Learning from Pasts, Shaping Futures

Across the planet, voices calling for greater equity are echoing across academia, higher education, political and cultural institutions, and transnational organizations. The 2024 Noble Prize in Economics was given for work on how to make institutions more inclusive—a clear sign of mainstream change. But given the enormity of challenges communities around the world are facing, why is change so slow to come? And why are the very institutions that were once created progressive now often inhibiting transformation? Our rhetoric might have become more equitable. But glass ceilings sustaining inequality, distrust, and resentment are increasingly destabilizing the social infrastructures, which connect our political institutions to schools, universities, public cultural organizations, and homes. We need to reimagine and reanimate our spaces of communal research, learning, and growth, and of our collective communication and action. In a time of global interdependence we have the privilege and duty to do so inspired by ideas and practices from cultures around the world and their deep-rooted histories. But how can we catalyze this process in a world where inequality is typically systemic and implicit, and anxiety, anger and self-absorption stifle our communication, growth mindset, and thriving?

MIT’s Comparative Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) reclaims the centrality of the Humanities in today’s business-and-STEM-driven world. How can we expand the cognitive & creative, ethical & social, healthful & playful contributions of the humanities to our world and its pressing challenges, beyond their traditional role as producer of scholars and educators? What new leadership roles could humanities graduates and scholars play in our societies? What should the “Business of the Humanities” include today? How can we reimagine the humanities to create a shared future for our world’s communities? A future that realigns people’s, scholars’, and governments’ attention, intention, and agency, with tools of human making, namely the humanities, STEM, and business?