The Agora is a speaker series within the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh that invites scholars to share work of relevance to the many aspects of communication scholarship.

The Agora features faculty and graduate students from both the Department of Communication and the wider University of Pittsburgh community, as well as other noted scholars from around the world. The Agora also occasionally features workshops that are relevant to various publics. Some of the workshops focus on mentoring, professional development, and pedagogy among other topics.

Speaker: David Marshall 

Presentation: "What the Humanities Do"

David Marshall: "Working as Co-Director of the Humanities Center at Pitt with Carla Nappi, I've sometimes found myself tongue-tied in a very particular place.  On the one hand, I'm deeply convinced of the worth and distinctiveness of the humanities.  On the other hand, when I'm called upon to articulate these things to non-humanities folks, I find the words I use echoing in my head a bit.  In those moments, it feels like I hear what I'm saying as discourse - "this is what people say when they're talking about this kind of thing."  And it's a classic rhetorical problem: the habits you've developed to speak about something to other folks who also do that thing will not be what you need when you talk to folks who do not share that thing with you.  I want to be better at this, and so I've begun a research project called "What the Humanities Do."  This talk represents a first experiment within that project, and it takes up three recent books that engage with the core problem - Eric Hayot's Humanist Reason (2021), Rens Bod's World of Patterns (2022), and Lorraine Daston's Rules (2022).  I think these books show that we don't have to make strong claims about the absolute distinctiveness of the humanities to demonstrate their worth, and I'll explain this claim in the talk."