My Humanities portfolio charts my engagement with scholars and artists whose epistemologies span disciplinary, spatial and temporal boundaries, but ultimately center on one concept: justice. In these digital pages, I offer my interpretations of these intellectuals’ ideas, contributing my own understanding of justice to their conversation.
However, although it represents my work and my thinking throughout my whole year in Humes, my portfolio is also just a lot of words. That is its theme: just words.
Words, I believe, cannot offer justice on their own. This year, I have encountered a plethora of variations on justice: I have scribbled about transitional, transformative, distributive, restorative, and retributive justice, to name a few subsets. I have also experimented with justice’s relationship to concepts as diverse as forgiveness and definition. Yet I have never encountered such a thing as written justice. Humes has complicated rather than clarified my understanding of justice, but the course has demonstrated one absolute point: justice demands action, not just words.
And yet, as I have been reminded implicitly and sometimes explicitly in each Plenary lecture and Section meeting, the H/humanities matter deeply and genuinely—and so do the words they so often centralize. As I continue to consider the values I have encountered in Humes, I find myself convinced that we need “just” words to discuss what we mean by “justice,” explain why our systems of justice fail, and decide how we might improve those systems. I do not know if our flawed world can truly achieve justice—whatever justice truly means. But, as my portfolio attests, we need words to find out.
As you engage with my portfolio, I invite you to begin by reading my Definition of Justice and my Key Terms, which introduce my framework for my questions of language and justice. After that, my works and words are yours to explore.
Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to the Humanities faculty for the effort and passion they pour into this program. Dr. Boyer, Dr. Bory, Dr. Bowles, Dr. Jankovic, Dr. Lipsker, and Dr. Pyle, thank you for making Humes such a unique, incredible experience.
Dr. Bory, Dr. Pyle, Dr. Boyer and Dr. Lipsker, I owe you especially heartfelt thank-yous for being so patient with my questions, interested in my ideas, and graceful with my missteps as my section leaders. You have made my year in Humes more engaging and mind-opening than I could have asked or expected.
My Humes experience would have been a lot more stressful and a lot less meaningful without the insight of this year’s amazing Fellows. I am grateful for their guidance and help, and I am especially grateful for my ATs, Emma McDonnell and Sidney Donnan. Emma, your kindness, insightful edits, thoughtful support, and well-timed study halls were infinitely helpful as I navigated my first semester of college. Sidney, your generous spirit, positivity, astute advice, and willingness to answer last-minute questions were also immensely valuable. Thank you both so much! I also owe extra thanks to Katriel Sander for offering much-needed, timely and greatly appreciated extra support (and tea and tea-adjacent snacks).
Last but certainly not least, I am immensely grateful for my fellow Humesters, whose thoughtfulness and dedication never cease to amaze me.
Some Notes
Citations: To create the citations in my portfolio, I relied heavily on Purdue OWL’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide and ZoteroBib’s online citation generator. I consulted Cara Evanson and Emma McDonnell. I am deeply grateful for their help. I also referenced MLA citation resources from Amherst College, Columbia University, EasyBib, the Gladys Marcus FIT Library, the IRSC Libraries, Lafayette College Library, the MLA Style Center, the Oxford English Dictionary, Scribblr, Simon Fraser University, the SSC Library, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Newcastle Library. Any remaining errors are my own.
Playlist: Each of the songs in my playlist (linked here and in the sidebar) resonates with an aspect of my experience in Humes, including my own emotions, my theme, specific concepts I encountered in readings, and justice as a broad concept. I include them here as an audio complement to the written reflections I offer in my website. The playlist cover image depicts Medea on her golden chariot by Germán Hernández Amore.
Background Image: In keeping with my exploration of language and justice, the background of my website depicts a dictionary definition of justice. The page comes from the Davidson College Library’s copy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Jess Stein and Laurence Urdang, Revised Edition, Random House, 1973. I took the photograph with an iPhone 14 camera.
