Like air, humanities-led work is everywhere, but it’s often taken for granted and overlooked because it’s part of life.
Academic books and articles on history and philosophy are also important. So are local oral history projects, art exhibits, or dinner table conversations about books, movies, and music.
new peer-reviewed open access journal, public humanitiesstrengthens connections between university-based humanities research and the wider world, creating a space for scholars and practitioners to share what they do and how they do it. The purpose is to. And its creation is a sign of how professors and people in higher education want to insist, even though it has been going on for many years, that: lament As for the crisis in the humanities, especially when you look beyond the dire statistics about funding cuts, endangered departments, and declining majors, the humanities are very much alive.
Public Humanities, published by Cambridge University Press, is pitched like a very large tent. The mission statement emphasizes inclusivity, declaring the journal to be “a space for scholars, students, activists, journalists, policy makers, experts, practitioners, and laypeople to connect and share knowledge.” There is. It is open to “all disciplines, geographies, eras, methodologies, authors, and audiences in the humanities.” These include anthropology, archaeology, classics, cultural studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, history, law, linguistics, literary studies, performing arts, religious studies, philosophy, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and psychology. , sociology, visual arts, and women’s studies.
“The humanities study what humans make—art, writing, thought, religion, government, history, technology, and society—and explore who we are, what we do, and how we do it. ,” founding editors Jeffrey R. Wilson, a Shakespeare scholar who teaches at Harvard University, and Zoe, assistant professor of liberal arts and natural sciences at the University of Birmingham. Hope Blatis writes: in essay In the first issue. In fact, they point out that some people doing so-called public humanities outside of higher education may not know or care about the term.
The editors plan to publish five to six themed issues a year, as well as “now” essays on pressing social issues and how humanities initiatives intersect with social issues. One such essay, written by Susan McWilliams Berndt, who teaches political science at Pomona College, addresses an existential question that students are asking, especially these days. “Why study the humanities when people are dying?”
Future themed issues will focus on indigenous public humanities, world literary studies, the Harlem Renaissance and its publics, literature and science in the public sphere, political philosophy, far-right rhetoric, and more. There will also be a “How to” issue. Wilson calls useful humanities skills that can be used in public, such as how to create a podcast, as “basic” speaking.
Ricardo L. Ortiz, one of the editors of this journal, Master of Arts in Engaged and Public Humanities Program He is a professor of Latinx literature and culture at Georgetown University. He is editing a forthcoming special issue on “Public Humanities in Practice.” Because the paper is under peer review, Ortiz cannot share more than general details, but the paper featured partnerships with historically marginalized and underrepresented groups in the U.S. and other countries. It is explained that it is a case study.
“Their projects range from those that capitalize on the literary culture of local communities, to those that collaborate with public history archives, to those that model community-based alternative pedagogies for students that work with off-campus partner organizations. ” he says. Although this project is based on academic research, it focuses on how to collaborate with community partners rather than extracting knowledge from them.
Avoid “myopic” thinking
This move away from “extractive” models of humanities research resonates with Matthew Gibson. He is the executive director of Virginia Humanities, which supports community-based public humanities projects across Virginia. (Almost every state and territory in the United States has State Humanities Council.) Gibson is not involved with the new magazine, but welcomes its arrival.
“The more we can focus on the public humanities, both inside and outside the academy, the better off the humanities in general will be,” he says.
Gibson argues that “Too often within academia there is a short-sighted view that this is the life and death of the humanities.” “And of course that’s not true at all. They’re infused into everything we do, everything we become, and they carry us into whatever career we decide to pursue.” He will take you there.”
He would like to see the journal add more non-academic editors to its advisory board, who would be interested in “policy, government advocacy, public outreach, and public-academic engagement.” People who work at the crossroads between ”
That’s the plan, according to Bouraitis and Wilson.
“We start with scholars in the community, which is the foundation for academic journals,” Wilson says. “Public humanities” is outlined in an essay in the Manifesto issue. That “typology,” as they call it, includes the kinds of knowledge gained in activism, pedagogy, practical humanities research in libraries and museums, journalism and public policy.
The editors also want the journal to be a safe place to work for non-academics who have practical knowledge to share with academia but are not trained to write for a professional audience. I’m thinking. (Devonnie Loser, professor of English at Arizona State University and editor of this journal) The need to be able to translate between an academic journal audience and a general audience applies both ways. “The necessity of public writing” Included in the debut issue. )
There is no shortage of extramural expertise waiting to be tapped.
Robert B. Townsend, program director for arts, humanities, and culture at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the magazine’s editorial board. He is also a long-time analyst of humanities data. What do people do with their degrees?. Humanists work in a variety of fields, and in his experience, what is considered official humanities activity in one country or setting is not necessarily important in another. This is partly because of the way such activities are funded. Public Humanities could be a gathering place to explore how these differences in definitions “probably create barriers and challenges to good conversations that might be had elsewhere,” he said. he says.
The journal aims to be geographically and conceptually broad. of editorial committee It includes many academics working at universities in the US and UK, but also from the global humanities community, with members based in Australia, Ghana, Hong Kong, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan, and more. However, there are linguistic limitations. This journal publishes articles only in English.
The idea for public humanities grew out of a roundtable discussion on presentism, politics, and scholarship that Wilson attended at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in 2018. article In the Spring 2019 issue of the journal “Profession”, he presented the idea for the journal. That led to preliminary conversations with Cambridge University Press, but “I had given up hope that the journal would become a reality until Zoe came along and that sparked the project,” Wilson says. Masu. It was Zoe who brought the team together and turned the idea into reality. ”
On the other side of the Atlantic, Bouraitis was researching the changing value of higher education and rising tuition fees in the UK. A colleague at Cambridge University connected her with Wilson and members of the press. “Intellectually, we come from completely different realms,” he says. “I love all things old, but Zoe feels very modern and of the moment.” (Compare academic books published in 2020: Wilson’s “Shakespeare and Trump” And Bouraitis’s “Values and the humanities: The neoliberal university and the Victorian legacy.. ”)
Launching a journal through an established university press made sense on several fronts. “We were very determined to create a space that would bring these conversations to the center of traditional academia,” Bouraitis says. “Many jobs in the general humanities tend to be seen as something to add to people’s careers,” she added. “We couldn’t agree with that idea. We wanted to keep it in a place within academia that could have long-term preservation, including a real place for conservation processes and public humanities.” ”
The diversity of what counts as the public humanities creates interesting starting points to explore. One of the editors, Sarah Nuttall, is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Witt Institute for Social and Economic Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The institute, which she headed from 2012 to 2022, focuses on public humanities, so she welcomed the magazine’s arrival as “a forum to talk about it with people around the world.” Nuttall will review papers and help recruit other scholars from the Global South as editors, contributors, and reviewers. (Early on, she suggested adding an editor based in West Africa, which they did: Kwabena Opoku Agyeman of the University of Ghana.)
Nuttal says that in South Africa, the debate about the role of universities and how they should be involved in public life follows a different script. “The outreach model that has defined much of the conversation on American campuses about this issue assumes that there is a community that can be reached in the singular,” she says. In South Africa’s multi-ethnic context, there is a sense that “there may be a problem for intellectuals from universities in a highly unequal country to reach that community in an uncomplicated way.” Instead, the focus has been on opening up universities to communities that have traditionally been excluded from them.
Nuttall points to attempts to define public humanities as part of the rise of society. important university researchwhich asks not only what the university is, but who it serves.
Academia “needs to be less pompous and unapproachable, and one way to do that is to put itself out in the public eye,” she says. “How do you turn really great academic research into social information, public knowledge? This is an ongoing problem and one that some academics are feeling stressed about.”
The new journal could become a place where humanists from all walks of life come together in search of answers.
