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 offerThrough Humes, I have encountered new epistemologies ranging from Kantian morality to Ashanti dance to the insights my classmates offer. my own interpretations of their ideas as my contribution to their conversation. This website charts my engagement with the scholars and artists behind those ideas and discusses my newfound insights about their conversation on justice.
However, despite all the ideas itI represent here, represents, my portfolio is also just a lot of words. That is its theme: just words.
“Just” words, because wWords 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 itsjustice’s relationship to concepts as diverse as forgiveness and definition. Yet I have never encountered such a thing as written justice. Although tThus far Humes has complicated rather than clarified my understanding of justice, but itthe course has demonstrated one absolute point: justice demands action, not Words, however, are 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. and it Ultimately, I find thathas persuaded me that our world does not, in fact, have a significant even understanding of what justice even means—as I explore in my definition of justice—as I explore in my definition of justice. In response, I propose that we need “just” words. We need words to discussallow us to understand 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 need words. Just words.
I do not know if I believe that our flawed world can truly achieve justice—whatever justice truly means. But, as my portfolio attests, we need words to find out.
