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So go and get some books. Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by braille. I'm Lee Chung-Grechault, and this week, we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're talking with Dr.
Amy Dotten. She's a lecturer in practical theology and head of the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Today we're going to talk about let's hear it for the humanities and fight against COVID-19. Dr.
Dotten, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. Before we get into a few of our questions, tell me a little bit about your work and how this fits in.
Sure, there's two key areas to the work that I do. One is in my title, which is Practical Theology. I run a doctorate program, which is designed for people in all sorts of different professions. They might be ministerial, they might be in charity work, they might be doing voluntary work to encourage them to think about the nature of their work theologically.
So it's bringing together theological understanding with the actual practices that people are engaged in. And the earlier area of my work is to do with so French philosophy, I work a lot on the work of Paul Reker, who thinks in ways that emphasize the interpretive nature of what we do when we try and think philosophically or more broadly in the humanities as a whole. And so I want to talk about how that fits into, the broader scope of humanities. We're so invested right now in what's happening with coronavirus and what scientific research can tell us.
What's the value of humanities at this moment, especially the subjects that you just talked about, which seem very high level and sort of abstract? Yeah, it's a great question, I think, the value of humanities at this moment. It seems to me that a key valuable contribution that the humanities bring is to actually think about values. It's not as if we are following scientific research blindly.
There's a process of weighing it up, of judging how to respond to it, how to develop creative ways of using those scientific insights. So it's not as if the science happens over in one place and then the humanities happen over in another place rather we're using those scientific and humanities trained skills to respond to a really complex situation. So to relate that to what I was just talking about there to do with the theological meaning of practices, I know what you mean about it signing abstract, but it's really trying to pay attention to the implicit meaning in the practices that we're engaged in. So to link that to C19, when we make decisions about what should close or decisions about what visits will be able to make, there are implicit meanings about what we value or we make decisions of that kind.
Now, often of course, those decisions have to be rooted in the scientific reality of what's safe or economic concerns, but actually how we prioritize things like making family time possible and so on at times like this is also revealing what we value. And to my mind, humanities are the field in which our critical thinking in relation to that get honed. So I think that's the contribution it's bringing is trying to work out the meaning of what we do because it has meaning and ignoring that, I think it's a big problem. And I think that's such a good point because I feel like every day I'm faced with ethical questions, whether it's should I go to the grocery store today?
Am I exposing too many people? But also there are these bigger ethical questions for global organizations. They're facing those right now looking at how to give out the vaccine, who should we prioritize? And actually ethics come into play there when you think about should the elderly get it first or the frontline workers or people of different races that are impacted disproportionately by COVID-19.
Ethics play a huge role in there on top of all of that scientific information. Absolutely. I think that's I think you've really put your finger on it. Do we protect vulnerability?
That's a massive question for the nature of the communities we live in and are trying to build. I would hope speaking as somebody's interested in ethics, I'd hope that that would be the priority, that the way in which ongoing decisions get made are attentive to vulnerability, attentive to power, attentive to the importance of relationship rather than pure economic reality. So yeah, I think that the humanities are a crucial reminder of these layers of meaning of what we do. The other thing that really fascinates me is even when you introduced yourself, I was struck by just the fact that your way of thinking must be so different than other people who maybe even study journalism or study science or math.
So researchers who study the humanities, they have to use critical thinking to sift through vast amounts of information and decipher it. How could critical thinking benefit us during this crisis? Especially the way you think about theology or these other subjects in the humanities? I think that's a really good question.
And I think that what theology does, what demands of theologians at least, is probably pretty similar to the humanities across the board. Because if you want to sift through, as you say, and decipher, that that's a task of paying attention and demanding evidence and insisting that reasoning be explained. And I can't really think of three more important things that we ought to be doing in a situation of global pandemic. We should be paying attention to the realities of the decisions that are being made, who is suffering, who is vulnerable to those decisions.
And we should also be demanding evidence. That's certainly not something specific to science. Those of us who work in humanities, whether it's history or theology or even, say, more art-based subjects, we're still trying to look for reasons why we think the way that we do. So I can't roll up and offer a shiny, new philosophical idea out of nowhere.
It needs to best some relationship to the way in which people are actually living and thinking and hoping. So the demand for reasoning to be explained seems to me to be of absolute paramagnetic importance at a time of international crisis, that we expect of each other to explain our reasons for operating in the way that we do. So that's what critical thinking offers, I think, that paying attention, demanding evidence, and expecting reasons to be explained. Do you find that you're reasoning differently than your friends or family that are dealing with this crisis as well?
Do you approach these sort of macro problems that we're all facing in a different way at all because of the way you think? That's really interesting. I don't think it's different, but I think there is a question of layers because we're all experiencing some similar situations. Anyone who's in a shielding category has had to stay indoors for lengthy periods.
Anyone who's on a front line role has had to continue to work. Those are different pressures, but they're bound up with the same need to look after each other, to be committed to each other, the sort of community building that we do by each doing something different. But still, as I say, being directed toward the same goal. But I guess it becomes different when you're working in, say, large organizations that need to make decisions about whether they open or closed, situations where you work might interact with particular industries that are under threat, all that kind of thing.
So I think it's not so much that my reasoning is different, is that my particular field of perspective is different. I'm coming from being in a university, wanting students to be safe, wanting my colleagues to be safe. What's still behind that is a wish for everyone to be well and work well together, I think. So it's not so much a difference in reasoning, as it is maybe paying attention to the way that those reasons become concrete in different ways.
Another interesting little nugget that was in this article was the study from the British Academy, which found that 50% of chief executives of FTSE companies have either an undergrad or post-grad degree in the humanities. What does that tell us about the literal monetary value of a humanities degree? It's a fascinating statistic, isn't it? It really is good.
I feel as though we ought to put that on the front of our advertising literature for theology degrees. I mean, it's a funny one. I think there's two parts to the answer. I mean, the first is that those who've had training in the humanities are part of massive, complex, economic networks that employ and house and feed and support our families and communities.
I'm not sure how significant the sort of 58 specific CEOs might be. I do think we might think of them as emblematic of that wider contribution. I think it's really easy to buy into the sort of STEM narrative that science is going to develop things, and therefore that's where economic growth comes from. But humanities are very much part of that as well.
But the second part of the answer, of course, is to question if monetary value is the only kind of value. And that's what you and I have already been talking about. The humanities are what will help us to scrutinize and interpret and fundamentally nourish our public life, I think. So it's a funny one.
It's exciting to see that the humanities can lead to those kinds of roles. But I guess it's important to imagine the other places they can lead to. I'd be curious personally how many theology majors are now CEOs. Those two things seem perhaps a little in contrast with one another.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you could maybe you can count the purpose of CEO. I don't think it's in the foot C100. But yeah, perhaps faith leaders are also doing some of that work these days, too.
Does that have a lot of people to oversee in a lot of real estate? So I suppose we'll put him in that category. We've talked about some very esoteric subjects on this show, 17th century ivory mannequins to the morality of honeybees. How would you apply lessons from these journals to everyday life?
That's such a great question. I really want to hear the episode on the morality of honeybees now. I must say that's a great ever. Isn't there something really beautiful in how esoteric these things are?
It seems to me that that kind of extraordinarily detailed, focused topic reveals something really glorious about human people that we can get. So detail, obsessed and we can find insightful patterns in the kinds of object are that would have been built in the 17th century. The morality of honeybees, the patterns of these things, the way in which people get excited and hopeful and imaginative about topics of this kind. I just find that hugely exciting.
There's joy in things that isn't about productivity and that is fundamentally not about these fearful situations we might be facing right now. But that just reminds us of the hopefulness toward the future, the things that can be possible. It strikes me that imagination is one of the things that humanities really do bring again to the fight against COVID-19. It's that that will allow us to reimagine new futures.
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for talking with us. Dr. Amy Dutton, she's a lecturer in practical theology and head of the department of theology and religion at the University of Birmingham.
Thank you again. Thank you. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast.