Humanities is a course at Davidson College where 70+ individuals come together to explore a main topic that extends throughout human time in various manners. Students participate in small group and big group work to facilitate their thinking. Furthermore, it is an experience like none other at Davidson College.
humanities is the study of collective human thought and experience. It is the discovery of a deeper history than what is taught in K-12 schooling. A history with many more stories and a recognition of all the stories that we are not told about.
Throughout this course of Humanities, we’ve focused a lot on the humanities. In Unit 1, there was a focus on how humans view other humans and place each other into boxes. Unit 1 also broke down how the human experience is not a shared one for everyone since there can be so much variation in it. Unit 2 focused on the historical uses of paradigms by humans to categorize what and how we understand the world around us. Unit 3 really focused on the “banality of evils” that Hannah Arendt focuses so much on and how it is naive to not realize that much of the human experience is violent and horrific. Unit 4 has focused on the human experience of being deemed as less than and how that plays into the mentality of humans. On our first day of lecture with Professor Bory, I found it really interesting when she discussed forgetting as a strength. Forgetting plays an important role in the study of humanities and in this course as a whole because I believe that forgetting is what we are fighting against in both Humanities and humanities. Another lecture that was really important was the lecture where the librarians came in and we viewed pictures of the Rwandan genocide. This lecture provided me insight into a part of the human condition that I believe is disgusting. Our fascination with death and how we view it as beautiful and art is a bit gross and that lecture just reminds me of how as humans we are savages. Unit 5, unit 7, and unit 8 all showed stories that aren’t told or aren’t really delved into often. Due to being an American and more specifically an African American I had heard of many the stories and perspectives explored in unit 5, but unit 7 and unit 8 had to do with movements and stories in Russia and Germany which are both places and stories I was very unfamiliar with. The Humanities course allowed me to learn more about the humanities and to recognize how little I knew.
