Liberal Arts

Next HumIn Focus episode examines tribalism, stories of cultural communication

WPSU to debut 'Humanity at the Crossroads: Stories of Diversity in a Tribalized World' on Oct. 23

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Cultural confrontation, cooperation and conflict will be the focus of the next installment of the Human Focus series created by the Penn State Humanities Institute and produced by WPSU.

“Humanity at the Crossroads: Stories of Diversity in a Tribalized World” will premiere on WPSU-TV and stream simultaneously at live.wpsu.org at 6 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 23. The episode will be rebroadcast on WPSU at 10:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 28, and will be available on the HumIn Focus website following its Oct. 23 debut.

“Humanity at the Crossroads” will examine four stories of cultural confrontation: Chinatown in San Francisco, Jerusalem during the Ottoman Empire, Iran’s Jewish community on the eve of the revolution, and the creolized Island of Mauritius. With each story, scholars will discuss the attempts — some successful, some decidedly not — to preserve cultural identity while engaging in processes of transformation and cooperation across ethnic and religious lines.

“We wanted to capture both the promise and the tragedy of cultural hybridity in a world where a retreat to one’s home ‘tribe’ is the norm,” said John Christman, director of the Humanities Institute and co-executive producer of HumIn Focus. “Our interviews include historians, an expert in art history, and a scholar of French and Francophone studies who are able to tell these stories from rich and complex scholarly angles.”

“Each story in the episode dramatizes the rich and complicated nature of history and identity, showing how partisan resistance to hybridity can be futile and counterproductive,” added Matt Jordan, associate professor of media studies in Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and co-executive producer of the series. “In the case of Iran, we are seeing how the tribalism that dashed the hopes of the 1978 revolution — when one ethnic group imposed its hardline on others — is unravelling in real time as protests across the country bridge tribal divisions once again.”

The result is a diverse and fascinating array of stories where the identity of a people has to be re-negotiated as well as protected, and where the definition of who one is needs to be both challenged and reconstructed in the face of social and political pressures.

The Humanities Institute created the HumIn Focus series in 2018 to showcase the social value of humanities research, and to spark dialogue between humanities scholars and members of the community on topics of pressing social importance. Confederate monuments, immigration, the complexities of American democracy, health care during the pandemic, and the American incarceration system were topics examined in the series’ previous episodes.

View a preview of “Humanity at the Crossroads: Stories of Diversity in a Tribalized World” here.

Last Updated October 17, 2022

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