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
The public I will address are those whom I can predict such as K-12 instructors and visitors to the Laguna Art Museum. The public I work with also includes those whom I cannot predict or know about at this time. I hope that my future work will do that which Walter Lippman describes as “an intelligent direction of social life,” that is, “the union of social science, access to facts and the art of literary presentation.”
The goal of this post is to discuss the community with which I will be working in terms of the topics that we have been analyzing in our Public Scholars meetings.I have been looking forward to running this community outreach program for some time (I discuss the overall structure of the program in my first blog post), but interacting with and learning from the other Public Scholars and the faculty members has helped to make me more self-reflexive about the type of project I am creating.
During the past two decades, there has been an unprecedented expansion of international volunteering and service, both in numbers of volunteers and sponsoring organizations1. Despite the popularity and growth of international volunteerism, scholarship on the long-term impacts of such service has been scarce. Proponents of such service suggest volunteer opportunities inspire ordinary people to get involved in global affairs, giving them the potential to promote global peace and make tangible contributions to the well-being of people around the world2.
The academy is designed to fail women of color and domesticate the decolonial politics of ethnic studies. As a woman of color and critical ethnic studies scholar, I’m in a vexed position. Before I can situate my “public” in relation to the academy, I need to explore two ontological questions:
“So who is your audience?” asks the newest addition to the advisory committee, a free-lance historian with over twenty years of experience. A small group of us are gathered around farmer’s market nectarines and cherries in a bright dining room in Walnut Creek, discussing the projects for Cal Ag Roots, a program of the California Institute for Rural Studies.
At Armstrong Redwoods State Park in Guerneville California, tourists crowd a well-marked interpretive nature trail, eagerly marveling at the aged, massive trees. Most are unaware that on the steep hill above them stands a small complex of weathered, wood-paneled buildings. This is Pond Farm, and though it is not as immediately awe-inspiring as the towering redwoods, it is also site of historic significance.
The primary “public” that my project—a collaboration between the non-profit performing arts organization Santa Cruz Shakespeare and the UC Santa Cruz research center Shakespeare Workshop—addresses is middle and high school educators. Secondary school educators have the great task of navigating not only their own goals for teaching and their students’ goals for learning, but also the state and district educational standards that seek measurable outcomes for student performance.
During a research trip to Akwesasne Mohawk Territory in the autumn of 2014, I visited the Akwesasne Cultural Center. The facility is home to both the Akwesasne Museum and Library and serves as a hub for daily community life. On a typical weekday in September, the library pulses with human activity—the laughter and muted gossip from community members as they planned events intermingling with the syncopated keystrokes of public computers.
My project, in partnership with the R&D “silo” of the California Energy Commission (CEC), is an examination of how we can conceive of and create measure of energy efficiency/consumption that can more fully capture how energy is actually being used among consumers, and identifying how these new measures, along with other institutional barriers that exist, effect the state’s ultimate goal to promote energy conservation. In this project, I have identified three separate publics. The first is the California Energy Commission itself.
I am here because I believe that girls and women are agents of social transformation, producers of knowledge, and what hip-hop scholar Ruth Brown calls “creative genius” (Brown 2013, 2014). As a working-class, first generation college student, I strongly believe in the need to center the voices of working class girls of color in knowledge production about music, art, feminism, and film. Centering their voices, means questioning the way we conduct, analyze, present, and write about them.
Since I was young, I intended to go into academics. Several members of my family were involved in academia, and I found the idea of perusing knowledge in order to educate a wide audience to be a very compelling career path. I was surprised, however, to find that the more involved with my research in graduate school I became, the group of people I was speaking to shrank. At first, I thought that I was doing something incorrectly, but quickly realized I was, in fact, doing exactly what was expected of me.
I’m here because I want a place to think about what it means to do publicly engaged scholarship. Because in the competitive, individualist context of academia the Public Scholars program creates a community of peers with whom to think deeply and collaboratively about these issues. Because I want to stay in the university and I’m committed to doing that in the most ethical way possible. Because academia is very good at theorizing politics on an abstract scale, and very bad at addressing the politics of its own institutions.
I’m in Mellon Public Scholars because of an unrelenting curiosity on the possibilities of connecting humanistic research with the initiatives of community organizations. I’ve attempted to negotiate the boundaries between academic and public life since I entered the university, and this program is an opportunity to meet colleagues who share similar goals.
