Annual General Meeting
of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada

20 November 1999 Ottawa

This Roundtable was organized to discuss issues around the future of the humanities in Canada and to ensure that the Humanities and humanities scholars conceive of the future in a dynamic manner.

Participants in the Roundtable were:

• Dr Pat Demers, Vice-president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Professor of English, University of Alberta
• Dr Andrew Brook, Treasurer of the Canadian Philosophical Association and Director, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University
• Dr Richard Sokoloski, representative to HSSFC from the Canadian Association of Slavists and Director, Department of Modern Languages, Université d'Ottawa
• Dr Francesco Loriggio, President of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies and Associate Director of the School of Languages, Literatures and Comparative Studies, Carleton University
• Dr Pat Clements (Chair), President-elect of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada and Professor of English, University of Alberta

Dr Demers opened the Roundtable by outlining the work to date of the SSHRC Working Group on the Future of the Humanities. This Group of eight was struck in May 1999 with representation from text-based, visual and performance disciplines as well as from social science fields of economic history and law. It has established several objectives for its work:

1. to devise a statement of the modes and values of humanities research and training in order to clarify to ourselves, SSHRC Council, the Minister and our various publics what we do;
2. to identify present challenges and trends for humanities research/researchers in Canada in order to:
1. clarify and strengthen the ways (mechanisms and rhetoric) through which current SSHRC programs, initiatives, and application materials encourage and anticipate the inclusion of humanities researchers;
2. mount a joint conference, with the University of Toronto, in Fall 2000, to explore and promote the changing world of the humanities; and
3. propose strategies and initiatives to SSHRC to respond to these changes.;
3. to explore the feasibility and potential benefits of collaboration with the NEH.

The Group plans to sponsor a major conference on the Humanities at the University of Toronto in Fall 2000 -- 12 to 14 October -- with the intent of making its workshops incubators of recommendations to Council.

The initial stage in planning for the Toronto conference has the Group devising a collaborative working statement on the Humanities. The most recent revision addresses the shared task of scholarship and teaching in the Humanities, the making of meaning out of our created world: its languages and literature (ancient and modern), its musical and visual arts, the events of its past and its systems of thought, both secular and religious. The statement acknowledges that the Humanities share much with the qualitative and theory-inflected branches of Social Sciences.

The second stage of planning is to explore the difficulties and trends that are confronting research and researchers in the Humanities in Canada. Members of the Working Group are each preparing a position paper, with topics that include Specialization, Interdisciplinarity, New Technologies and Media, Knowledge Transfer, Community-responsive Scholarship, New Paradigms and Fields, Graduate Studies and Skills, and Faculty Renewal. Papers will help formulate workshops which, with a broad-interest public plenary, will formulate specific recommendations and initiatives for consideration by Council. Members of the research community and the Federation will be invited to participate in these workshops.

Dr Andy Brook presented a particular area of concern for philosophers in Canada, namely the issue of strategic themes and their interest and appropriateness for the Humanities. The pre-occupation of the Canadian Philosophical Association on this issues stems from the recognition that the SSHRC strategic theme on Applied Ethics -- one that should have been of significance in their discipline -- had 'died on the vine.' The CPA is interested in taking an active approach to ensure that a similar situation does not arise again and that themes are developed that have interest and application for the Humanities.

Specifically, the CPA has been working internally to establish strategic theme topics that meet the dual criteria of having current research significance and having application to a present issue. The themes being put forward by the CPA include:

• cognitive science;
• politics, law and society; and
• nature or nurture.

The CPA is working with the HSSFC to encourage wider involvement from the research community, particularly in the Humanities, in the development of these and other themes topics for presentation to SSHRC.

Dr Brook did, however, underline the continuing difficulties that the SSHRC criteria for strategic themes present to the Humanities. In particular, the criteria are stated so generally that it makes it difficult for the humanities to easily see a 'fit.' Moreover, the requirement that the research have application to government policy is not obviously achievable in many Humanities disciplines. Finally, the notion of private and public sector partners is elusive for much Humanities research.

The final presentations came from Dr. Richard Sokolowski and Dr. Francesco Loriggio who, together with a number of other colleagues, have been participating on a working group on modern languages. Each in his own way, they addressed problems now facing modern language units. Drs Sokoloski and Loriggio outlined the real effects on modern language disciplines, including: a relativeness approach, where their disciplines are seen as purely adjuncts to literature, linguistics or sociology; the forcing of their disciplines into purely minor categories; and the prompting of their issues being taught in English only.

Dr. Loriggio brought attention to some of the trends that can be discerned in the restructuring many of the smaller modern languages programs are undergoing. These trends involve: (a) forcing units to abandon the teaching of literature, or to teach such courses in English, or to teach such courses in the original language only if private, outside financing of the courses is available; (b) the housing of language courses and literature courses in separate units, especially if the literature courses are taught in English.

Dr. Loriggio outlined some of the issues this raises. As disciplines, italianistica, ispanistica, Germanistik, etcetera, have rested on the assumption that there is a particular knowledge to be derived from the study of the correlation between a language, a culture and a history, however complex that correlation may be. In turn, this assumption has linked back to a fundamental trait of the humanities, to the view that the humanities are the study of the humanae litterae, or, as the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin has proposed, the study of human utterances, and therefore have the question of linguistic plurality built-in to them. Within faculties of art "foreign" modern languages units have been the units which have reminded us that what sometimes we think applies to everybody, in effect applies only to us or primarily to our tradition. To maintain language offerings apart from the literature offerings, on the grounds that they provide a service for other units with language requirements, thus not only erodes the disciplinary status of the modern languages. It deprives the notion of disciplinarity of one of its components, and thus impoverishes that notion. The implication is that only those practices which measure up to certain criteria (i.e., which can deploy strong, "neutral" protocols of analysis) can be deemed to be disciplines.

Similarly cogent issues arise when "foreign" language units --and only "foreign" language units among modern language units -- are asked to find outside funding for literature courses. These issues are of an ethical nature but are, Dr. Loriggio contended, no less germane to the humanities in an era in which societies are more and more multicultural and multi-ethnic.

Although modern language units have not always articulated these concerns efficiently, when they have, administrators have not always listened. One of the functions of the working group on modern languages is to reconsider these questions and to see how they can be made to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

A few questions were taken from those attending in the short time remaining.

There were references to recent hirings in modern language units at the University of Alberta which seemed to indicate that some universities were taking positive steps towards redressing some of the difficulties the modern languages units have encountered. Dr. Loriggio responded that the University of Alberta had indeed begun to re-invest in these departments, unlike provinces such as Ontario, but that the main tensions persisted there too.

Another point was made concerning disciplines such as philosophy were in themselves already interdisciplinary in nature. This needs to be taken into account as new strategic themes are developed. Dr Brook responded that philosophy as a discipline is generally not doing well in SSHRC grants results. This, he suggested, was partly due to problems in grantsmanship and partly due to program design that does not meet the needs of a part of the research community.

Several suggestions for the SSHRC Working Group to consider were made to Dr Demers. The fact that women make up a large portion of humanities students and scholars needs to be considered by the Group in their deliberations. It was also strongly emphasized that the Working Group redress the many strategic, policy-oriented initiatives taken by SSHRC and ensure strong support for basic research alongside any policy-driven research. Finally, it was suggested that the Group needs to explore why the best students are entering science programs and whether the Humanities and Social Sciences need to re-invent themselves (and how), particularly in undergraduate programs.

Dr Clements concluded the Roundtable emphasizing that these issues were important for the community to continue to discuss and to take action upon, thereby ensuring that the Humanities have their rightful place in the future.