Wednesday Nite at the Lab
press release: WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person (Room 1111) presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at on YouTube.
On July 19 Solon Simmons of George Mason University will pose the question, “The Afterlife of Story: Are the Humanities Still Useful?”
Description: For over a century, it has been fashionable to describe the state of the humanities as a crisis, largely because the methods of analysis that proved to be so successful in the physical sciences did not seem to apply to the subject matter of the humanities. Now we live in the era of large language models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and this crisis has reached a climax. As reported in February of 2023 in the New Yorker in an article called ‘The End of the English Major,’ “during the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third.”
It appears that even the students who might once have been drawn to study literature or the arts are simply interested in more practical pursuits: with a strange fetish for computer science. Can we still speak about higher purpose in a systematic way? Is there a future for humanistic scholarship? What role can narrative social science play? In this talk, Solon Simmons, director of The Narrative Transformation Lab and a professor from George Mason University will speak about findings from new research on plot structure and its relationship to the abstract ideals of peace and justice. Not serving as a replacement for art, history, and literature programs, a purposeful social science with a narrative focus might serve as an alternative way for creative students to cultivate an interest in developing an educated imagination.
Bio: Solon Simmons is the director of The Narrative Transformation Lab (TNT Lab) at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A sociologist by training, he is the author many books and articles on narrative and storytelling in peace and politics, including Conflict Resolution after the Pandemic Building Peace, Pursuing Justice (2021), Root Narrative Theory and Conflict Resolution; Power, Justice and Values (2020); and The Eclipse of Equality: Arguing America on Meet the Press (2013). He is currently finishing a book about story grammar and basic plot types.
At The Narrative Transformation Lab, Solon is leading efforts to develop cutting-edge narrative tools for use in practical applications in both adversarial struggles for justice and collaborative journeys toward peace. Solon served as interim dean for the Carter School in 2013, and Vice President for Global Strategy for George Mason from 2014-2017, and he teaches classes on the craft of peace writing, conflict theory, narrative, media, discourse and conflict, human rights, quantitative and qualitative methodology, global conflict, and critical theory.
Explore More: https://tntlab.
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