How might we foster intergenerational conversation in the humanities?

In this episode, Caroline Fowler engages former RAP fellow David Scott in a reflective conversation on generational consciousness, intellectual inheritance, and the shifting horizons of political and artistic imagination. What begins as an observation of a quiet rupture between senior scholars and emerging voices unfolds into a rich dialogue about the languages we inherit—and the ones we fail to share. Drawing on Scott’s formative experiences in post-independence Jamaica and his work founding the Caribbean journal of criticism Small Axe, the episode probes how different generations inhabit distinct temporalities shaped by hope, disillusionment, and the afterlives of historical transformation. This conversation invites listeners to reconsider what it means to belong to a generation, to inherit a past, and to imagine futures that remain, however tenuously, within reach.