By Alissa Orozco
For decades, UC Santa Barbara Religious Studies professor Kathleen Moore has studied law and religion. Her work specializes in Islam, examining how both religion and U.S. politics intersect to create “Muslim” as a public identity.
Earlier this year, Moore received a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to create two new interdisciplinary minors for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts: Legal Humanities and Medical Humanities.
Moore joined UCSB in 2002, just four years before the university decided to suspend the Law & Society degree program due to faculty shortage. In 2017, Moore become Associate Dean of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts and sought to bring back legal studies to UC Santa Barbara, but with a humanitarian approach.
Moore recently sat down for an interview and discussed how the programs came about and what the future looks like for these new fields of study at UCSB.
Q: How did the development of the two Humanities minors come about?
A: In 2017, I started organizing the faculty in this division, in Humanities and Fine Arts, who teach law-related subjects and had never really had a coordinated approach to offering their curriculum. That was 2017, and I had the Dean’s support at that time and we started talking about creating new courses and creating a minor and then of course, the pandemic hit. I became an associate dean basically at the same time. As Associate Dean, creating a new minor in Legal Humanities and Medical Humanities became my assignment.
I wrote a grant proposal to the National Endowment of Humanities for a program for Hispanic Serving Institutions. Only universities that have 25% or more Latinx students qualify. So, I wrote a proposal that would create faculty workshops to create both a new minor in Health Humanities and in Legal Humanities.
UC Santa Barbara Religious Studies professor Kathleen Moore recently sat down for an interview on her introduction of Legal Humanities and Medical Humanities to UCSB.
Q: For those who don’t know, how would one define Legal Humanities and Medical Humanities?
A: What Legal and Medical Humanities is, or what makes it distinct, is there is a relationship with the past, and that’s what humanists study. Under that umbrella we would be looking at things like ethics, secularism, and doing more of what we call ‘qualitative work,’ meaning looking at small numbers, rather than looking at larger data sets. So, it’s looking at people’s stories, and really focusing on storytelling, how people tell their stories. How is this one person’s situation completely different from the other general population?
Q: Why do you think there is a need for these two new programs of study here at UCSB?
A: A lot of reasons. At the top of my list is that students are concerned about what they're going to do after college and their career goals, and we don't have a lot here to prepare students for that. If they’re going to go into graduate school and become academics, then yeah sure. But what about other kinds of careers? So that was why I thought Pre-Med, or actually we call it Health Humanities. It really covers a lot of different disciplines that you know students are taking to prepare for not just medical school, but public health. And it also would mean that those students who generally look at just STEM departments would see that we have a track here in the Humanities and can take those classes.
Q: Why do you think is it important to even consider humanities, let alone study humanities in the fields of law and medicine?
A: Because Humanities students and scholars bring a wide-lens perspective, looking at the human context. We look at the contextual variables around illness, for example. Or the contextual variables around the police and their practices. It sort of brings the med student or the law student back to reality. When you’re working with people, human beings, you really need to keep that in mind, to understand what’s important to the patients, or clients that you’re dealing with, and what they are living with, and their lived experiences.
Q: Do you plan on creating or developing more programs for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts in the future?
A: I’m hoping to put Disability Studies out there. The discipline has been here at Santa Barbara for a long time but it’s just not had critical mass, like attendance in the courses and support from the Dean. Disability Studies will start out as what we’re calling, a ‘conjunction’ to Health Humanities. But from that, with enough faculty, it has the possibility of growing into its own major. And same with Legal Humanities.
Alissa Orozco is a third-year student at UC Santa Barbara studying English. She wrote this article for her Digital Journalism class.