Blog

In the wake of Hurricane Irma, which has swept through the Caribbean basin this past week, I am thinking of environmental turmoil as a metaphor for political turmoil. If Irma has stirred all of this commotion because the lives of many around the Caribbean are put at risk; political causes are just as dangerous as environmental threats to the lives of activists and grassroots organizers.

“Danza de Los Superhéroes: Zapotec Immigrant Tradition in Transnational Transfer”

This is the title of Leopoldo Peña’s new article in the online journal Boom California. Leopoldo joined our Public Scholars cohort from UC Irvine this year.

I actually had my first experience going into the field last week!  I went out and conducted a needs assessment for the organization I partnered with.  I honestly don’t know what I expected, as my previous experience with giving out surveys had generally revolved around collecting them online.  Doing surveys in-person was definitely not something in my comfort zone — but by the end of the day, I had a lot of fun and collected a lot of experience that I can use moving forward.

As summer approaches and we begin to turn our proposed projects into reality, I personally am beginning to question what problems I might expect in working with the local publics with such a politically sensitive topic. What biases will I encounter, and how can I prepare to address them myself? How will my own position as a university-sponsored individual impact how I am received?

This summer has been long anticipated. I am very excited to have the time to just fully focus on my field research and on my Mellon Public Scholarship project. This allows me to have a ‘free’ and open schedule to participate in various events and meet with different people.

I’m actually going out this weekend into the “field” this weekend, which is, for me, both proverbial and literal. The site, where I will be both working and living, is a grassy clearing in a state forest in Sonoma county. As I anticipate this trip, I’ve been thinking about the tensile relationship between the twin virtues of expectations and flexibility. Both, it seems, are necessary for any project in the field.

I will be starting with California Arts council soon. I have been having difficulty in getting them to respond to my queries. While they are friendly and helpful they take longer to respond to queries. Given, the information I have with me, I will be taking my skills as a collaborator, management graduate and researcher in to the field.

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately. As I enter into the summer working for the Oak Park Neighborhood Association I hope to accomplish many things. I hope to help the community build capacity to tell their own stories, I hope to make connections with people within the City of Sacramento, and I hope to produce something that is meaningful and helpful for the community I will be serving. But ideally, I’d like to produce the start of a digital humanities tool that lasts for many years. That can be used toward advocacy and as a tool to build community capacity.

At this point in the class, I feel that I have spent a considerable amount of time planning my summer project. However, it always seems as if more time could be spent. Between listening to the experiences of past Mellon Public Scholars and listening to other professionals discuss their dissertation projects in another class, I have realized that something will always happen that one is not prepared for. As I begin this summer, I am going to take these lessons with me. I will take these lessons and a plan that I know will probably not be carried out in full.

As I move from discussing and theorizing my specific project and community-engaged scholarship, I expect to keep learning. I anticipate discovering a lot about the type of research I’m going to do (techniques for gathering data, strategies for finding difficult-to-find organizations, skills for using map and database tools) as well as knowledge about working in a scholarly context and organization that is different from my day-to-day work as an instructor.