At CRASSH, researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences have the opportunity to intersect, generating fresh thinking and innovation, as Director Professor Mary Jacobus explains.
At CRASSH, researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences have the opportunity to intersect, generating fresh thinking and innovation, as Director Professor Mary Jacobus explains.
The vision that underpins CRASSH involves distance and engagement: both stepping outside one’s own discipline or institution, and getting together with like-minded collaborators.
Professor Mary Jacobus
Now reaching the end of its first decade at Cambridge, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) – once a fragile newcomer with a controversial moniker – has established itself as a focus for humanities activity, while its post-modern acronym has won international name-recognition.
CRASSH was conceived as a way to create interdisciplinary dialogue across the University’s many faculties and departments in the arts, social sciences and humanities. It brings together early career researchers, established faculty members and visiting scholars – for research groups, workshops, colloquia, lectures and conferences – across an array of established and emerging fields.
Indispensible to the research environment, it serves at once as a centripetal hub, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives, and as a centrifugal force for disseminating
new ideas. It provides a space for both reflection and interaction, where researchers can step beyond the frames of their disciplines.
Hunger for dialogue
As well as fostering interdisciplinarity, the Centre, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has taken on the challenge of disciplinary innovation. Some of the most innovative work has originated in the Centre’s graduate/faculty research groups – currently spanning Endangered Languages, East European Memory Studies, GreenBRIDGE (sustainable architecture), the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Network, and the Science, Technology and Bio-Social Studies Forum.
Meanwhile long-running groups such as Cities, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum continue to flourish, along with recent comers such as Late Antiquities, Health and Welfare, and Postcolonial Empires. Each year brings fresh proposals and new graduate cohorts.
Like the 20 or so conferences sponsored by CRASSH each year, research fora do more than challenge familiar disciplinary silos: they create collaborations from which fresh ideas and projects grow. Many of the conferences run by CRASSH – convened by early career researchers as well as established faculty – produce edited books; some form part of ongoing projects; others spearhead new initiatives and propel them forward to the next stage.
Research today involves networking, often internationally. But the term ‘network’ hardly begins to evoke the research culture engendered by face-to-face meetings and discussion. One of the discoveries made by the Centre at the outset was not just Cambridge researchers’ hunger for dialogue, but their need for a physical space where it could take place: a hospitable interdisciplinary location with common intellectual ownership.
Humanities world view
Recent CRASSH conferences have made an implicit argument for the importance of the humanities perspective and remind us how the world is changing before our eyes: forays into science like Have You Ever Seen a Molecule? Art, Science, and Visual Communication; attempts to grapple with modernity such as Understanding New Wars or Can I see your ID? Personhood and Paperwork in and after the Soviet Union; and, topical today, New Media/Alternative Politics: Communication Technologies and Political Change in the Middle East and Africa.
During 2009–10, a Mellon Sawyer seminar on Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty ran throughout the year, with seminars on finance, health, environment, policy making and democracy, bringing together faculty from across the University, including the Statistical Laboratory, History and Philosophy of Science, Geography and the Cambridge Judge Business School.
This year’s Mellon-funded CRASSH conference in June, The Future University, will address urgent questions about the role of the humanities, including the arts and social sciences, in a modern technological university. The theme asks what universities are for – examining their evolving character and changing concerns in the digital age – a poignant theme at a time when cuts to university funding and fees threaten especially (but not only) the humanities.
For the Centre’s new theme kicking off at the start of the next academic year (see panel), we have selected visiting fellows from our largest ever application pool, along with new India and EUIAS fellows and two new Mellon postdoctoral fellows working on subjects relating to the theme. The generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the Newton Trust and the Charles Wallace India Trust has helped to establish CRASSH as an academic destination for researchers.
As the fellowship group grows, it becomes clearer than ever not only what our visitors gain from access to Cambridge research resources, but also how much they bring to Cambridge: the lively intellectual traffic that energises an international university.
Crystal-ball gazing
From the start, the CRASSH ethos has been strongly participatory. Even as the major research councils look for bigger and better research applications, they note the importance of the bubbling up of new ideas that lead to innovative work. CRASSH plays a part here, through competitive funding for graduate-led research groups, sponsorship of graduate-convened conferences, and Early Career Fellowships for Cambridge faculty beginning a new project. Our postdoctoral and early career fellows this year are working on projects that span terror and terrorism, complex simplicity in architecture, educational innovation and the economics of infectious diseases.
If one function of research is to keep us from forgetting the past – its achievements or its failures, its languages, histories and literary productions – another is to anticipate future concerns: energy, intergenerational justice, the environment; new forms of art, music and culture that cross media; new possibilities for peace as well as war; or new forms of human interaction, whether via digital media or ID papers.
Gateway to the humanities
The vision that underpins CRASSH involves distance and engagement: both stepping outside one’s own discipline or institution, and getting together with like-minded (or unanticipated) collaborators. It aims at the indispensible combination of reflection and argument that gives rise to the best research.
Contact among opposed positions, the ability to learn from working with other people, bridging differences without conceding essential ground – these are facets of the ‘human’ face of the humanities that we teach and encourage through critical study and practice of humanities disciplines.
The argument for the humanities made by CRASSH is that fresh thinking and innovation take place in the interaction between independent research and research collaboration, in the interstices of disciplines, and in the collaborative ethos and international perspective that characterise humanities research at its best. CRASSH aspires to provide this unique form of encounter: a gateway to the humanities.
For more information, please visit www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/
Transregional research in a transregional building
CRASSH’s next theme will be Cultures and Politics of the Transregional, responding to the need to approach ‘regionality’ from a humanities perspective.
Historically, geographical and legal borders have marked the reach of regional identities. But in an age of globalised movement, borders are constantly being crossed by the flow of travellers, by the transit of goods, by the transfer of new narratives and forms of language, and by the transmission of political and other ideas.
Flows across borders and the systems that control them are ever more large-scale and complex in character, and demand rethinking in interdisciplinary and comparative ways. With this focus in mind, Cultures and Politics of the Transregional, which runs for two years from the start of the academic year in 2011, will encompass a visiting fellowship scheme and a programme of interdisciplinary conferences, workshops and public lectures.
Fittingly, the theme coincides with a symbolic move to the University’s new humanities building at 7 West Road, where CRASSH will form part of an expanded international and cosmopolitan research community consisting of the regional studies Centres (African, Latin American, Mongolian and Inner Asian, and South Asian) and the Department of Politics and International Studies.
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