Keywords & Concepts

At the most basic level, a community partner is a person or organization that a scholar works with on a curricular or research project. But the history of the term suggests important shifts in how the field thinks of community partnership: while older models of service learning tended to construct “partners” as passive recipients of faculty and student time and work, more recently scholars of public engagement have worked to shift the definition of a community partnership toward a more egalitarian, two-way relationship of knowledge production. The Carnegie Foundation defines these kind of community partnerships as based on “the mutually beneficial exchange, exploration, and application or knowledge, information, and resources” (2012). While not all engaged humanities work involves community partners, collaborating with an organization beyond campus can provide faculty and student fresh perspectives on academic work.

A subset of the engaged humanities, this field uses online technologies and tools to analyze and share knowledge about humanities subjects such as literature, philosophy, or history. Digital humanities projects include the creation of websites, podcasts, online zines, interactive maps and exhibits, and digitized editions of texts. See the UP library’s Digital Humanities research guide for a selection of DH tools and example projects.

The engaged humanities are best understood as a constellation of approaches that seek to develop understandings of human experience and values through modes of interpretive inquiry that connect academic work with the world outside the humanities classroom. The field is sometimes labeled “public humanities”; the shift toward “engaged” rather than “public” signals a desire on the part of scholars and practitioners for a more capacious, flexible definition that more fully captures the ways that the humanities can relate to other fields. For instance, while “public humanities” tend to focus on bringing the work of the humanities  to a wider audience beyond the university, the “engaged humanities” also include connecting humanities work to other disciplines and professional development within the university. The shift from “public” to “engaged” also indicates a move toward collaboration and connection in addition to the public presentation of knowledge. See Daniel Fisher’s “A Typology of the Publicly Engaged Humanities” for a discussion of the field’s different areas of work. 

Interdisciplinary work integrates the methods of two or more fields of knowledge to examine a subject. The engaged humanities include work that connects the humanities to other fields through interdisciplinary collaboration. Indeed, one reason scholars shifted toward the label “engaged humanities” from the “public humanities” is precisely for its inclusion of interdisciplinary work as an important form of engagement for humanities fields. 

There’s more than one way to do engaged humanities work; the spectrum of engagement refers to these different models of connecting beyond the classroom. One one end, there’s outreach, often thought of as “translation”—work that informs the public (example: designing an exhibit for display at the local library). In the middle of the spectrum, there’s exchange, work that interacts with the public (example: holding community discussion groups at the local library). On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the co-creation of knowledge, or partnering with the public to produce outcomes together (example: holding discussion groups to collaborate on the creation of an exhibit for the local library). As the examples indicate, the engagement is less intensive on one end of the spectrum and becomes more intensive along the axis. While scholars often turn this spectrum  into a hierarchy, with more intensive engagement favored over less intensive “outreach” methods, many practitioners take a more pluralist approach and see a place for all forms of engagement within the constellation of the engaged humanities.