I decided to join the WhatEvery1Says project because I saw it as a unique opportunity in order to grow as a researcher in Humanities and, at the same time, the best place where to engage the skills I acquired through my previous working experiences as a physicists.
The proposal of the WE1S team to open a dialogue with STEM and Social Sciences, structuring a strategy for advocacy for humanities not in opposition to these other fields of knowledge, is strongly needed.
Now, I want to share my experience as someone who has been on the two sides. From my previous education and working experience, I know that many STEM initiatives are going in that direction. Furthermore, while being a physicist, I always met, among my colleagues, people who play an instrument (and some of them very well), or who wrote fiction or poetry. I always encountered enthusiasm when proposing to go to art or history museums. I saw people naming stars or theorems or phenomena with references to Literature, Music and Art. When I changed side, the times that, while talking about whatever, I was saying something that it looked kind of scientific, the reaction of the people I met was "that is boring" or "that is too complicated". I proposed to watch the launch of rockets at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, and I was told "you are really a nerd". I have been given academic papers (from the seventies) where the humanities were presented as offering critical thinking and mind-opening while STEM were described implicitly or explicitly, as cold and dogmatic (a very hug misconception about STEM).
Richard Holmes concludes the Epilogue of his wonderful book The Age of Wonder : How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science with these words:
The old, rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics- are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective.
Williams Wordsworth, one of the most quoted romantic poets, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, shows appreciation for the scientific works and explain how science is not in his poetry not because of an essential incompatibility or a fear of it, nor because of lack of interest or relevance of the scientific disciplines but because their understanding is perceived as out of reach in everyday life.
I think that, if advocacy for Humanities includes interdisciplinary and dialogue with STEM, humanists have to know about STEM, have to know of their content and to be able to relate to how they work, understanding the differences, not assuming to know them.
A dialogue has to go two-ways. To go forwards, it needs both legs, otherwise it will be always limping.
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