What can a course in Interdisciplinary Humanities offer for today’s careers?

The Humanities, described in the classical sense as the study of human experience, expressions thereof, and the evolution of human society, are distinguished by an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and critical thinking.

Arguably, the most prominent humanities fields are history and the arts, while Philosophy, languages, and law - although they overlap with the Social Sciences in many respects - are the rest. We live in the information age in which narratives, or public discourses, very often, are the power shifters – they determine how political and cultural scripts might play out in a social context. This makes a humanities education particularly empowering as it lends one the skills required to intervene in or shape narratives and public discourses. Primarily, one might associate the following competencies with a humanities education:

Nuanced Sensemaking

Studying the humanities trains one to deal critically with subjective, complex, and imperfect information. With a multidisciplinary and comparativist exposure to the study of the human subject through literature, philosophy and history, the humanities student learns to examine evidence sceptically and investigate an issue from multiple perspectives. Humanities are all about a nuanced consideration of questions avoiding all simplistic conclusions.

Strong Communication Skills

Communication entails the transfer of information for producing amplified understanding. A student of the humanities is bound to build skills in writing and critical reading, often in multiple languages, as s/he gets to interpret a large volume of literary, visual, and audio-visual material as part of their academic training.

Writing analytical essays, discovering polemical vantage points for building legitimate arguments, understanding narrative devices - tropes, metaphors, and symbols in everyday speech - and a study of literary theory, enable humanities students to develop an intuition for both verbal as well non-verbal (including gestural or visual) communication.

Creative Problem Solving

Studying the humanities opens up a universe beyond reality as we know it, especially with the students’ introduction to the realm of fiction, art, and fantasy. Such an exposure inspires a counterfactual, constraint-less thought process. When faced with situations where conventional problem-solving approaches prove way off the mark, such a mode of creative thinking helps one overcome static, laborious, and predictable loops of mental activity.

Research Capacity

Research is the central pillar of any academic discipline and the humanities are no exception. the humanities ideally should adopt a flipped classroom model wherein students would attend faculty lectures after having read and formed an idea of their own on a given text or topic and utilise classroom time only to explore new threads of deeper research. The humanities student is trained for methodical surfing of large volumes of cultural texts and records, archival material, art works, and even museum exhibits. They also receive a fair introduction to Digital Humanities - a discipline that lies at the intersection of computation and humanities. Students in this field receive continuous encouragement for producing original research output in the form of term papers, dissertations, academic presentations, and field study.

The role of humanities is unparalleled in fostering knowledge societies of the world since times immemorial and remains relevant to date. From completing a PhD and venturing into higher academia, to finding roles in broadcasting or print media, think tanks, and organisations of the social sector - career opportunities for the humanities graduate are manifold and their horizons ever expanding.

Further, since the humanities generally lend one good language skills and eclectic intellectual interests, publishing is a very relevant career field for those with degrees in the humanities.

About the author

Dr. Saumya Dey, Professor at Rishihood University, offers courses in the MA in Interdisciplinary Humanities programme at Rashtram School of Public Leadership - a constituent school of Rishihood University. He has done a PhD at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His primary research interests are intellectual and cultural history. He has till date authored three books – Becoming Hindus and Muslims. Reading the Cultural Encounter in Bengal. 1342-1905 (Munshiram Manoharlal, 2015), The Cultural Landscape of Hindutva and other Essays. Historical Legitimacy of an Idea (Shubhi Publications, 2019), and Narrativizing Bhāratvarṣa & Other Essays (Shubhi Publications, 2021).

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha