4.4 - 3) Rethink Liberals Arts as a Start-Up Curriculum for a Resilient Global Citizenship

[Professor Davidson]
Hi, welcome back.

It's Week 4 - Segment 4, and Paradigm Shift 3. We're going to be talking, again, about the future of higher education, and this lesson is about rethinking liberal arts as a starting curriculum for resilient global citizens. I'm here with my friend, Laurent Dubois, who is the co-director of the Haiti Lab, director of a new institute on campus called Scholars and Publics, and professor of history and romance studies. And why I asked Laurent to be with us today is because the Haiti Lab, for me, exemplifies ?'s idea of resilience. Resilience is a concept of, no matter what the world throws at you, you have, you've been prepared enough to be able to somehow cope with it, deal with it, and maybe-- if you're really doing it well-- throw it right back. The idea of the liberal arts as a start up curriculum for resilient global citizenship is that, in America we have an idea of general education-- liberal arts-- we don't really use it as a tool. In many European countries, and other countries around the world, education is far more vocational. And the idea with pushing for this idea of the paradigm shift-- and you'll find more about this on the website-- is Amartya Sen's idea that all education is vocational education. By that, he means that the chief vocation in life is to lead an engaged committed life in society, and that a good liberal arts education prepares you for all the ways to be an active global citizen.

So that's a lot. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Laurent, to talk about what you had in mind when you started the Haiti lab, and the different ways that it was both introduced when lots of different disciplines were involved, but also something that was really about engagement in the world.

[Laurent Dubois]
Well, the Haiti lab was of course part of a bigger experiment in Humanities labs that had been percolating for a long time, but then we began; we were the first of these labs, particularly at the Franklin Humanities Institute. And I guess the main brief was, in some ways, fairly simple which was to think about a humanity-centered project, but one that would link to other parts of the university, to other schools. And so, in our case, we started really with global health and law; eventually, we worked with the environment school as well. And the other was to find innovative ways to bridge undergraduate, graduate, and faculty research and teaching in some way.

So with that, that was essentially our opening brief. The other context was, of course, that the Haiti earthquake had taken place in 2010 of January. We had begun kind of mobilizing in many different ways to respond and to sort of think about how we might respond, both sort of concretely in Haiti and how we might respond to also the discourse in Haiti and the debates about Haiti from the kind of position of research that we'd been cultivating here for some time. And so, the lab became also a place to think about what types of response might come out. And the lab then produced a wide variety, a wide spectrum of responses-- many of which we had not imagined when we began the project. So we also were about having an open space where new ideas could kind of emerge and percolate as much as possible.

[Professor Davidson]
You had partners in Haiti-- one of the things you did was actually maintain some of those partnerships.

[Laurent Dubois]
Yeah. I mean, there were really two of us: me and my co-director Deborah Jensen. We were the two specialists here mostly focused on Haiti. And both of us had arrived actually not that long ago. So I'd been here when I-- how many years? Just a few years before that; and her just a few years, as well. So we had cultivated research links with universities in Haiti. We had a colleague actually, it so happened that a colleague-- a close colleague-- Jean Kasimir, who is a former ambassador of the United States but also an eminent sociologist in Haiti, was teaching here the semester right after the earthquake. So he helped in some ways for as we conceived of the lab and we continued to have a lot of links with him and through him, a number of other faculty members, as well. And then also, in parallel, there was a Duke Engage program that had existed in Haiti for up to, about 20 years now, I think. So, it had long been there-- run out of global health-- we made one of the people who runs that program, Cathy Walmer; she was a core faculty in the lab. And so, we also had that link to a Duke Engage program which is situated in a women's health program in Haiti. So there are a couple of places that we could connect with.

[Professor Davidson]
Tell us a little bit about the kinds of courses students took in conjunction with the lab, and then how those translate into the work that you've been doing in Haiti.

[Laurent Dubois]
I mean we had a number of courses that we taught over the course of 3 years. I taught a course on the history of Haiti. Deborah taught a number of other courses. But actually, in some ways, perhaps the most interesting area was this kind of zone of what became kind of group independent study. So the model of independent studies has long existed in the humanities, of course. They tend to be rather individualistic affairs-- at least as usually practiced, like a lot of humanities research; and sort of the whole point here was to move away from that model. So what emerged, we had at our first meeting-- we had 50 students show up; the paint was still drying because this this whole building had been renovated. We ended up with 27 students signed up for 27 independent studies. And we had graduate students and so forth, but what quickly emerged as the case was that what we really needed to do was organize people around kind of projects, and around questions and issues that were coming up.

A couple of clear examples: one was a law school project. Someone had approached a law school about creating a new law about violence against women that would draw on kind of global examples, but also specifically engage with the history of feminist movements and women's rights in Haiti. So what we had is-- there were law students who knew about law and women's rights but not much about Haiti, and we had a group of students who had taken classes on Haiti and studied Creole and we kind of partnered them.

Another was around cholera in Haiti, which actually emerged after the Haiti Lab began; so it's October of 2010. But very quickly-- Deborah and Victoria Szabo did this-- they organized a group of students to study the history of the epidemiology around cholera in Haiti and ended up actually publishing an article in the CDC journal, based on what the students did.

So, this kind of way of taking questions that were quite urgent question being proposed in Haiti, and then showing how humanity's work could engage and, and influence.

[Professor Davidson]
So then, the article that you wrote, as I remember, is a historical account of cholera in Haiti that helped the CDC to make a case that it hadn't existed. before, right? So this was a singular act or a singular epidemic?

[Laurent Dubois]
The first, it was the first. Yeah.

[Professor Davidson]
And did that have some repercussions in terms tracing where the cholera came from?

[Laurent Dubois]
I don't know if it was immediately that, because by the time the article came out, I mean it's pretty clear that this was a make-believe strand and that sort of thing. What was interesting, I mean what happened is essentially the journalistic accounts were all saying, there has been cholera in Haiti for 50 years or 30 years or 100 years; it pointed out that nobody really knew. And so it had never been asked as a question, had there been cholera in Haiti before? I mean, it had asked by someone, but it hadn't been asked in detail. But what Deborah and Victoria realized is that's a question historians can answer, right? And they can answer it by going to 19th-century newspapers. I mean, so it turned out to be a very archival thing, because when there was a cholera outbreak, newspapers talked about it because ship captains needed to know about it so they would avoid they would avoid going there. So when there was cholera, it showed up in their press. And so they were able to look really thoroughly through the press and at least make a very strong case that there had never been an outbreak based on an absence of outbreak. And also noting some things that the Haitian government had done specifically to try avoid cholera, perhaps seemingly successfully.

[Professor Davidson]
One of the theories of history we've been talking about a lot in this class is how you use the past in order to, not only to understand the present, but issues from the present illuminate and make a kind of history.

[Laurent Dubois]
Yeah, because there's a bigger point, which is a lot of what we were doing over and over again. A lot of people were interested in thinking about Haiti and helping Haiti at that moment. And in some ways, our response was constantly saying, well, let's learn first, whether you learn language first; you're going to be a lot more useful in Haiti if you speak Creole and if you're interested in doing something, so you can take Creole at Duke; there's classes, educate yourself there. But also to try to really understand what's going on in Haiti; what was the situation? I mean Haiti is a very odd and unique situation currently, because of the intensity of international aid, right? It's the country that has the most, there's the most international organizations and NGOs there, but it also has this very unique and interesting history that shapes that process. And so there's a lot about it that you know, in some ways a kind of deepened humanistic knowledge and really transforms the way people approach the question.

I mean, in some ways we were trying to always highlight the way in which the problems that might seem simple at first were, of course, incredibly complicated. And so the urge to find the solution, I mean, you know, we're always sort of pointing-- I mean, if a solution was easy, it would've already been figured out by Haitians themselves, right? Would, if it was that easy to figure out. So the fact is that you have the whole concatenation of historical circumstances that create the context. And part of that is also just, just in some ways just confronting and, and going against a lot of the dominant visions of Haiti that you have that are circulating, that are quite simplistic. So--

[Professor Davidson]
Were any of the students in the lab able to actually go to Haiti and visit?

[Laurent Dubois]
Many students went to Haiti, yeah. Because many students went on the Duke Engage program. It was two directions: some students went on Duke Engage and then they came back. Kind of fascinated, and thought, how do I learn more about Haiti? And so they came to the lab. Others who started in the lab and then went. And, in addition to the Duke Engage program, a number of students ended up going for different research trips.

[Professor Davidson]
We're sitting in front of a very beautiful installation that was part of the Haiti lab. Can you tell us about this?

[Laurent Dubois]
Right. So, actually, this is really the first thing we did. And I always cite that the first expenditure of the Haiti lab was 20 cans of resin. And then also we submitted a lot of receipts from the scrap exchange which was this incredible tour of the Institution of Recycled Art. During the summer lab, we had already invited and welcomed a Haitian artist who had visited here before, we've also had connections with him before. And he was going to come to give a speech as part of a series on disaster and talk about his work, Haiti, Haitian artists.

But he said to us, I'm an artist, I'd like to create something. You know, rather than just come and give a talk, and he started talking about that. So he come up with this idea, that they've used in other formats before. Each of these is a resin panel that were made in molds. There's a mold and you kind of put layers of resin down, and then on top of each layer after it dried, you could place objects or images. Many of these are images, just prints, manipulated on computers; digital work. And then printed on transparencies and just placed in the resin. Each of these has about four or five layers of resin. So you put a layer of resin down, let it dry. So that's the technical aspect, then the conceptual aspect is you have a square. Each of these squares was made by a different student or faculty or visitor-- although some of us made more than one-- but the square is kind of, to some extent, a discrete thing. Like each square was its own thing.

And then, of course they were going to be assembled together to be a kind of monument and memorial to the earthquake and a kind of a reference or a kind of evocation of all. So it was a very horizontal process. It was kind of perfect for the lab in a sense. Edouard showed us the technique. He said I've made these before, but what he never had actually is a group of collaborators who had a lot of access to sort of historical images of things. So he made these before often with personal objects. So when my or your students brought personal objects--

This was a little bit more humanistic in the sense that, the whole point was to evoke different parts of Haitian history. And we can, we have, we can kind of bring a group of students who are, who are studying Haitian history to look at this. And like almost every important theme about the country is somewhere represented

[Professor Davidson]
Can you point out just a few of them?

[Laurent Dubois]
I mean, just behind you here, you have Dessalines, who's the founder. Sort of the founder of the country, who declares independence in 1804. So it's made by co-director Deborah Jensen. There's a manuscript in here signed by Dessalines-- a figuration of him, his signature-- and also an evocation of his love of dance. So that was a kind of part of the--

You have here, these are images from the Haitian revolution. Here you have an image to the other side of the Haitian palace as collapsed after the earthquake. But above it is art images of the Haitian revolution. So talking about these cycles of war and disasters.

[Professor Davidson]
So its spans a couple hundred years?

[Laurent Dubois]
I mean everything from the evocation of indigenous time origins that are here to very contemporary images over here of graffiti that was right after the earthquake. Here, you have an image of one of the great 20th century writers. So yeah, you have, both the kind of rather immediate recognizable images and then images that are-- and some of these images are extremely recognizable, at least for people familiar with Haiti, and some are not. Some are cases where we sort of deconstruct and evoke very famous images, and then there's other images that are less well known. And some are very personal. I mean, there's one here which is a student who'd studied Creole, which is essentially a selection of the kind of the most important Creole words she thought of when she thought of Haiti. So it's a kind of linguistic.

[Professor Davidson]
Beautiful.

[Laurent Dubois]
Evocation.

[Professor Davidson]
Well, we will put it up on the Coursera site: the link to the website. And it talks about all of this process the--

[Laurent Dubois]
Because you can look at each one as a text.

[Professor Davidson]
It's a great metaphor for the history and the present, art and history, and all of those things.

[Laurent Dubois]
Yeah and it was. Part of the point was, again, it might seem strange that the first thing we did, and there was a lot of urgent issues in Haiti, was to make a work of art, right? But there's a way in which we thought that made sense as a way of taking stock of mourning, of kind of evoking this history. And it was a really great process for many people involved. It was also an important process for many people who are texturally focused, or the fetishization of text in humanities, right? And all of us were forced to then think visually. And almost no one who did these besides Edward del Valkaria and one or two other people is in any way a visual artist in any trained sense, right? Some of the students were visual arts students, but many of these were made by people for whom the idea of doing visual art was already a bit of an obstacle or barrier or challenge.

[Professor Davidson]
That's fantastic. The last lesson, Paradigm 2, was about unlearning and we did that the National Museum of Arts. So this is really another example of how art can sometimes make you go into paradigms or assumptions and then you look at them a different way-- in a way you didn't even know you could look.

[Laurent Dubois]
And I would say, I mean, I realized later when I gave a talk, I was writing a history of Haiti at the same time as I was working on this project. And I made five blocks for this, and each of the blocks basically correlates to one of the chapters in my book. So I kind of wrote the book and made the blocks in some relation to each other, and I think the writing, which was affected by the visual works. So it's kind of interesting in a sense.

So that as in just in the pure sense of kind of research, having these kind of open spaces of innovation actually I think can transform more people do.

[Professor Davidson]
Just fantastic. You've moved on? You're now going to be running a new institute called Scholars in Public. Can you tell us a little about that?

[Laurent Dubois]
Yeah, and actually a lot of the ideas that had come out of this Haiti lab experience. But the idea is really to sort of create a space of debate and exchange and critique about the ways in which research and the university can engage with broader publics, right? And that can mean everything from kind of intervening in the media and journalism and blogging, to kind of building from the ground up various kinds of platforms so through which research can be shared with broader publics. As well as we're really interested in thinking about kinds of collaborations with artists or musicians, so that a kind of research and various kinds of things can be, can influence the artist. So it's still, I mean, it's also a very experimental idea, but the idea is to take very seriously the idea that the university kind of has a mission to constantly be engaged beyond its walls and to be in dialogue with bigger publics than. So--

[Professor Davidson]
And then there's the question we ask everyone. Who's your favorite teacher? And is there something you learned from that teacher that you still think about in your present life? It could be more than one teacher.

[Laurent Dubois]
Yeah. I mean I'll give two bookends. One, I always remember this professor; Mr. Hood was his name; one of my great high school teachers, who was completely insane. And he talked politics and was always getting in trouble because he was a little radical and all this stuff. But he was just a teacher that kind of had this incredible passion for all that was going on and connecting past and present. So I remember him vividly from 10th grade you know.

And the other person is my mentor in graduate school, Fernando Cornell, who was the chair of my dissertation committee. He's a Venezuelan anthropologist, this kind of remarkably wide-ranging thinker, but also just had this kind of omnivorous intellect, right? That he kind of had this way of just being curious about everything and taking something that seems simple and then it would get more and more complicated. And he was very committed to the idea that thinking and conviviality and collaboration work together, right? That we are not monks and that in exchange you kind of get the best ideas; I think there was always this sense that the teacher and the student were engaged in kind of learning from each other which was an important lesson.

[Professor Davidson]
Thank you. My favorite teacher was Mrs. Lipman. I think her first name was Mrs.

[Laurent Dubois]
It wasn't at all like a Mr.

[Professor Davidson]
I know, nor was Mrs Lipman. It's funny how we carry those things with us forever that will forever be misinterpreted. Thank you so much for spending time with us. This was great.

[Laurent Dubois]
Thank you. You, too.