the strengths of humanities research is that it does not move in straight or predictable lines. It works with unexpected archives, and in ways that demand considered, often book-length rumination. In our attention economy, it is shocking how many significant human phenomena are simply neglected and forgotten, at accelerated speed. The humanities can help slow down and contravene this disappearance of the evidence of our activities and thoughts. In this sense, there is an archaeological aspect to many humanities approaches: they uncover and sift through neglected or marginalized corners of human experience.
I do think some humanities research will utilize new tools to make innovative discoveries, like data science’s ability to process larger sets of data, something we pursued in my time directing the UC Davis Humanities Institute (2016-2022). In this direction, too, the outcomes of humanities research may be communicated in new forms, like data visualization as well as video presentation of its conclusions.
What new directions and initiatives are you interested in pursuing as you assume the directorship of UCHRI?
Humanities methodologies will continue to be important, maybe even more important, given the digital domination over our work, our entertainment and our attention in general. But I do think humanities research should engage head-on with key technological developments, including machine learning and the shift away from reading among our students. While at UC Davis, I co-founded the department of Cinema and Digital Media, which has grown its faculty, its majors and its physical plant – one of the few areas in the humanities in the last fifteen years to have grown substantially. To speak to our students and to our world, I think the humanities should absolutely engage, with a critical lens, these technological developments. So, one of UCHRI’s first initiatives will be forming a taskforce on critical AI and media literacy. We would be doing our students and the state of California a disservice not to bring humanities methodologies to bear on these developments. They will be a fact of life going forward and a fact of employment for our students, and we need to address them directly.
I think developments, like large language models, occasion the involvement of humanists to interpret texts, to comprehend narratives and to write, not least in order to understand what these tools are doing. This is to appreciate what they can achieve, and also to comprehend their limitations and mistakes.
UCHRI will also focus on bringing humanities methodologies to the world beyond the university, including in public and engaged scholarship. One example of this engagement is a humanities grounding for human rights. As part of this, UCHRI will support work on the histories of non-U.S. cultures and their languages, as this is crucial for human rights work, especially endeavors fighting racism.
Finally, I plan collaborations with our STEM colleagues – the STEM sides of the university have been growing relative to the humanities for some time, but I have also found that many STEM colleagues appreciate the importance of the humanities, including for the effective communication of their findings (for example, on climate change, something on which UCHRI has worked, including with its current WUICAN grant).
Why have a systemwide humanities research institute? What do you think are some of the key things that a systemwide view can offer?
The uniqueness of UCHRI and its model of cross-campus collaboration correspond to the uniqueness of the UC system itself. The UC system is the premiere public university in the world precisely because of its complex structure, and there is enormous potential for collaborations across the campuses. Given that it is only logical for a campus to carry one or two experts in a given field, working at the UC level allows those experts to collaborate and convene research groups on a given topic that best utilize the strengths of the system as a whole.
For example, UCHRI recently hosted a multicampus research group on media consolidation and the media industry’s impact on cultural content (“Media Consolidation and Democracy”). The group included experts from UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara who came together at UCHRI to discuss and create visual materials for teaching these phenomena and their impacts. That scale of research simply is not possible on a single campus. I find it very fruitful and exciting to sponsor and convene such research.
There are humanities centers on each of the UC campuses, and UCHRI helps facilitate their collaboration around particular issues and interests. Why is this important? What do you see as the significance of humanities center collaboration?
One of the most satisfying aspects of my time as director of a campus institute was working in the UC Humanities Center Consortium with other directors and staff. The campus centers and institutes are able to build on, and guide, the strengths of each campus – they know well the areas of focus of their humanities and arts departments. For example, we decided our annual theme of sustenance collaboratively with the centers and institutes at our spring meeting. I just completed a virtual listening tour of all the campus centers: I spoke with directors and their senior staff to learn about what they are now working on, where they see research potential and what challenges they are facing. The centers and institutes help foster these strengths and gauge the most productive direction for a given campus. Our goal at UCHRI is to convene innovative research across campuses, so the centers and institutes can help us decide areas of focus as well as neglected areas to support.
What are you most looking forward to in your move from Northern California (UC Davis) to Southern California (UC Irvine)?
Although I am from the East Coast, from rural New England, I grew up visiting Northern California, where I have family on both my mother’s and father’s sides. I went to college there and have lived there since 2004 – I really love the area. But I am very curious to get to know the many cultures of Southern California. For example, I’ve done a lot of work in film studies and history, have used the archives of the L.A. area and am delighted to have easier access to those. I also have family in both Orange County and L.A., so I am looking forward to seeing my many cousins more often!