The “Public” of Public Humanities

Effective public humanities scholarship requires a theoretically grounded articulation of who the “publics” addressed by a project are, while also allowing scholars to theorize the very nature of “publics” themselves. As Looser proposes in her essay for this section, public humanities imply an orientation beyond scholarly communication and toward public-facing work. She makes the case that this work demands a broader understanding of whom archival research is for, arguing that its results and outputs are just as important for an enlarged audience to learn about as they are for scholarly ones. But public humanities necessarily make a critical intervention in the ways that “publics” are conceptualized. Engaging with concepts of “public” theorized by Michael Warner and Mizuko Ito, Elizabeth Coggeshall's essay makes the case for the multiple publics of public humanities, asking the critical question of who the publics called into being by public humanities projects are. She theorizes three modes of engaging with these publics—translational, engaged, and participatory—each defined by a unique methodology, and examines how they are manifested in case studies from public humanities projects in the field of Dante studies.

Brizee likewise theorizes the nature of the “public,” linking the very mission of public humanities to the Greek philosopher Isocrates's assertion that phrónēsis, or practical wisdom, and artē, or excellence in public life, are achieved through a blend of theory and praxis. Intellectual development, therefore, can be fully realized only by looking beyond the boundaries of academic scholarship and making space for the work that it does in the world. Closing the perceived gap between university and community also entails recognizing that we as scholars are ourselves simultaneously part of various publics, not removed from them. We, like community partners and others who create public humanities scholarship, are in fact part of many publics and even counterpublics, in Warner's figuration (112–14). This is why Eric Touya de Marenne, in his essay, emphasizes the importance of helping students prepare for humanities-informed participation in careers in social sciences and STEM. Given these considerations, the public of public humanities is best understood in multiplicity, determined by interactions with audiences beyond the academy and, crucially, by the ways in which they are addressed by the public humanities scholarship itself—as consumers, as cocreators, and as participants who shape interpretation and meaning.

Partnership as Public Humanities

From a methodological standpoint, there is no public humanities without partnership. The translational approach to publics that both Looser and Coggeshall describe, while unidirectional, nonetheless requires collaboration. Publishing an op-ed or an article involves engaging with the publication venue's editors and copyeditors, who help shape the piece to most effectively communicate with the audience. Sharing archival research through an analog exhibit may require working with librarians, archivists, curators, and graphic designers, among others, while a digital exhibit could require the addition of developers or technologists to the team as well. Beavers's essay in this section describes his long-running public humanities seminar in West Philadelphia, which tackles issues like gentrification and climate through the work of the playwright August Wilson and is made possible only through collaboration with community organizations. The efforts by Brizee to tell stories about neighborhoods surrounding the universities where he has worked likewise require community consent and involvement. The engaged stance that Coggeshall, Beavers, and Brizee elaborate requires active collaboration on research design, implementation, and dissemination with community partners. The participatory opportunities for partnership that Coggeshall advocates create space for more flexible forms of collaboration that emerge through online participation with networked publics, such as crowdsourcing, transcribing, curating, and interpretation. In every case, public humanities scholarship depends on those connections and interactions.

Partnerships are critical to realizing the intellectual endeavor of public humanities, bringing together (in various permutations) research universities, community colleges, state humanities councils, cultural institutions, K–12 schools, and community activists. Public humanities scholars cannot meet the diverse notion of “public(s)” that we have articulated by simply immersing ourselves in collaborations with other academics or within scholarly communities. The roundtable in this section that Brian moderated with Phoebe Stein, Eric Lupfer, Ashley Beard-Fosnow, Maryse Jayasuriya, and Brandon Johnson highlights the role of state humanities councils in providing a context and model for wide-ranging civic partnerships. Lupfer reflects, for example, on the necessity of such collaborations for the public humanities efforts of Humanities Texas in the wake of the Uvalde massacre, which brought together professors, teachers, archivists, and librarians to respond to public trauma and community loss. In the same vein, Brian Kirby, Vincent C. Martinez, Margaret Nelson-Rodriguez, and Brian Yothers have recently explored the potential of partnerships among community colleges, research universities, and civic and cultural organizations to promote public engagement with the humanities in the United States–Mexico borderlands (Kirby et al.). Partnership is inextricable from the methods for public humanities in general, but especially public humanities efforts that respond to concrete problems facing communities and incorporate scholars with relevant knowledge into this response, while simultaneously drawing from community expertise.

The Ethics of Public Humanities

As we, along with the other members of the ad hoc committee behind the MLA's guidelines, have argued, public humanities require an ethical stance that opposes the extractive ways universities too often engage with publics—swooping in to gather stories and data that then become the basis of a scholar's claim to fame or a university's claim to serve surrounding communities. Instead, public humanities require changing the methods of research, shifting away from a lone scholar who maintains sole control over the direction of a project to a more collective mindset. Beavers makes the case that public humanities must recognize that communities are sites of knowledge production and must value the lived experiences of people who reside there. He calls attention to the fact that such a commitment to the community may change the ways in which research fulfills its ethical obligations to the community. This necessarily influences the methods of a project—how it's designed and undertaken as well as how it's shared. Employing collaborative methods helps reorient the work of university-community engagement away from the extractive and toward the redistributive, beginning with the question of what communities need (if anything), recognizing their capacity to solve their own problems, and building meaningful, lasting relationships like the ones Beavers outlines. Likewise, as the roundtable Roopika organized with the early career practitioners Cassandra Tanks, Tieanna Graphenreed, Taylor Seaver, and Laurel Grimes demonstrates, the ethics of community care and accountability often run counter to prevailing theories and methodologies, requiring a reimagination of how humanities research might be carried out in collaboration with multiple publics.

The ethics of public humanities have theoretical implications as well. As Américo Mendoza-Mori's essay demonstrates, a well-theorized approach to public humanities, like his invocation of ayni as a theoretical core for Indigenous language recovery, is necessary to realize community goals for linguistic justice. In his essay, Brizee further demonstrates that the practices of public humanities are ripe for theorizing. Offering a framework for participatory, iterative, empirical, and resilient methods of public humanities, Brizee speaks to the harms engendered by failing to embrace a collaborative ethos for public humanities. At their heart, the ethics of public humanities are concerned both with justice for the communities they serve and with acknowledgment of the multiple forms that intellectual labor in humanities fields can take.

The Languages of Public Humanities

Public humanities cannot achieve their promise if the public that they address is presumptively English-speaking. Languages, especially Indigenous languages or national languages that are less frequently taught, have a critical role to play in engaging multiple publics, particularly those that have been historically underrepresented in the academy. In this vein, Mendoza-Mori stresses the value of public humanities for supporting endangered languages. Translation, interpretation, and a robust approach to language instruction are critical components of any truly public praxis in the humanities. The roundtable that Maria Francisco-Montesó at South Carolina Centro Latino hosted with fellow translators and interpreters Lamia Benyoussef, Awa Diagne Lo, Stacy Mosher, and N. Imani Robinson speaks to this essential question of how translation and interpreting, which occur in many industries, are public humanities practices. Within language communities, including English-speaking communities, there is a further need for the translation of complex concepts and research into prose that addresses nonacademic audiences and speaks to the significance of the work that we as public humanities scholars do for our wider communities. Such translation opens up dialogue with the intellectual contributions of journalists, theorists, and writers whose ideas and creativity influence and shape their societies, even when under threat of censorship. As Looser's essay suggests, we must resist the idea that communicating to multiple audiences is “dumbing down” ideas and recognize, instead, that we—and public audiences—are collectively enriched by the ability to share our ideas more broadly and to have them understood.

Attention to language pierces through silos, liberates intellectual labor from academic constraints, invites the rich contributions of Indigenous and creole philosophies and practices, and breaks down walls between the university and its neighboring communities. This is as true for the participants in the roundtable on translation and interpreting as for those in the early career public humanists panel. Benyoussef, for example, speaks to how she came to the translation of Arabic writing as a way to highlight the gap between the agency that Arab women demonstrate in their writing and the limited agency they are accorded in the United States—for these women, an intervention in language is a mediation of cultural dislocation. Similarly, Grimes discusses the way her language, Chikashshanompa' (the Chickasaw language), contains ontologies and epistemologies that offer a different worldview than that of English. Through a multilingual engagement with the public, from town squares to digital platforms, public humanists cocreate knowledge that may resonate more authentically and democratically for today's increasingly fast-paced and transforming world.

The Pedagogy of Public Humanities

For many public humanities practitioners who work in universities, public humanities are deeply tied to pedagogy. We have, ourselves, incorporated public humanities into our classrooms, giving students the opportunity to engage with community partners, which as Brizee notes in his essay is a high-impact practice. In the broader context of declining humanities enrollments, when students decide what to study, they are making decisions about what they value. They make these decisions in the context of public perceptions of the humanities from family, friends, teachers, career advisers, the media, and politicians. But public humanities ask them to consider a different set of priorities that puts the community and the common good first, while offering them an opportunity to reflect critically on their own positioning within society.

Pedagogy also offers a path toward enacting the insights of theory. In his essay, Touya de Marenne considers how we as scholars might bring humanistic approaches to economics and other social sciences as a way of preparing students to engage in civic life—by centering the very human elements of race, class, gender, and nationality that will affect the work they do in the world. For him this means thinking through how to negotiate Henry Giroux's theoretical critiques of neoliberal higher education and the purpose of the university by using postcolonial and feminist theory to inculcate a broader sense of civic-mindedness in students in the social sciences and STEM fields. Touya de Marenne's work demonstrates how the lenses that are integral to humanistic inquiry can intervene in other disciplinary contexts to prepare students for futures as public agents of the humanities. If one of the justifications for higher education in general and the study of the humanities in particular is the need for an informed citizenry, then offering students the opportunity to engage with crucial questions that affect their communities through their study of theory and literature is essential to public humanities methods.

The current state of affairs in the United States and other countries around the world that are turning toward authoritarianism and away from critical public engagement makes understanding and creating new theories and methodologies of public humanities all the more urgent. We see this section of PMLA, along with the other recent publications in the field, as necessary contributions to situating public humanities work within a scholarly milieu, even as the work itself engages with multiple publics. We hope that our section will contribute to current efforts to theorize public humanities—to assist other practitioners by outlining theoretical, methodological, and, in many cases, multilingual conversations that they can intervene in and draw from. Practically, we also hope that this intervention in theories and methodologies helps public humanities practitioners within universities make the case that their work should be valued as scholarship in evaluation, reappointment, tenure, and promotion processes. Above all, we firmly believe that the humanities fulfill their most crucial existential function when responding to the needs of the publics in which they are enmeshed, and when they elicit engagement, participation, and a response in return, promoting civic and community engagement especially in times of increasingly polarized public discourse, heightened threats to democracy, and continuing vulnerability of minoritized communities.