By permission of the British Library. They begin by framing questions . Questions open windows to new ideas, images, and insights.
Questions also serve as the frame on which knowledge is built.
In the arts and humanities, researchers pose and pursue questions that go to the very core of our humanity. Humanities departments are reshaping, in significant ways, this crucial area of higher education. Global in reach, transformed by technology, reaching across field boundaries once thought inviolate, research in the humanities and the arts responds to the needs of an ever more complex world. Berkeley faculty and graduate students from the arts and humanities ask questions of enormous range. The multivoiced humanistic body of knowledge of which I speak is, in its own less obvious way, profoundly pragmatic, serving the necessary purpose of human self-understanding, and rescuing us from our muteness by expressing all the facets, dark and bright, of the human condition.