We are currently looking for partners and colleagues interested in contributing to the projects below. Please reach out to Dr. Johann Noh (noh1214@mit.edu) to signal your interest.
1. Legacies for Our Future
Calls for greater equity in the halls of academia, museums, archives, political and cultural institutions, and transnational organizations are growing ever louder. If everyone agrees that business as usual is no longer acceptable, and the 2024 Noble Prize in Economics was given for work on how to make institutions more inclusive, why is change still so very slow? Why are progressive institutions, once created as the solution, now part of the problem? The global institutional supply chains that connect political institutions to education, public cultural infrastructures, and homes is marred at every step with barriers for leaders, scholars, artists or writers—past or present— living outside the traditional centers of power. We need to unhitch this complex network of “inequality pipelines” to create truly new spaces of research, learning, and of collective communication and action, based on 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?
We seek to connect with colleagues who study and teach specific cases of political, cultural or pedagogical legacies drawn from any place and period and are excited to collectively experiment with this treasure house of human experience—containing the best and worst—to devise and cultivate new forms of leadership, human growth & development, and education.
Current concrete topics and projects include:
1. LEGACIES OF GLOBAL COOPERATION through politics, diplomacy, sports, arts, literature, STEM research and education
- Alternative Diplomacies for Human Thriving: What to Learn from the World’s Diplomatic Cultures?
- Athletes & (In)equality from Antiquity to Today
- World Poetries of the Neighborhood: Building Trees of Life
2. LEGACIES OF INEQUALITY through colonialism, slavery, displacement, exile, diaspora
- Slavery, Indenture and Indebted Labor Forms within Asia and the Indian Ocean
- Visual Artists and Legacies of Resilience from Exile and Marginalization
3. LEGACIES FOR FUTURE CLASSROOMS, museums, archives, libraries, transnational organizations, and local cultural infrastructures around the world
2. Podcast Series: Asian Medicine in the World
We will launch “Asian Medicine in the World,” a podcast series featuring dialogues with health professionals, policymakers, and academics to explore the global impact and lessons of Asian medicine.
We will focus on questions like:
- What has the world learned from Asian Medicine?
- What can the world learn from Asian medicine?
- What are some roadblocks to better integration?
- How can humanistic reflection help develop better avenues for making Asian medicines more accessible to the knowledge commons?
More generally, these conversations will feed into our overall exploration of how the study of the history and anthropology of medicine can contribute to the development of better healthcare in the present. As such, it will raise some key connectivity issues between the humanities and the sciences.
3. Wind, Water, and Artificial Intelligence: Appraising Fengshui in Real Estate with Machine Learning
Our project brings together historians, urban planners, and AI engineers to collaborate on a groundbreaking project that aims to “teach” machine learning software to recognize and appraise a property’s fengshui through Visual Artificial Intelligence techniques. The initial stages of our project examine Chinese residential communities in Singapore, Taipei, and Los Angeles. Although rooted in digital research methods, our project centers humanists and their ability to contribute to ongoing developments in AI technology. As a core part of the project, historians of China will draw up a list of 150-200 widely recognized, specific fengshui principles from classical texts. These principles will then be taught to AI systems with machine learning software, which in turn will analyze a real estate parcel in Singapore, Taipei, or Los Angeles and produce a fengshui analysis. We aim to provide fengshui analysis (including a fengshui score, like Redfin’s “climate score” or “walkability score”) for 5,000 parcels in our first year of research, and then scale up accordingly.
4. Animal Welfare in Asian Religious Traditions
We aim to trace religious discourses across East Asia that centered plant and animal lives broadly. In the medieval period, Buddhist monks in China and Japan developed a worldview that promoted the deification of sentient beings beyond humans, extending to animals by attributing to them the potential for Buddhahood. Later, a discourse on the enlightened nature of inanimate entities began to emerge, reshaping attitudes toward a broader range of natural phenomena such as plants, trees, and rocks. By the early modern period, particularly in Edo-period shunga prints, this perspective culminated in captivating visual works that intertwined nature’s reproductive cycles with human procreation. As such, we take as our focus the topic of animal-human kinship, and how it was driven, supported, and framed by religious sensibilities.
Humanists have rightfully critiqued romanticized or enchanted views of religious approaches to nature that emerged in the West during twentieth century. Yet, there is considerable value in a nuanced examination of cultural arenas where collaboration and contestation between religion and nature took place. MIT’s Center for Comparative Global Humanities is the ideal hub to bring together scholars working at the intersection of environment, religion, and science. The broader academic community of MIT stands to benefit from knowledge and awareness of the cultural patterns and practices that have shaped environments over time.