David Herzberg, Joseph M. Gabriel, and Nils Kessell reflect on the shifting boundaries between medicines and drugs. The speakers emphasise the importance of the humanities in making sense of these complexities. Rather than treating drugs as purely technical objects, humanistic approaches place them within broader stories of human behaviour, inequality, and belief. Kessell describes this work as “putting science back into society,” while Gabriel underscores the urgency of humanities perspectives in addressing contemporary crises in medicine.

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Samantha Pinto, (The University of Texas at Austin) and Nasser Rabbat (MIT) join us to examine how global narratives have often been shaped and repurposed to serve specific cultural and political agendas, and how historical figures and archaeological discoveries have been harnessed to propose specific visions of history and the world. The humanities can help us reveal these mechanisms and make us aware of these propagandistic manipulations.

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Carlos Rojas (Duke University, USA) and Jie Hyun Lim (Williams College, USA) talk to us about how the humanities are transforming in the age of social media and AI. They explain why these disciplines remain indispensable as tools that help us think critically, listen deeply, and imagine futures beyond the limits of the present.

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In the inaugural episode of Humanities in the World, a podcast from the University of Rochester Press, scholars Maya Dodd (Flame University, India) and Erika Pani (El Colegio de México, Mexico) explore how the humanities shape national narratives, public memory, and cultural identity in India and Mexico—two nations deeply marked by colonial legacies and vibrant postcolonial transformations.  

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