Blog

Last year, I was invited to facilitate a session for a small parent group in California’s Central Coast.  At the end of the session, I tried to prompt the parents to reflect upon the significance of their group; that is, what they had gathered from each other and how the group helped them grow.  While parents found the group helpful, they found various needs unmet.  They turned to me asking me what I was able to offer them.

A central proposition in understanding the political engagement behind the project of public humanities resides in the teasing out “the unavoidable paradox,” as Lisa Lowe puts it, brought on by producing knowledge in social institutions that perpetuate an imbalance in power relations while unsettling such status quo through practices of community engagement.

I always appreciate readings that raise the interconnections between nations, particularly between the US and other Third World nations–reminding us that there is much more beyond our borders. Okihiro’s viewpoints of Third World studies as the theorization of liberation for everyone (!)–not just for Third World or communities of color.  As Okihiro claims: Third World studies are “about society and the human condition broadly”.

I am currently attending the National Council for Public History Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana and many of the sessions have been grappling with the same themes we have in our Public Scholars class. How do we privilege communities without sacrificing academic integrity? Should that be the concern of an activist scholar? What do we call this work anyway: public history, public scholarship or something else? And the most important question (to me at least) why so much anxiety between public and “academic” scholarship?

The readings this week have made me think with more care about the intersecting identities of public activist and scholar. What are the responsibilities of both, what are the risks, and is it perhaps better to leave academia altogether and become a scholar not of public discourse, but within them? In the introduction to Activist Scholarship, Sudbury and Okazawa-Rey tell of the general reaction to Canadian antiracist feminist Sunera Thobani’s analysis of US foreign policy and the mass death it caused post-9/11. Her work was met with resentment and hostility.

Quite directly Gary Y. Okihiro’ piece touches on Ferguson’s discussion on incorporation and the archive, as an institutional mechanism for exercising power. Okihiro offers thus an explicit example of a power dynamic in which liberation is substituted for a mainstream and celebratory notion of freedom, a concept that is rife in contradictions but that somehow is seldom discussed as such.

A lot of the points made in the readings for this week about the neoliberal college campus (especially in the Sudbury introduction) were interestingly echoed acutely in a meeting I was at after reading them. UC Berkeley is, like many public campuses, facing a budget deficit of $150 million and the response is disproportionately affecting humanities, rather than the other “products” that the student-consumers are receiving.

The university is central to how scholarship has been conceptualized thus far. Therefore, we must consider the environment that public scholarship and scholarship more broadly inhabit at the university. Many shifts have been occurring in the university, including the development of the neoliberal university. The proliferation of the neoliberal university has profound implications for the state of public humanities.

This weeks’ readings were focused on the promise of Third World Liberation movements and water-downed promise of that movement reflected through university implementation of ethnic studies programs. More centrally, the readings centered on the question posed in the Okazawa-Ray reading: is it possible to teach and combat systems of oppression when we teach in universities that uphold those tenets.

This week our readings and discussion have turned my thoughts to the position of the public scholar and public scholarship in universities. Questions about how and whether community-engaged work and activism should connect with work in academic institutions seem to generate a variety of answers—and more questions. Is it a failure to separate our academic scholarship from our activism/work with a community? Will bringing them together damage them by undermining the credibility of one and “professionalizing or institutionalizing” the other (Bhattacharyya and Murji 1366)?

Last week we discussed the history of the university and its relationship to building the nation-state, expanding capitalism, and US neocolonial and imperial powers.

Growing up undocumented, I had few options in terms of what my future could be.  Going to college was a dream that so few people like me had the opportunity to do, and the main goal I had in mind was to get my degree, get out, and get a job — to keep myself afloat, and stay out of trouble.  However, I was fortunate enough to meet a mentor that took me under her wing, and instilled in me the belief in research and the scientific method.

As a budding Black scholar, public and community-based scholarship, is not something that I think about, but more or less just do. While completing my M.A. thesis I had a critical moment in my development where I asked myself, “if my Nana can’t understand my work and its purpose, what am I doing?” Moreover, my entry into academia has been greatly influenced by radical social movements. Huey P. Newton’s assertion that his work (both organizing and academic) was for the “brothers on the block” propelled me to keep researching and producing scholarship for those in struggle. 

The second set of readings on archival power and normative technologies of absorption place racial and social minority groups as examples of how liberatory grassroots movements become, to a degree, depoliticized by their inclusion into archiving institutions of the nation-state. In doing so, a genealogy of power within American universities is presented as an articulation of a new form of coloniality.

What is public scholarship or community-engaged scholarship? What can this engagement look like? What counts as ‘giving back’ or establishing reciprocal relationships with the communities we study? These are all difficult questions to answer that I have grappled with and tried to disentangle.