In this blog post, Aurash Khawarzad describes a creative mapping project, The Public Humanities Map, which charts the scope and relationships among publicly engaged humanities work across CUNY and our Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.
In this essay, Michelle May-Curry, Project director of Humanities for All, reflects on a session from The Graduate Education at Work in the World conference, in which session organizer Kristen Galvin invited participants to not only chart existing public humanities initiatives but also to engage in blue-sky thinking around what this work could look like and do in a world without practical restrictions. Here, May-Curry extends Galvin's invitation to a broader consideration of the field of public humanities and how this more unhindered thinking can yield surprisingly practicable solutions as well as means of illuminating the challenges and obstacles to producing publicly engaged scholarship.
Sociology scholar Ellen Meiser shares an essay discussing the pedagogical possibilities of using podcasts and audio material as a tool in college classrooms and how she has employed them while teaching asynchronously during the Covid-19 pandemic. Connecting this teaching approach with her work as co-host of the sociology-focused podcast The Social Breakdown, Meiser makes a case for how bringing other voices and sounds into the classroom through podcasts can "show not only what our world sounds like, but also how it feels."
In this reflection, GC PhD student and Futures Initiative Fellow Cihan Tekay writes about her experience of co-organizing the conference "Graduate Education at Work in the World." She narrates the process of having to adapt not only structures but also expectations––that themselves reflect the conditions under which academic work is performed pre- and post-pandemic––in re-conceiving a physical convening as a series of remote gatherings. She also discusses how the conference's presentations––on topics ranging from prioritizing accessibility in research formats to creating digital primary sources in college classrooms––reflect back on what it means to organize a virtual conference.
In this interview, Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Marco Saavedra discuss their work creating a collaborative public syllabus that traces Saavedra's constellation of influences and proposes reading together as "an(other) act of love." At the heart of their conversation is a question of how love is a constitutive element of both collaboration and liberation.
Lost & Found editors Iris Cushing, Megan Paslawski, and Zohra Saed discuss with L&F Publisher Kendra Sullivan what they've learned about writing through working in the archives of Diane di Prima, Marty Korte, Lucia Berlin, and Langston Hughes, as a continuation of their discussion for the 2021 AWP conference. Among many things, they reflect on the 'magic transmissions' of poetry, thought, and communication between the living and dead, archival research as 'pushing a hand through the veil of time,' and "the extreme 'outside' at the very heart of life."
In this interview, Ryan Mann-Hamilton and Queenie Sukhadia discuss Ryan's project Environment Community Humanities Oasis (ECHO), which seeks to connect communities around environmental justice actions; how public universities can make good on their claims of social impact; and the inclusion of publics in the process of not just making but also brainstorming projects.
In this interview, Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Queenie Sukhadia discuss questions and concerns arising from Ángeles's project Archives in Common, including how to share "knowledges, experiences, and memories [of immigrant communities] in a way that is non-extractive, where these knowledges, experiences, and memories don’t then become data," the relationship of these forms of sharing to mutual aid, and imperatives to transform both the university and practices of academic work.
In this report, Carolyn A. McDonough gives an overview of the activities of the team of GC-based research assistants working on Virginia Heath's in-progress documentary, Mae West –– The Constant Sinner. In addition to dispatches from each of the research assistants, whose work has been both upended and productively reoriented by the Covid-19 pandemic, director Virginia Heath provides an account of the how her process and vision for the film has changed and developed over the last year.
In this essay, GC PhD student and educator Katherine E. Entigar reflects on the process of working collaboratively with pre-service teaching students to shift parameters, timelines, expectations, and notions of participation in their shared classroom, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Together, redefining education as necessarily determined by realities in students' lives outside the classroom, Entigar writes about how the class sought to create a horizontal structure among teachers and students.
In this interview, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Yarimar Bonilla and Queenie Sukhadia discuss Yarimar's project, The Puerto Rico Syllabus, along with the importance of "valuing public scholarship as scholarship" and conceiving of one's work as inseparable from the communities in which it is situated.
In this interview, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Chloë Bass discusses her project "Here and Not There" with Queenie Sukhadia, as well as the responsibilities of the public university, how to make research accessible to non-academic audiences, and how the resources of the university can be used "towards a larger good rather than controlled through scarcity mentalities and ongoing austerity."
In this blog post, Sonia Adams outlines strategies for both pedagogical and curricular development approaches that integrate the importance of global literature in English classrooms across CUNY and beyond.
In this essay, Iris Cushing recounts her evolving relationships with the constellation of poets, relationships and writing surrounding and published in Lost & Found, including Diane di Prima, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Mary Norbert Korte, Judy Grahn, and David Henderson, following the "glowing breadcumbs" that illuminated her path between them.
In this essay, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Ángeles Donoso Macaya writes about the workshop series Brewing Memories, led by Carolina Saavedra. In her reflections on these workshops, Donoso Macaya considers how the transmission of memory and indigenous knowledges through plants, herbs, and food might also create an archive in common––one that "is not based on, and which does not reproduce, extractive methodologies, but rather that emerges, and keeps developing further, from the same collaborative process of creating and learning together."
In this short essay, Distributaries Writer-in-Residence Queenie Sukhadia reflects on her Instagram-based public humanities project, Academia for All, a platform where she breaks down key theoretical and academic texts for audiences with limited attention spans and/or who might be disinclined to read academic writing. Here, she gives insight into her motivations to make this project, considers how the project has functioned and who it has reached thus far, and poses questions of what future directions the project might lead.
In this essay, André Luis Leite de Figueirêdo Sales reflects on how models of prefigurative activism from Brazilian high school student ativistas making their own schools to ACT UP's imperative to "act as if you had the power to produce reality" might inspire educators to reimagine their roles as activists in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Distributaries Writer-in-Residence Queenie Sukhadia offers a series of short reflections on a selection of texts that exemplify the potentials of the public humanities. As she writes, "The public humanities are less a noun and more a verb: questioning, reflecting, deconstructing, reconstructing, retreating, ceding, and most of all, becoming (a necessarily incomplete process)."
In this blog post, Mellon Seminar Digital Publics Fellow Nga Than discusses the effects of switching to virtual instruction mid-semester during the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, particularly considering its impacts on the formation of community among students and the exchange of emotions between students and teachers.
In this interview, Dr. Terri N. Watson and Dr. Gina Charles discuss the vital role that Black women teachers play for Black girls, including the formative influence of their early relationship as junior high school teacher and student as well as a wider conversation about how Black women teachers provide "mirrors and windows," through which Black girls can see themselves in leadership roles and flourish in their educations, career paths, and lives.
In the final short essay in the series "Practicing Distance," artist Jeff Kasper offers resources for developing support networks during the pandemic and beyond. Pointing toward the Bay Area Transformative Justice Coalition (BATJC)'s model of pod mapping, Kasper reflects on how knowing who is in our pods––a term the BATJC developed to define who we might turn to for care, in the wake of harm––might be a useful starting point, as we navigate limited access to public space, particularly those who depend on it for their safety.
In this reflection by artist Jeff Kasper on the proxemics of social distance, he offers an exercise for transforming conflict through collaboration and cooperation rather than compromise. This exercise proposes collectively devising social stories to "articulat[e] one's personal boundaries and approach the context of physical distance and giving and receiving care" amid the ongoing reality of conflict in social situations.
In his latest entry in his series "Practicing Distance," artist Jeff Kasper continues his consideration of proxemics in our time of physical distance. In this short essay, Kasper proposes instructional scores and prompts, which might be used to "choreograph care" to navigate the intimacies and risks of sharing personal space. He also considers how we might prioritize dependency in our understandings of intimate relationships.
Writer in Residence Queenie Sukhadia makes a case for how the public humanities might allow those working in the academy to rethink the false binary between public and academic knowledge. In this piece, she insists on the responsibility of scholarship to promote social good, by sharing out knowledge and expertise beyond the academy and elaborating the ways in which public knowledge shapes academic work.