It’s about feeling
The capacity to understand, share, and navigate the feelings of others—a key "intangible" benefit cultivated through studying literature and history.
What is Empathy?
Kasley Killam defines this specific dimension of well-being as the quality and quantity of your relationships, placing it on equal footing with physical and mental health.
What is Social Health?
The three-part acronym representing the foundational structural unit of academic argumentative writing.
What is CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning)?
Coates’s term for the suburban ideal of manicured lawns, peppermint, and Cub Scouts built upon historical violence.
What is The Dream?
Research type that collects non-numerical data (words, interviews) to answer "Why?" and "How?" questions.
What is Qualitative Research?
In 2024, LinkedIn listed this core humanities outcome as the No. 1 most in-demand workplace skill.
What is Effective Communication?
Kasley Killam’s recommended formula to build a healthier social life.
What is the 5-3-1 Rule?
Evidence type that relies on numbers, percentages, or mathematical trends to establish patterns.
What is Statistical Evidence?
The place where Coates discovered the vast diversity of Black thought, culture, and history, away from the rigid expectations of his youth.
What is The Mecca (Howard University)?
Research bias occurring when subjects change their behavior because they know they are being observed.
What is the Hawthorne Effect?
Studies show that exposure to the humanities increases empathy, wisdom, and tolerance of this uncertain state.
What is Ambiguity?
Ephrata Tesfaye uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing this demographic group earns $653 weekly compared to lower earnings for Black and Latina women.
Who are White Women?
The single-paragraph, ~250-word summary sitting at the start of a standard formal research paper.
What is an Abstract?
Poet Ali argues that "language" goes far beyond spoken words to encompass these universal human states.
What are Shared Experiences / Emotions (e.g., love, loss, laughter)?
Philosophical questions differ from scientific ones because they resist closure by data alone and outrun this type of evidence.
What is Empirical Evidence?
Tech executive Eric Berridge argues in his TED talk that while STEM fields teach us how to build things, the humanities teach us these two vital considerations.
What are What to build and Why to build it?
Media tropes like the Mammy, Jezebel, and Angry Black Woman historically stripped Black women of this quality.
What is Dignity?
APA 7 in-text citation format requires these three specific pieces of information inside parenthetical references.
What are the Author's Last Name, page or paragraph number, and Year of Publication?
Coates chooses to write about "losing his body" rather than using abstract sociological terms like race to emphasize this reality.
What is visceral / physical violence?
The core semantic breakdown of "What does it mean to be human in this decade?" separates the sentence into the Interrogation, the Universal Subject, and this contextual element.
What is the Temporal Qualifier?
Three major causes behind the modern "crisis" in the humanities include university economic motives, post-WWI disillusionment, and this issue within academia.
What is Academic Withdrawal (or scholars being sequestered/producing niche dialogues)?
The legal and social framework defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe overlapping systems of disadvantage.
What is Intersectionality?
Sampieri’s four key evaluation criteria used to justify research existence (name at least 2).
What are Social Relevance, Practical Implications, Theoretical Value, and Methodological Utility?
The 1966 Sonia Sanchez poem recited in discussion that confronts martyrdom and mourning.
What is "Malcolm"?
A C.C. Grayling metaphor describes philosophy as patrolling the entire circumference of this boundary.
What is the Patch of Light / Circumference of Ignorance?