Public Humanities Launch | The Manifesto Issue

Public humanities happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life. Providing a 10-point typology of public humanities, this introduction explains why we need the humanities – as individuals and as societies – and narrates some moments when the humanities have changed the world.

Head cheerleader here to encourage you all to write about disrupting white supremacy, colonialism, hetero-patriarchy and dismantling systems of oppression.

Activism is anything but glorious. As well-intentioned the recognition of scholar activism is, it misses the point of what activism is by singling out one person, and a scholar. The danger with claiming scholar activism as heroic is two-fold. First, it makes activists exceptional, letting society rely on exceptional individuals to do the heroic work as we collectively fail to assume our responsibilities. Second, it glorifies the activism of scholars, implying that it is more valuable than that of others and overlooking the structures of authority that empower and protect them. Instead, we must normalize scholar activism, expect it, both to share the load with other activists and to live up to our responsibilities.

The University of Ghana operates within the larger national and regional context that tells the familiar story of faculty who operate in overworked and underpaid conditions. Yet faculty members strive to combine their official duties with activism, recognizing the importance of contributing to nation building. Additionally, there is the expectation of faculty to imbue into students the importance of activism.

A class taught at the English department symbolizes this quest to ensure that students evolve away from traditional classroom practices to experiential learning that harnesses the environment. Through these modes of pedagogical engagement, both faculty and students leverage the unique tools that are available just by being in an African university.

The status of democracy and democratic processes is of bipartisan concern across many established democracies. Can examples drawn from classical Athens make a useful contribution to discussions of the failings of contemporary democracy? And can they help young people to learn about democratic processes and their role as participatory citizens? My article considers a range of interventions from the past decade in the United States and the United Kingdom, carried out at different scales and through different methods. It considers the strengths of working with material from the distant past – its non-partisan nature offering a safe space to discuss political conflict without engaging in it – and also the weaknesses, such as the limited franchise of ancient democracies like classical Athens, and the need to consider specific historical issues in their own context.

This article makes the case for unearthing a long history of public humanities. The story begins with the very emergence of universities in the United States and continues through key moments where people of color and Indigenous people have shaped the history of public humanities.

Risam makes the case against allowing the novelty of the term “public humanities” to erase this history and for resisting cooptation of public humanities by the neoliberal university.

In his novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman imagines that we will one day engineer an artificial intelligence that will mimic humans in every way. In order to reproduce “the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being,” however, the computer that houses it will have to be bigger than the Earth.

This essay takes Grossman’s novel as the start and endpoint for a discussion about the role of the public humanities in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The response of the humanities to the pervasive fatalism about an AI-driven future should be twofold. First, they can serve as an antidote to a credulous, amnesiac present which sees the future as already decided, with inexorable effects that we can only adapt to. Second, they can challenge the now pervasive view of intelligence as computational and algorithmic. The humanities refuse to see humans as codable, or as just part of the data stream.

We should certainly study the ways in which AI is changing what it means to be human, but we should never lose sight of what is most astonishing, and uncopiable, about us.

The essay aims at discussing visual arts and gender issues, with specific reference to models for female empowerment by means of aesthetic paradigm shifts. These took place thanks to pioneering video artists in the 1990s and were then upheld by new millennium music pop stars in highly influential videoclips.

I argue that videos by artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Cheryl Donegan, Mona Hatoum, Andrea Fraser, and Susan Hiller matter today for how they tackled gender issues by means of the moving image, especially by challenging the male gaze and creating gender specific perspectives long before women could claim a similar influence on the television business and in the movie industry. They offered ground-breaking strategies in visual representation and video narratives of considerable impact since they were later adopted in public life, particularly through female pop stars’ aesthetic transfer into music videoclips, such as with Beyoncé.

In this regard, I observe how art historical references are applied in recent videoclips to challenge the male gaze, letting a threefold strategy emerge: thematic reprise, iconographic substitution, and aesthetic transposition.

The future of public humanities will be determined by the infrastructural investments that support its continued development. These include, in the context of the United States, increased federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities; a serious re-engagement in the material support of new humanities scholarly production by private foundations; and a focused effort by humanities organizations to cultivate philanthropic donors.

This manifesto argues that the humanities are the rightful inheritance of every person, regardless of background or position. If we are to take seriously both the resource needs of humanities research—which demand that funds be allocated for highly trained scholars to read, interpret, authenticate, preserve, and circulate primary source material—and the idea that no one has a higher claim than anyone else to these sources and processes and the insights they yield—which demands that individuals outside of the academy explicitly experience them selves as equal participants in the humanities—then our approach to both research infrastructure and public engagement must radically shift to emphasize repair.

Repair, here, is the interpersonal, intellectual, strategic, repetitious, time-intensive work of ensuring that every individual can claim this rightful cultural inheritance. It is the work of creating the conditions for encounters between individuals and the vastness of history, culture, and difference. The future of public humanities must be in the creation of replicable models for these encounters, in the knowledge that in every instance, the work of the humanities is and must be unreproducible.

I ran the online classics publication Eidolon from 2015 to 2020. Eidolon sought to make Classics “personal and political, feminist and fun,” publishing more than 500 articles and receiving 3 million total views in its five years of active existence.

Because our editors (and many of our writers) were scholars who grew up consuming and producing digital content, we were able to bring a measure of academic rigor and methodology to inform urgent personal and timely essays. Eidolon’s position as both insiders and outsiders to the discipline of Classics made it uniquely suited to address some of the most challenging and necessary conversations facing the field, from white supremacist classical appropriation online to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within the discipline. But the lack of institutional support that allowed total freedom also made the publication vulnerable and contributed to its closure in late 2020. It’s wonderful to have fans, but a publication also needs champions. I argue that, for an online publication to be exciting and fresh but also resilient, it must maintain a delicate balance between fearlessly commenting on the most pressing issues of the day (without, perhaps, waiting for the temporal distance and perspective that academics usually prefer!) while still cultivating the institutional support necessary to weather inevitable challenges.

And, most importantly, you need to have fun while doing it.

As an African American deeply impacted by the personal and communal trauma from the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and alleged “racial reckoning” that took place globally immediately thereafter, I have personally wrestled with the responses of many non-Black persons to these events.

Though the responses came from well-intentioned friends and colleagues trying to be helpful and conciliatory, they resonated as an empty refrain: “I don’t know what it means to be Black, but….” Each time I heard this refrain, I found myself pondering more deeply what and how these folks, and all folks, understand and practice empathy. My experiences and research revealed a similar concern that I witness across many situations in which people think they are being helpful when in fact they are not doing what real empathy requires – being with the person rather than trying to imagine what the person is going through.

This article challenges the faulty ways that people have been taught to think about and practice empathy in hopes of offering a model that might facilitate in more meaningful ways ties that bind human hearts and minds.

Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities.

Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities.

Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

We present two examples of how the environmental humanities have built bridges with governments and made effective policy interventions. Lessons can be drawn about how public humanities can help develop social and cultural understanding and societal resilience.

A decade ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published The Heart of the Matter report to much acclaim. But what has been the impact of such a high-minded report?

In the decade since its publication, we have seen a prevailing anti-humanities rhetoric with significant consequences to the security and persistence of humanistic principles. This article focuses on what many consider to be the most crucial problem of our time, climate change and its consequences, in thinking about how this overwhelming problem offers a rallying point for the insertion of the humanities into practical solutions which require an upending of discrete disciplinary perspectives as well as a bridging of the academic and public divide so that any space between the practice of the humanities and advocacy for social and environmental justice is vastly diminished. It argues for a thorough review of academic reward systems, for a broadening of scholarly definitions, and for a pedagogical focus that demands theory commit to empirical application.

Finally, it suggests that we reengage our storytelling prowess with an emphasis on the power of metaphor in order to bolster imaginative response and methodological flexibility that is both cogent and compelling.

This essay brings Black Studies, now commonly referred to as Africana Studies, further into the public humanities dialogue. Scholars in the public humanities field are urging a practice of humanities that is collaborative and committed to racial and social justice, especially in the context of community-based scholarship.

The origin and current protocols of Black Studies are also community-centric and operate within a liberatory framework in that it is ultimately concerned with the vitality of Black people across the diaspora. The essay describes the correlation between Black Studies and public humanities and discusses the usefulness of both disciplines in reckoning with slavery and its legacies at higher education institutions.

In addition to giving a short genealogy of public humanities and Black Studies, the essay uses William & Mary’s Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project at Washington College as examples on how to possibly navigate the challenges ahead as public humanists and Black Studies scholars critically engage with the public on memorialization, reconciliation, and redress.

Researchers need to reach a new academic normal in which virtually every piece of scholar-facing humanities work generates a public-facing writing component. This essay recounts interactions with a colleague who, in a curriculum meeting, described public humanities as “a hobby.” I suggest arguments and strategies to lead skeptical colleagues to re-envision the value and possibilities – and occasional dangers and pitfalls – of the public humanities.

Public writing is a practice that academic humanists should regularly engage in and a mode we must be willing to teach in order to win back public trust in higher education and to reinvigorate humanities research at a time of precarity.