- Friday 26 September
This lecture is a curious exploration of what (humanities) research and project work are really meant to do.
The poet Ocean Vuong describes how we are taught early on to read academic texts like hunters – always in search of the main point. But Vuong teaches his students that reading can also be: “[…] an atmosphere. There is nothing to plunder. There is nothing to get.” We learn to search for points in what we read, and we learn to deliver results in what we write.
But can we imagine academic projects and texts as atmospheres? Could a text support the reader’s curiosity and capacity to imagine otherwise? To manifest possibilities? As the Norwegian social anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen puts it: “Our job is not to tell people what to do. But to show that everything could have been different.”
The lecture/workshop is part of a first-semester course in the Humanities BA programme at Roskilde University, but everyone is welcome to join.
Participants
- Martine Bentsen, Associate Lecturer, Department of Communication and Humanities, PhD
- Marie Lunau Dejgaard, Postdoc, Department of Communication and Humanities, PhD
This session is presented by Roskilde University.