Over the past week, I have been completing a one-week Digital Communications micro-internship with TORCH, contributing to the behind-the-scenes action of a dynamic, multidisciplinary organisation. As a Modern Languages undergraduate, I am an avid proponent of the arts and the humanities, and as the future of the humanities is being put into question, it is all the more important that centres like TORCH continue to prosper, encouraging groundbreaking interdisciplinary research and proving that these fields do have a place in our society.
One of my favourite tasks, though time-consuming, was subtitling TORCH YouTube video, specifically the Book at Lunchtime series on 'Monstrosity', a pamphlet created in collaboration with academics, from Oxford and the University of Uppsala, coming from a variety of departments including English, French, Geography and the Internet Institute. They tackled the age-old question of 'What it means to be human?' from the perspective of the non-human, the monstrous. And whilst the guests spoke less on the content of the publication itself, apart from several readings of extracts from the pamphlet, what really intrigued me was their emphasis on collaboration, and through this I could really perceive the organisation’s interdisciplinary goals in action. Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, director of CIRCUS, which is the Uppsala equivalent of TORCH, draws upon a quote by Theodore Zeldin in order to demonstrate the power of collaboration:
Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.
And this is exactly what has happened in the meetings between Oxford and Uppsala. With production spanning two years, Book at Lunchtime episode gave me a profound insight into the experiences of not just working across disciplines, but across time, space, and ways of thinking. Wes Williams, for example, speaks about how collaboration pushes the limits of creativity, allowing you to venture into an unknown, but exciting space. Matthew Reynolds describes the social aspects of the project, a space in which you are 'engaging with people, not experts', since no one is an expert in everything.
Hearing them speak really made me hark back to my own time here at Oxford. Being some of the very first people to step into the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities (indeed, I've been here since day one), by simply being in the space I have truly felt an environment of collaborative and interdisciplinary study. Us languages students are usually found at the Schwarzman from 10 to 5 on most days, going to grammar classes, attending lectures, practicing speaking, or just catching up with friends. The latter is one of my favourite parts of this new space: the sheer amount of common areas means I get to meet, see, and hear from people from such a huge variety of disciplines. Even within my own subject, I feel as though I've gotten closer with the students from my cohort, since we often study or have lunch together between classes, something that the old faculty didn't allow for. Although my degree is concentrated mostly on literature, I've been able to learn so much just by seeing people around the building. I've managed to borrow notes from a History student for an essay on the novel of the Mexican Revolution, borrowed books from the Humanities Library about film under Francoist dictatorship, and have managed to sneak into a few Art History lectures over the last two terms in order to help with my dissertation on Women's Art in Portugal and Argentina.
I've come out of this micro-internship, and from my two terms at the Schwarzman, with a newfound optimism for the future of the humanities. The discussions, projects, and research that we as humanities students undertake, both individually and collaboratively, can have a real impact on the world, and I'm excited to see what will be in store when I come back from my year abroad!
