As academic life becomes more unstable and precarious; even as academia becomes more acutely aware of the hegemonies it nurtures (including that of privileging the text), it becomes imperative to consider with due seriousness the role of the educational institute in the production of different kinds of knowledges, as well as the publics implicated in this. Beside the constituencies addressed in our own research, students constitute a significant community engaged in the process of the co-production of information and knowledge in the classroom. It becomes imperative for us to allow and encourage them to express critique and imagination through a range of literacies, including the audio visual and digital. Academic scholarship in the arts and the humanities has so far privileged textual scholarship; research papers, articles and books that must demonstrate the necessary methodological dexterity which disciplines so perfectly craft. Most undergraduate and post-graduate courses in the arts and humanities require the standard 3000-word essay and a final exam as part of the assessment criteria. While many of these regulations are a consequence of the regulations of the UGC, there needs to be a serious discussion on whether the testing of cognitive and analytical skills through a short essay are an adequate indication of what a student has really learnt and discovered through the course. While we continuously declare the hyper-mediated nature of our world in theory, we have hardly reflected on the impact that this sensorium is bound to have on methods of scholarship, teaching and learning, although this is beginning to happen to some extent within the digital humanities. Theo van Goldberg’s proposition for an ‘agile humanities’, a form that he refers to as the ‘afterlife of the humanities,’ is much applicable to liberal arts pedagogies too: “The challenge to the humanities today is to be sufficiently agile to be able to translate for ourselves and others, to make legible the conditions we inhabit, the range of meaning-making conditions we face historically and contemporarily—conceptual, argumentational, vocal, textual, visual, sonic, and now digital—as well as the affective responses to them by individuals and collectives.”[viii]
I conclude with a story[ix]:
A certain Raja has a beautiful parrot, and he becomes convinced that it needs to be educated, so he summons wise people from all over his empire. They argue endlessly about methodology and especially about textbooks. “Textbooks can never be too many for our purpose!” they say. The bird gets a beautiful school building: a golden cage. The learned teachers show the Raja the impressive method of instruction they have devised. “The method was so stupendous that the bird looked ridiculously unimportant in comparison.” And so, “With textbook in one hand and baton in the other, the pundits [learned teachers] gave the poor bird what may fitly be called lessons!” One day the bird dies. Nobody notices for quite some time. The Raja’s nephews come to report the fact:
The nephews said, “Sire, the bird’s education has been completed.”
“Does it hop?” the Raja enquired.
“Never!” said the nephews.
“Does it fly?”
“No.”
“Bring me the bird,” said the Raja.
The bird was brought to him. . . . The Raja poked its body with his finger. Only its inner stuffing of book-leaves rustled. Outside the window, the murmur of the spring breeze amongst the newly budded Asoka leaves made the April morning wistful.
Rashmi Sawhney is an academic, occasional writer and co-founder of the VisionMix network. Her research explores the production, circulation and exhibition of moving image cultures at the intersections of cinema, visual arts, and digital media in the South Asian context and she has a special interest in science fiction film and video.
[i] http://mhrd.gov.in/university-and-higher-education.
[ii] Srishti tends to use the term ‘General Studies’ in lieu of ‘Liberal Arts’ in order to accommodate courses on science and technology with a bearing on creative practices. These General Studies courses are compulsory units for every undergraduate and postgraduate student registered in any programme of study along with other units in their areas of specialization. The General studies courses are not categorized by discipline, but are put together with the objective of facilitating students to acquire various capabilities for critique, analysis and argument (as opposed to the art or design skills they would acquire from their other modules). Nonetheless, I continue to use the term ‘liberal arts’ and ‘humanities’ in this article in order to draw upon their rich histories.
[iii] Ratto, Matt. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” The Information Society 27.4 (2011): 252-260.
[iv] Most students stuck to this requirement, barring one who wanted to develop an interactive sensor-based work using the computer mouse. Thus, he worked within the broader framework of ‘new media’ as opposed to ‘digital media’.
[v] The fact that the classical flâneur has always been male has been ciritqued in feminist scholarship and perhaps it needs to be pointed out here that the cyber flâneur overcomes this limitation since online identities are manufactured as well as concealed.
[vi] Treske, Andreas (2013) The Inner Life of Video: Theory for the YouTube Generation, Network Notebooks no. 6. Amsterdam: Colophon, Institute of Network Cultures.
[vii] Excerpt from Nishita’s concept note, written to describe the rationale of her project.
[viii] https://humafterlife.uchri.org/
[ix] Translated in V. Bhatia, ed., Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education (New Delhi: Sahitya Chayan, 1994).
