What can the aspirational humanities teach us?

This paper focuses on the aspirational stance of varieties such as environmental and urban humanities to better understand the opportunities and risks associated with the humanities reaching outward, especially in the context of so-called societal challenges, wicked problems, and missions. The analysis takes a genealogical and discourse-centered approach, considering individual epistemic traditions alongside shared patterns in relation to how these fields have been negotiated and developed, to bring forth tensions useful for considering the how of engaging humanistic knowledge to collaboratively respond to challenges and problems, not only through individual projects or even fields, but in terms of capacity building.