As the country generally and the academy specifically head into an uncertain future, hope can be found in the Humanities. This assertion may seem especially quixotic considering both capitalist and cultural pressure in the United States to privilege the “usefulness” of any object, phenomena, or even person that is measurable in some kind of way, often monetarily. The effects of this utilitarianism on higher education have been manifold, such as reducing college degrees to passports to the working world and the vocations therein.

Nowhere in the academy has this strain of American culture been so deeply felt as in Humanities programs and degrees. Whether it be learning a different language, appreciating a piece of literature, or studying other cultures, unless these pursuits can be monetized in some sort of way, they are curios at best and inconsequential at worst within the market place. When practitioners of these disciplines are driven to demonstrate how the Humanities impart skills transferable to economic endeavors, they become disconnected from the inherent worth of what they study and teach. The result is an either/or false dichotomy; the Humanities disciplines offer both extrinsic and intrinsic significance. The difficulty is when the former subsumes the latter.

The root word for this expansive field of Humanities is “human” and it is in real human connection that hope for our future is fostered, sharing our common humanity as expressed through the written word, languages, and the literary arts. In the Humanities we not only communicate what we were, what we are, and what we could be, but we also get to the heart of the “why,” of how meaning is made, and, in doing so, we forge human bonds. These give us the hope of a shared future in all its splendid, multi-faceted variety. In our current political climate, the consequence of the Humanities cannot be overstated-the Humanities is, after all, where hope lives.

We invite a wide range of approaches, though papers and sessions that explore the value of the Humanities in relation to a more hopeful future are the ideal submissions. Languages, literature, pedagogy, writing studies, linguistics, folklore, film studies, the digital humanities, and library studies are all welcome to address any element of these considerations that are pertinent to the discussion.