Office Hours
There is a series of rudimentary questions that appear to have no real answer. How do we make sense of the world around us? How should we organize society? And what--if any--meaning can we excavate from such questions? Perhaps it goes without saying that it is from these questions that fields of academic study emerge, coalescing more broadly into what we now call the humanities, the social sciences, the "hard" sciences. Hundreds and even thousands of years later, we have no definitive answers, and yet it is the pursuit of such questions that provides us with any sense of meaning and/or guiding principles for existing and, more importantly, co-existing in the world.
Whatever Office Hours is, it is borne out of these questions, and a cross-disciplinary exploration of different methodological approaches to such questions. Too often these approaches take shape in academic silos without any substantive dialogue between disciplines (higher education proliferates around these silos, largely sealing off meaningful conversation in favor of expertise, specialization, and gatekeeping). By contrast, the primary goal here is to foreground the productive friction between these disciplines and approaches. We will privilege difference over depth and contradiction over systematic coherence, even potential naivete over politically correct virtue signaling and field-specific jargon.
If we consider the social sciences, for example, the primary concern is design. How do societies organize and institutionalize, bringing people into contact and relationship with one another? What do these systems and institutions tell us about the communities therein? Where do they fall apart? And how do they come together? The humanities, however, tend toward a more focused lens on communication, values, and meaning-making. The questions therein are more existential, interrogating meaning with a somewhat antagonistic--or at least ambivalent--approach to efficiency, engineering, or social design. There is little desire to optimize in the humanities.
Disciplines like analytic philosophy wield the methodological tenets of the social sciences, relying primarily on formal logic and deductive reasoning but often at the cost of historical context. These disciplines do not live in a vacuum. Office Hours will begin by staging a conversation between these disciplines and competing methodologies, attempting to bridge the gap between different critical frameworks. If a dying academy historically relies on professionalization and institutionalization, we will opt for a less professional approach, one that de-professionalizes this approach in service of a more open and accessible conversation.
