4Humanities Advocacy Projects

4Humanities and its local chapters are at work on a variety of projects to create advocacy for the humanities and also to develop innovative research and materials to help drive such advocacy. Current ongoing projects include:

* “Shout Out for the Humanities” Student Prize Contest

* Humanities, Plain & Simple Initiative

* Backpack Mini-Documentaries

* Humanities Infographics

* Arts & Humanities in the 21st Century Workplace

* Humanities Showcase

* WhatEvery1OneSays Research Project

An Interview With Daniel Pink: On the Artist Uprising

This is the first of a series of interviews with extraordinary people who are using their skills and training as artists and humanists to improve their communities, challenge assumptions, and advance our understanding of the human condition. In this piece, we spoke with world-renowned, best-selling author Daniel H. Pink about the ways his scholarship in the humanities shaped his career. He offered advice to young humanists and asserted the socio-cultural importance of the humanities.

Daniel Pink is the author of five books, including three long-running New York Times bestsellers, A Whole New Mind, Drive, and To Sell is Human. He was host and co-executive producer of Crowd Control, a television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel. He has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired as well as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. Daniel Pink’s TED Talk on the science of motivation is one of the 10 most-watched TED Talks of all time.

Marketing the humanities to the worker bee and more: a 2016 submission to the 2016 4Humanities Student Contest

How would you market the humanities? How would you change your marketing method for the worker bee who is tired and frustrated versus the shy red panda who isn’t quite integrated into the social fabric of society?

Professor Odekhiren Amaize at the American University in Dubai charged his students with the task of branding the humanities as espoused by Douglas B. Holt in How Brands Become Icons –Principles of Cultural Branding (2004) and asked them to identify methods of reaching different publics across multiple time periods in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915).

Printable “The Humanities Matter!” Infographic

In 2013, the University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities–in collaboration with 4Humanities–created an award-winning The Humanities Matter! infographic with statistics and arguments for the humanities in high-impact visual form. Instead of worn out sayings and factually ungrounded criticisms, The Humanities Matter! draws on published statistics and a crowdsourced poll to give a shout out to the humanities in sections on “What the Humanities Do,” “But the Evidence Shows,” and “Culture is Important.”

…and then our pile of professionally printed banners ran out.

So we created a printable, 8.5×11 version of the banner due to popular request.