Welcome to my Humanities portfolio. This website charts my engagement with the scholars and artists I have encountered this year, whose epistemologies span disciplinary, spatial and temporal boundaries, but ultimately center on one concept: justice. In these digital pages, I offer my own interpretations of their ideas as my contribution to their conversation.
However, despite all the ideas I explore here, my portfolio is also just a lot of words. That is its theme: just words.
Words 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. Thus far Humes has complicated rather than clarified my understanding of justice, but the course has demonstrated one absolute point: justice demands action, not just words.
Yet Humes has also emphasized a truth I knew simply from living in the world, but that Dr. Boyer said best: “There truly is no justice.” Our course deals primarily in instances of injustice, demonstrating humanity’s failure to reach justice in our legal systems, our responses to tragedy, and our societies at large. Ultimately, I find that our world does not even understand what justice means—as I explore in my definition of justice. In response, I propose that we need “just” words. We need words to discuss what we mean by “justice,” we need words to explain why our systems of justice fail, and we need words to decide how we might improve those systems. To move towards justice, we must rely on words. Just words.
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.
Version IV.
