Blog

Over Memorial Day weekend 2016, the community of Akwesasne gathered with local dignitaries to honor the last surviving WWII code talker with the Silver Congressional Star. Levi Oakes, aged 94, received long overdue recognition for his service to the United States following years of bureaucratic delays. The ceremony served as a poignant reminder that history gets made every day at Akwesasne—even it takes outsiders decades to recognize its significance.

I am already busy, working on research for the museum exhibition here in Southern California. I do feel much more prepared. The MOU process was especially helpful and productive, so I am grateful that assignment was in place. I am using nozbe.com in order to organize my tasks (Thank you, Cleve Justis!). That tool is pretty amazing. I’m also experimenting with Google Keep, to see which tool I will stick with.

During the course of this seminar, the work that we have done together visualizing and mapping out our projects through project frameworks and these blog posts, writing MOU’s and dialoging about them with our community partners, and considering the feasibility of the project has been very helpful to me. Beginning the project months in advance now seems to me the best way to lay the foundation for a successful project.

As the quarter wraps up, it is remarkable to look back and see the ways in which all of the individual projects have developed in a relatively short period of time. For me personally, in just a couple of weeks, I will begin my first interviews with former volunteers and will be simultaneously packing for my trip to Ecuador to record oral histories of community members that have lived near and have been affected by my community partner.

Looking back to our first Public Scholars seminar meeting at the end of March, I am reminded of a key question that remains important to me as I shift my attention toward the summer. When asked to consider who is the “public” of the “Public Humanities” in general and of our public-facing projects in particular, together we raised further questions about the very need to define a special kind of academic work as “public.” Why and how is it that the public university, and the work of academics, is not already (or no longer) connected to or understood to be serving the public?

When I leave campus and head into the field, I will bring a trunk with me, the baggage of the academically trained, the baggage of all that I am.

This baggage contains useful tools and useless tools. Perhaps we’ve started to figure out which might be which, and that education will continue—and useful/useless will certainly change over time. But it is clear that the bags have, to a certain extent, been packed and sent ahead. As nice as it might be to clear out all the baggage we’d rather leave behind, it’s impossible.

It has been interesting to watch my questions change since the beginning of the Public Scholar seminar–both expanding, and becoming more focused. I have encountered many questions that I realized I hadn’t yet addressed in a rigorous way upon entering this program.

As the Mellon Public Scholars seminar comes to a close, I feel ambivalent about the public humanities. I’m simultaneously more confident in what I can accomplish over the summer and uncertain about what it means to be a scholar outside of a university setting.

In approximately 27 days I will officially start my internship with the CEC. Taking pause from writing the last seminar paper of my graduate career, grading statistics homework, and compiling comprehensive exam reading lists, I am left contemplating what questions, skills, background knowledge I will bring with me into the field on that day.

I really appreciate how the Public Scholars seminar has forefronted questions about what it means to work with/for various publics and the kinds of problematics that emerge at different scales of engagement. For me during this quarter, the class has also coincided with several conversations about bioethics in science and medicine. Early on in the quarter I felt afloat in a sea of questions, perspectives, and criticisms about 1) the role of the university and humanities PhDs at work in the world and 2) the relationship between science and society.