Doris Sommer

“Civic participation depends on creativity, an (aesthetic) knack for reframing experience, and on a corollary freedom to adjust laws and practices in light of ever-new challenges. Without art, citizenship would shrink to compliance, as if society were a closed text. Reading lessons would stop at the factual “what is,” rather than continue to the speculative “what if.”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

“We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.”
― Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities