Authenticity: Identity and Place
Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts (DCHA)
Authenticity Theme for 2026-2029
In a world of deep fakes, politicized media outlets, manufactured identities, and AI that can jail us in algorithmic abstraction, many yearn for the real, the trustworthy, and the true—for authenticity as coherence, correspondence, and intelligibility. But “authenticity” can also be a straitjacket, suspicious of variation, diversity, and the emergent. It can become a default mode, resistant to change.
The Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts (DCHA) will explore formations of “authenticity” throughout the 2026-2029 academic years, structured around the Center’s mission to explore the “past, present, and possible.” Each year of theme will focus on a specific aspect of “authentic” life. All three years of the “Authenticity” theme will showcase interdisciplinary programming such as public lectures, faculty research initiatives, and community-engaged initiatives that engage the question of how a sense of the authentic—defined from a variety of perspectives—opens up avenues for the exploration of human identity, community, and possible human connections. How might selfhood, lived space, and historical place be redefined or revealed by reexamining a sense of the authentic? How do we move toward truth without catching ourselves in the thorns of empiricism, returning to aestheticism, or relying only on sentimental imagination? How can authenticity be defined as futures thinking rather than a nostalgic return to the past? What will the authentic mean in the future in material as well as conceptual terms? By approaching such questions through the lens of humanistic inquiry and artistic representation, the DCHA will highlight the threads that run throughout individual understandings of self and the world.
2026-2027 Theme
“Authenticity: Identity and Place”
The 2026-2027 focus will be “Identity and Place.” Both are categories typically associated with the “authentic,” but what is “authentic” can never be assumed. If identity and a sense of place are constructed concepts, always in process and always under examination, in what ways are they authentic? Can we imagine a new authenticity in relation to identity and place, and if so, what would that look like? How would new understandings of “the authentic” redefine older, nostalgic, sometimes ethnocentric and anthropocentric notions of regionalism, geography, cultural traditions, or nature? In what ways are virtual spaces, and digital beings, “authentic”? How does authenticity take into account the nonhuman world, the posthuman world, the gender-fluid world? How do the arts and the humanities address these questions in conversation with the social, data, and natural sciences?
This year will feature distinguished speakers and events offering different perspectives on authenticity in relation to “Identity and Place,” as well as a national conference titled “Speculative Souths” to be held in summer 2027 at the Denbo Center. More information to come!
2027-2028 Theme
“Authenticity: Cognition and Belief”
In 2027-2028, the theme of authenticity will explore “Cognition and Belief.” This cycle of the theme takes up basic questions about how we know and interact with the world. How do epistemology and scientific method need to be revised in order to create a new form of authenticity? In what ways can authenticity merge with hope, joy, and wonder in through the imagining of new possibilities for belief, faith, thought, inquiry, and methodology? What constitutes the trustworthy, the intelligible, and the true, and how do political systems impact thought and belief? In what ways can scientific method, moral philosophy, and epistemology be redefined as speculative, provisional, or multiple in order to address the contemporary world? How in an age of AI do we define authentic thought? In what ways are animal studies, plant studies, and medical research redefining how we think of thinking itself as chemical and neurological processes? How is science challenging or reaffirming traditional secular and religious belief systems?
2028-2029 Theme
“Authenticity: Craft and Materiality”
In 2028-2029 the focus of the theme will shift to “Craft and Materiality” to create dialogue among practitioners, scholars, and the public about what authenticity might mean in relation to material environments and physical objects. In what ways do craft, the handmade, and the analog raise new questions about the idea of authenticity in a world increasingly defined by digital abstractions and AI, by the artificial, and by the scientifically altered? What is the relation between markets and the material? Yet in what ways might the tactile and the material thing be inauthentic or illusory? How does fabrication in the arenas of both art and science address desires for the authentic in relation to the made/artificial? What is authentic creation and material imagination, recentered through art and design; through curiosity and innovation; through collaboration and sharing?