Emphasizing critical perspective and imaginative response, the humanities...foster creativity, appreciation of our commonalities and our differences, and knowledge of all kinds.
-- American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Heart of the Matter
This week I have been thinking about the challenges of undertaking a public humanities project for a summer and what I can realistically accomplish. While we’re all here because we believe in the importance of public scholarship, public scholarship and particularly public humanities projects can suffer from being broad, ambitious, and, at times, nebulous in scope. For this reason, I think that these kinds of projects benefit from specificity more so than other academic projects, like writing an academic article.
Making feasible plans is central to public scholarship. As I work to plan my project, I am very concerned about planning a feasible project that will still provide meaningful benefits to Yolo County Food Bank. I think project management is a crucial skill to develop for public scholars. Although project management and planning are important to any research project, I believe they are even more important in public scholarship due to the involvement of multiple parties and the more pressing timelines in the public sphere.
This is a tough question to answer, especially since I think the central question for me is: what can we do over a summer? Our readings have emphasized the idea of collaboration and exchange in community-engaged work, so while I can set goals for myself, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this project will involve a host of other people–and communicating with them will be a big part of the project.
Native American “educational goals [are] profound—to produce competent, caring adults—and consequences for failure [are] equally profound. The ultimate test of each human educational system is a people’s survival (Lomawaima, K. & McCarty, T.; To Remain An Indian, 2006).”
What is “Public Scholarship” in relation to educational paradigms in existence, and I do mean paradigmS. During Discussion, I find myself feeling vulnerable. I don’t mean to be a bull in a china shop, but I also can’t help feeling like a tea cup on a horse track…
I am assuming the ‘here’ in the question refers to the public scholars seminar. So, my answer, although directed at explaining why I am interested in being a public scholar, begins by pointing out a coincidence, which is the fact that I have often asked that question in my educational journey. Particularly, in the last four years of graduate work at UC Irvine, the question has been recurring consistently. On the one hand, as I am the first in my extended family to venture into a Ph.D. program, I have had to resort to that question to make sense of the experience I am going through.
From our readings and discussions, it seems as if many people are scholars first and public scholars second. I mean this in terms of career trajectory, not in terms of importance. Many people became scholars and then later become publicly engaged with their scholarship. I have been fortunate enough to have a series of mentors that have instilled in me a value of public scholarship before I became a scholar myself.
The prompt for this week’s blog and readings have compelled me to do some reflecting on my trajectory and everything that I have done to get to this point.
Why am I here? This to me was a very broad question. ‘Here’ could start from a very philosophical point of view of being the world or the universe itself. At this level I am at the level of humanity, we can all ask the same question. The following few interpretations of the word ‘here’ stems from my intersectional identity as an immigrant, dance practitioner who is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies and now a Mellon public scholar.
I’m from an academic family. I know how to handle academics, talk to them, and understand what they’re saying, most of the time. But I have to admit, since starting to take graduate-level humanities courses, a lot of language has felt needlessly opaque, like an insider’s club of alienating discourses. Especially at a time when programs are under fire, I think this contributes to the harmful notion that the humanities are significant only within the confines of the university.
Four simple words that form such a difficult and profound question. As I finish my second year of graduate school, the question of why am I here and why I choose to remain here have slowly begun to haunt me. Coursework is finishing and I’ll slowly start entering a more open stage of my graduate career. In applying for fellowships during Fall quarter, I looked over my graduate school application materials.
This week we were asked to write about why we are here–and for me, the answer is simple. I think that knowledge production–scholarship–does not (and should not be thought of) as happening within the confines of the academy. Limiting access to scholarship, and limiting what constitutes scholarship, is harmful, particularly in the United States today. While funding is cut for education, and a dislike for the so-called “educated elite” increases, I believe it is my job–our job–as scholars to make ourselves open and relevant to the public.
Today’s topic asks the question: Why am I here? The simple (or not so simple) answer to that question is that I am here to try something new. Over the course of this past year (and a reminder, I am a first year student in Sociology), I’ve found myself in a bit of a quandary. Foremost in my mind is to figure out what kind of scholar I want to be. While I do believe that I’ve found a home in my department, it becomes clearer to me every day that “sociology” is exactly as broad as it sounds.
Because of its “outward-facing” approach, I think that public scholarship makes you a better teacher. Its emphasis on building community and exchanging ideas aligns with the classroom environment I want to build with my students and will help me cultivate a greater awareness of the issues they may be facing outside of it. The prospect of involving work in the community or encouraging my students to take action inspired by the coursework in our class, mentioned in several of our articles, also seems really inspiring.
“We define activist scholarship as the production of knowledge and pedagogical practices through the active engagements with the service of progressive social movements”
I came into public scholarship long before my formal education began. I am a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northwestern California and our community based education begins early in life. We sing to each other, dance, and grow up knowing our histories and stories before we step foot inside of a classroom. Growing up, I noticed that the stories I heard day to day in my household, about our culture, people, and contribution to the world around us, were never told accurately or fairly in academic settings: American Indians were relegated to the past.
