Blog

This summer I plan to facilitate a women’s creative writing workshop at the CERESO (Centro de Reinserción Social) de Mérida, in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula. My project is entitled, “Stories from a Mexican Women’s Prison.”

After completing my master’s degree, I taught World History at a community college in southern California. I was dismayed that I could say very little about how California history fit into larger world history paradigms and global trade networks of the nineteenth-century. I felt I should be able to do better, especially given that most of us had grown up in California. Solving this conundrum became the focus of my current dissertation research.

I am here because I want my research to speak to a larger audience. As a doctoral candidate in sociology, I work on tax incentives and local economic development. Economists have argued for 40-plus years that more often than not tax incentives for business do more harm than good, and yet local practitioners and politicians have increased their use of these ineffective policy tools following the Great Recession. Since coming to graduate school I’ve realized that the process/ findings of research do not magically transform into knowledge for relevant publics.

The word “criminal” holds a lot of moral judgment. Only “bad” people get arrested and go to prison, right? Wrong.

In the first scene of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, a character deliberates whether to join his colleagues in their pursuit of learning. When he asks, “What is the end of study?” his question addresses, in part, the circumstances required to learn. His friends have decided to seal themselves off from their communities for three years to start their “little academe,” demonstrating a belief that learning is done in relative isolation, away from the “outside” world.

Beneath the daily sensationalist headlines of the political spectacle there are also news of communities struggling against environmental degradation, inequality and oppression. Occasionally, trending articles pop up on our newsfeeds: “Teens Sue U.S. Government Over Climate Change,” “Indigenous Leaders Are Being Killed Because They Want the Right to Live.” Before we allow the information to sink in, we move on to the next article in our feed.

I applied to be a Mellon Public Scholar in the hope that the program would provide an institutional space, a cohort, and the financial resources to both think and practice the public humanities.

Across the country, humanities institutes are offering graduate students an opportunity to speak to the relationship between universities and their communities through public scholarship. Now’s the time for UC Davis to join the conversation.

We at the UC Davis Humanities Institute are excited to be launching the Mellon Public Scholars Program to address two related goals: to support community-engaged scholarship on campus and broaden the training and career opportunities for our PhD students.