Background Texts

Boyer’s essay, originally given as a speech to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is widely considered a bedrock for theories of academic engagement across the last 25 years. Boyer argues that the American university has historically been at its strongest when participating in the building of a “more just society” and calls for a renewed emphasis on the scholarship of engagement: work that centers on the “most pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems” in our communities (18). This essay is especially interesting for identifying (in 1996!) the emerging problem of consumerist attitudes toward higher education and how they are inherently related to the ever-rising costs of college: when education becomes a “private benefit” rather than a “public good” it follows that it’s individual students that ought to “pay the bill” (19). Boyer lays out several stages of engagement, from working across disciplines, to sharing knowledge with public audiences, to applying knowledge to timely issues and ends by suggesting that if universities were to refocus their mission around these kinds of practices, “campuses would be viewed…not as isolated islands, but as staging grounds for action” (27).

The Humanities for All site is a fantastic resource that supports and showcases publicly engaged work from across the country. Together these two pieces by Daniel Fisher offer a great starting point for learning more about the field of the engaged humanities. In “Goals of the Publicly Engaged Humanities,” Fisher offers an overview of the objectives of the field in its current state after reviewing more than 1500 projects submitted to Humanities for All. He identifies 5 goals that these projects tend to coalesce around, including: informing contemporary debates; amplifying community voices and histories; helping individuals and communities navigate difficult situations; expanding educational access; and preserving culture in a time of crisis and change. He then expands on each goal by examining model projects. “A Typology of the Publicly Engaged Humanities” shifts from goals to instead categorize projects by genre; in this article, he identifies 5 types of this work, including outreach; engaged public programming; engaged research; engaged teaching; and the infrastructure of engagement and again using examples to explain each type. In a field that can seem expansive and at times difficult to pin down, these two articles are refreshingly straightforward; especially recommended for those who learn best by browsing examples while reading.

In this pragmatic and approachable essay, the authors write about the evolution of their humanities program at UT-Austin to argue that the humanities are at their most potent when they are creating social relations (not just showcasing or interrogating them)—indeed, for Gale and Carton, humanities practices are uniquely suited to collaborative, community-engaged work. The detailed exploration of their own humanities center is instructive as a model of reflective program-building, but this article will be of use for anyone interested in constructing better rationales for the value of the humanities, and higher education more broadly. “The best way to argue for the relevance of the humanities is not to keep asserting its value but to demonstrate what it is capable of doing, within, across, and beyond the university’s walls” (44). 

One of the major figures in the field, Jay provides a brief history of the engaged humanities, examines multiple examples of engaged humanities practices, and argues that public engagement and digital humanities offer the most promising way forward for establishing the relevance of the humanities within higher education and the wider culture. This article offers an especially useful distinction between public humanities work that seeks to showcase and share knowledge with a wider public and public scholarship that is based on collaborative knowledge-creation between university and off-campus partners (54). The latter half of the essay offers “ten key points of reflection” for practitioners; while some of these may be more useful for those faculty already doing engaged work, on the whole they provide a good sense of the key issues and challenges in the field.

In this article, Looser provides a personal account of how she came to be an “accidental public humanist” (hint: it had to do with an embarrassing encounter at a Jane Austen conference) and provides a pragmatic guide for those interesting in dipping their toes into the world of public writing. Looser’s lively piece provides a model for how to engage a general audience in one’s scholarship (one representative tip: “relentless wet blanket, top-down, and preachy approaches” don’t fly with nonacademic publics). Check out the last section of the article in particular if you’re interested in learning how to pitch your work to editors of popular publications.

An expert in humanities-based community-engaged learning and director of Bringing Theory to Practice, a national initiative to renew undergraduate education, Scobey draws on his experience in the field to make the case that the humanities must be central to public engagement. In fact, according to Scobey, it’s the practices of the humanities that enable the U.S. public sphere as dynamic, multiple, and always in process. Scobey manages to sidestep the pervasive “crisis” rhetoric in favor of an eloquent argument for the “public gifts” of the humanities, gifts that he says will not only engage more students but also be crucial in addressing the most pressing issues facing our communities today.

Woodward’s survey of the field of publicly engaged humanities is perhaps most useful for its descriptions of the vast array of programs and projects across the country. But faculty will also appreciate her incisive analysis of the fissures of the field; for instance, Woodward argues that the field needs to reclaim the intellectual side of public scholarship, a side she finds absent in much recent work: “In embracing the public humanities we must take care not to inadvertently set to the side the tradition of reflective and interpretive inquiry on the part of individuals as a practice seen by some as suddenly out-of-date” (119). Come for the plethora of engagement models; stay for the reminder that public work need not be doctrinaire.

Don’t let the title fool you; while this work takes eighteenth-century British literature as its central subject, any scholar interested in learning practical advice for incorporating public humanities approaches into their teaching and scholarship will find something for them here. While individual chapters are organized around sites of public engagement such as community non-profits, museums, public libraries, and digital archives, each section includes voices from multiple stakeholders beyond the authors, including community organizers they partnered with, university administrators, and students. The volume stands out for its honest grappling with both the benefits and challenges of doing publicly-engaged work. Chapter 1 is especially useful for its nuanced discussion of the opportunities and pitfalls of the concept of “service learning” (26-30).

This article (written by the creators of this very toolkit!) is our attempt to understand the strange and somewhat paradoxical difficulty in situating the humanities in a public humanities program. By exploring how the humanities are both lost and found in the different pieces of our nascent program, we argue that the best way to build lasting interdisciplinary and campus-community bridges—and assert the humanities’ vitality—is to rebalance so that we’re placing just as much on emphasis on the practice of the humanities as on the engagement of the public. The piece might be especially useful for those who are running (or envisioning) their own programs and would like to peek behind-the-scenes at how others have approached the nuts and bolts of program building in the field.

In her introduction to a special issue on the public humanities in the Modern Language Association’s journal, Krebs highlights three projects that highlight the range of the field: a feminist film festival in New Mexico; engaged humanities program building at Georgia State; and a university/community partnership that reflects on place and economics in rural Idaho. The entire special issue is worth reading, but this introduction, which gives voice to the three scholars who lead the projects, is particularly useful if you’d like to get a quick sense of the possibilities in the field without reading full-length articles about each one.

Lucas and Radia make the compelling case that engaged humanities learning can be one of the most successful ways to teach students practical skills while simultaneously intervening in stereotypical narratives about the value of humanities education. The authors focus especially on increases in student agency and leadership and improvement in writing skills gained through participation in civic and public engagement projects. This straightforward essay offers a simple starting point for faculty who are interested in learning more about a university-public library partnership and/or the benefits of designing writing assignments with outcomes beyond the classroom.

Is the purpose of college to prepare students to enter the job market or is it to teach students how to think? It’s both, of course, but many faculty struggle with the tension between these goals and are skeptical of arguments for “instrumental” education–this article is for them. Mangum thoughtfully teases out this tension in her work as she grapples with how to balance her scholarly impulse to “complicate” and “problematize” with her desire to address the “manifold daily challenges that face us” in the classroom. As she walks readers through her own trajectory of pedagogical public engagement–from a service learning course on literature and animals that partnered with a local humane society, to a collaboration on a public performance of a suffrage play with the League of Women of Voters, to public festivals and accessible archival work–Mangum showcases the range of engaged humanities teaching while not shying away from discussions of the challenges she faced along the way. The article is especially useful for how it constructs the public humanities as a form of claiming scholarly agency in the face of the crises within higher education.

This piece is framed as a conversation between two humanities scholars who work on related, but very different, engaged humanities projects at different institutions (Sommer on a collaborative workshop project developed at Harvard called “Pre-Texts” that promotes civic dialogue and Strong on UT-Austin’s Free Minds Project, a community-based humanities course open to all). The authors weave their pedagogical experiences with theoretical work (Schiller, Dewey, and Gramsci, to name a few) to demonstrate the enlivening potential public engagement can have on scholarly thinking. This article may be especially useful for faculty who are drawn to doing more engaged teaching but are skeptical of its connection to their scholarship; Sommer and Strong suggest that rather than existing in a zero-sum relationship with their scholarship, collaborative public engagement has allowed them to think more critically and expansively about what it means to be an academic today.