{"id":14084,"date":"2015-01-07T16:07:57","date_gmt":"2015-01-07T21:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=14084"},"modified":"2024-08-09T07:42:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-09T11:42:52","slug":"professor-stuart-murray-inductee-inaugural-cohort-college-royal-society-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2015\/professor-stuart-murray-inductee-inaugural-cohort-college-royal-society-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Stuart Murray: Inductee to the Inaugural Cohort of The College (Royal Society of Canada)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Professor Stuart Murray: Inductee to the Inaugural Cohort of The College (Royal Society of Canada)\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

by Erin Shields
\n(BA with Honours in English, 2016)<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"Stuart<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Professor Stuart J. Murray<\/a>, of Carleton\u2019s Department of English Language and Literature, has recently been inducted into the inaugural cohort of The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. The College is a new body of the Royal Society of Canada<\/a> (RSC), recognizing intellectual leaders in their field. It is the highest honour for emerging scholars in Canada.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The College reflects the changing face of academia, with its members consisting of a new generation of diverse, social-media-wielding scholars, scientists and artists who are working for the betterment of Canadian society. Traditional RSC fellows, typically elected on the basis of lifetime achievement, are categorized according to three disciplines, whereas the College gathers together younger scholars from across the disciplines in order to foster multidisciplinary dialogue and innovative approaches to contemporary social issues. Already, Murray has received his first \u201cassignment\u201d: to introduce a colleague he has been paired with, in 70 words or less (and in both official languages), at the College\u2019s first Annual General Meeting\u2014and he has been paired with a scientist who works in Quantum Computing. \u201cI don\u2019t even understand all of the terms,\u201d Murray confesses, \u201cit\u2019s so far outside of my area of expertise! So I went and researched his work, as much as I could, to learn a little about it, and it\u2019s fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murray is no stranger to interdisciplinarity. He is the Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics<\/a>; his work uses literary and rhetorical methodologies to take a critical look at the workings of \u201cbiopolitics\u201d in society, or, the politics surrounding life and death. Murray describes his scholarly focus as \u201cthinking ethically about the ways our conceptions of life and death get framed and constructed rhetorically through discourses, through texts, through images, through emotions even, and how this framing\u2014how this construction of life\u2014then gets taken up in health, in science, in criminal justice, and so on.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t really pay attention to department lines,\u201d he says. Evidently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Professor Murray and Professor Sheryl Hamilton, the other Carleton scholar who has been inducted into the College, have interdisciplinary programs of research. \u201cWe represent some of Carleton\u2019s values in terms of interdisciplinarity,\u201d Murray says, \u201cand I\u2019m proud of that, that\u2019s why I came here. Carleton is a place where I can do the work that I do and be supported and encouraged.\u201d But moreover, Murray argues that the interdisciplinary nature of his work is also \u201coddly representative\u201d of Carleton\u2019s English department: English professors offer courses that mobilize insights from multiple disciplines through the study of literature, from traditional Western classics to Digital Studies in the humanities, African Studies, Ethics, Queer and Gender Studies and more, reaching into the past and into the future. Murray may not be paying attention to department lines, but it seems that the English department has its own fluidity, and a shared concern with ethical and cultural life, making it ideal for Murray as an academic home base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The College has been created at a time when the RSC is particularly interested in debates surrounding the future of higher education in Canada. In a world that seems increasingly to be turning away from the Arts, Murray offers not only an example of how an Arts education can be applied to pressing social issues, but he is also a passionate advocate for the importance of an Arts education in the creation of ethical and compassionate citizens. The study of literature is intrinsically interdisciplinary and diverse, and so it offers a multiplicity of perspectives. Murray argues that the manipulation of subjectivities within literature helps us to reflect critically upon our own world-views, and to develop a self-reflexivity without which \u201cwe\u2019re operating in the dark.\u201d \u201cA work of literature gives us different terms with which to understand ourselves and what it means to be a responsible and caring person in relation to others.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the type of compassion invoked by Murray should not be confused with getting a case of the warm and fuzzies. In Lynn Coady\u2019s Munro Beattie lecture this year, she talked about \u201cstorytelling and discomfort\u201d\u2014that is, how having to take on the perspective of others can be an uncomfortable experience. Murray believes that this kind of discomfort is vital. There is \u201csomething about writing and reading about yourself, and seeing yourself or experiencing yourself in a different way\u2014sympathizing with the villain, say, and accounting for that\u2014that makes you a better person, and by better I mean more ethical, more compassionate.\u201d He sees his work as asking and confronting \u201cuncomfortable questions about the ways that we are complicit in wider systems that are often simply unjust, intolerable or ultimately unliveable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The College, operating in its outreach and advisory capacity, will provide a platform for scholars like Murray to have their work reach a wider and more influential audience. With its mandate focused on social media, interdisciplinarity, and social justice, the creation of the College is in itself a kind of political move, Murray says: \u201cit both acknowledges the direction that higher education is going and it renews a political commitment to engage a younger generation of scholars to be leaders and decision-makers\u2014and that\u2019s really exciting. It\u2019s daunting, but it\u2019s exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Erin Shields (BA with Honours in English, 2016) Professor Stuart J. Murray, of Carleton\u2019s Department of English Language and Literature, has recently been inducted into the inaugural cohort of The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. The College is a new body of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), recognizing intellectual leaders in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,27],"tags":[42],"class_list":["post-14084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-news","tag-royal-society-of-canada"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14084"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34307,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14084\/revisions\/34307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}