Note: the below assignments are rough-cuts of the tasks asked of students in ENGL 693B: Public Literary Humanities.  Comments for improvement are strongly suggested.

Public Re-Meditations

Part of the work of doing public humanities is finding ways to translate the work of academic scholarship to various audiences and genres.  Each of the assignments below is an occasion to re-imagine the rhetorical scenario of scholarly work for different iterations of “the public.”

Eight total assignments (including the proposal), earn 1 point each for timely submission, with 2 additional points for timely submission of all of them (10 points total).

Of the seven actual re-mediations, you’ll submit polished versions of five of them for the final portfolio (30 points).  These will be graded as a body of work rather than as an average of 6 individual assignments.

Those assignments are:

9/4: Propose your Corpus—In a page or so, write a proposal for the body of knowledge that you’ll be writing about for most of the semester.  The requirement is that it must be something that you have academic insight about, and that you can sustain an ongoing interest in for the duration of the semester.  This might be a proto-dissertation topic, a transformation of a past academic project, a side interest, an artistic influence, etc.  Your proposal should: articulate what the “general public” perception of the topic seems to be, what informational knowledge you have to convey, what theoretical/interpretive take you bring to the subject, how the subject might be exigent for a non-academic public, and what excites you about bridging that gap.  This assignment does earn its point for completion, but it cannot be included in the final portfolio.

9/11: Op-Ed—Using the range of models available, write a 500-750 word op-ed that suggests a way that your corpus (or some element of that corpus) illuminates our contemporary moment.  In a brief prefatory paragraph, identify the venue and briefly analyze your audience for their defining features, likely advance knowledge they may have on the topic, and pre-existing attitudes that they may have about your subject.  Then: headline and 500-750 words.

9/25:   Event/Flash Talk Proposal—Events are public performances of humanities knowledge.  They may happen on the scale of the local event or a highly curated online venue.  Propose an event that brings your body of knowledge to a wider audience.  TEDxWVU? A Campus Read event?  A WV Humanities Council “Little Lecture”?  Write your proposal in the form of a 1000-word (max) grant proposal that: summarizes your proposed event, defines the intellectual content of the event, identifies the audience, (including the way that your venue/platform is accessible to them) and a brief sense of how this event will enrich that audience on their terms.

10/2: Book Review Essay—for your assigned book (or a book connected to your corpus directed at a similar market-segment, approved in advance)…write a book review (1000-1500 words) that briefly summarizes, assesses, and puts into exigent context the book in question.  Good book reviews achieve this task thoroughly, helping readers to understand the book’s value to them whether or not they agree with the reviewer.  Great book reviews also subtly advance an argument about the subject (often a meta-discursive one) without getting in the way of the review of the book itself.

10/16: Digital Project Proposal—Again in the form of a grant narrative, propose a digital project that makes your corpus accessible and usable in an innovative way and/or to an audience whom might otherwise never have been able to access it meaningfully.  In your proposal, describe the way that the digital interface presents information, what digital tools (to the best of your limited knowledge) might be useful in creating this interface, and how this interface preserves, presents, or allows for interaction with your body of knowledge.  Consider in this case that a digital project proposal might include information including but extending beyond the corpus you’ve already been working on.

10/30:  Letter to a Legislator—Keep it short, sweet, and simple.  Write a persuasive letter to a local, state, or national legislator that marshals a key piece of  literary-humanistic information that illuminates a matter of urgent contemporary political concern.  500 words is likely too many.  In a brief prefatory paragraph, identify the legislator, their relevant educational background, their likely pre-existing views on your subject, and your rhetorical goal (PACT, baby!).  Consider sending this letter.

11/6: Podcast—Using the tools discussed in class, create a 10+ minute podcast that opens up your corpus to a new audience.  If the technology really escapes you, write a 5+ page double-spaced script, exactly as conversational as you’d want your podcast to be.  Avoid monologues. Consider also collaborative podcasts, in which you collaborate with a classmate or two (or dear friend to whom you will forever owe a favor)…still, ten minutes per podcaster, max three podcasters.  Unlike some other genres, bonus points (not real) for scruffy humor and can-do amateurism.  Like other genres, the point is to make deep humanities inquiry accessible for a different audience.

11/27: Open Re-mediation—By now, you will perhaps have devised other genres and media by which to communicate your corpus to new audiences.  A children’s book?  An episode of Drunk History? A script for a biopic?  A public re-enactment? A completely different take on a genre already explored? Pick the genre, audience, and length that you believe is most appropriate to propose (or draft) such a re-mediation.

12/11: Portfolio due (with Final paper)—include a brief (500-1000 word) prefatory memo that frames the five (revised, polished) pieces you’ve chosen to submit and your rationale for doing so.  Describe the strategies you’ve taken in these five pieces and trends in your efforts to bridge the academic-public gap that may correlate with your own interests or perhaps something intrinsic to your corpus.  Be prepared to present a single outstanding piece to the rest of the class.  Possibly be prepared also for it to be shared in some more public way to be brainstormed by our class at a later time.

The last formal activities have ended from the 2018 Mellon School for Theatre and Performance Research.  I haven’t blogged in this space for quite a bit, but I did post to the school’s blog a few days ago, and also had the time to conduct a blogged interview with WVU Press Editor Derek Krissoff.

Quick overview: the School was a two-week series of seminars, writing workshops, and public lectures from luminaries in the field. The theme of the school was “Public Humanities.”  Accordingly, I had a lot of ways in to this academy. The writing workshop, run by the inimitable Andrew Sofer, gave me a chance to dust off a scholarly project that has been simmering for years.  Beyond that, the discussions throughout gave me a thousand ideas for programming and activities for the WVU Humanities Center.  Many of those came from the seminar I participated in, run by Martin Puchner, whose esteem in the field seems outstripped only by his erudition.  Those sessions gave me loads of productive material to begin earnest planning for my Fall graduate course in Public Humanities.

While readers can stay tuned for developments in each of those projects, I’m taking a few moments to reflect (publicly) on the experience itself, qua experience.

• We do not often enough have opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange across sub-fields. While I love conferences for the focus and intensity of an individual panel and working group, they often are too brief to get very deep, and we tend more and more to sort into tinier and tinier coteries.  And while the academic department  as a unit should provide such  model as this, well…familiarity and paperwork alike breed contempt.
• I was thrilled at the diversity of participants—international participants from (in some way or other) South Korea, China, Russia, India, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, Germany, England, France, and Colombia. And folks around the US from a range of critical fields, ethnic backgrounds, institutional contexts, and geographical regions.  I learned about a wide range of scholarly projects.  More to the point, I learned how these worldviews shape those projects.  That was exciting new territory for me  And if the future of our field is represented by these younger scholars, our field is in good shape indeed.
• Having spent the previous six summers curating and stage-managing experiences like this one, but for younger students via the WV Governor’s Honors Academy and Governor’s School for Math and Science, I should not have been surprised at the intensity and richness of the emotional landscape of this experience. I even went so far as to imagine I might be immune to that richness. But sure enough, I experienced it just this way, with all the warmth and light one hopes for in a tiny utopian gathering of like-minded folks.

A final story from #MellonSchool2018: During our glorious, generous, final gathering, we shared our impressions and gratitudes about the week.  Not long into this collective love fest, one of participants recalled the moment he found he had been accepted into the school.  Of course, he googled us all, cowed by the things he had found.  “I was so intimidated when I learned about Ryan, I thought, how am I coming here?”  laughter burbled up from the group—he had been a robust participant, and I certainly didn’t bear my claws.  This became a running joke through the rest of the session, how frightening I was.  It’s funy because it’s not true, but it’s funny because it’s true.  I think I’ve shown myself this week to be very not scary, but my new friend’s reaction, it turns out wasn’t an uncommon experience.  Most participants were graduate students or early career faculty—the target audience.  The presence of a fully-promoted professor as a participant (who was a classmate, and not faculty) seemed to set a high bar that initiated some impostor syndrome.

While to my mind #ScaryRyan might be the silliest of all possible hashtags, I am coming to understand that for some, it was a little too real.  Perhaps it goes without saying that my own anxieties were very present in the run-up to the program.  I was worried that being a senior scholar with little publishing or writing or even grad teaching in the past six years meant I’m an old dog with outdated tricks.  These brilliant, beautiful young minds were just as prone to rip me to shreds as to learn from my experiences.   But learning that I felt intimidating to international scholars, women, and people of color made me realize something important. Even by following the standard pathway of academia—an institution built to support ableist, middle-class, straight white male norms—I implicitly do some small (or not-so-small) violence on those who experience difference simply when I show up on the guest list.

In these weeks, I tried to ask questions about how to more gently and generously navigate these spaces of contact, to listen to the answers I was gifted and to hear the honest advocacy from which others spoke and asked their own questions.  I also tried in some ways to advocate for certain kinds of attention to the vulnerable places that my own presence represented in this conversation—for Appalachian publics, for theatre in rural places, for environmental justice—even though that has not been my work, per se.

I sensed a spirit of generosity, gratitude, and joy in this afternoon’s gathering.  I suspect that whatever trepidations people had the person I might have turned out to be, that I did not remain in any particular way intimidating; nonetheless it was a learning experience to recognize that for some, merely the path I have navigated thus far might pose a risk for them.  At that’s important to know—that the power of those with privilege is not just a shield against violence or discrimination, it’s a sharpened dagger with which we move through the world, and we need to be careful where we’re pointing that thing. And as often as possible, put both the shield and dagger down, and be vulnerable to the world.

***

Of course I miss Ann and the kids palpably, and I’m ready to go home.  But I already miss the presence of the friendships and frientorships I’ve formed this week.  No doubt they will be present in my scholarly life well into the future, whatever shape that may take. I’m grateful in great and small ways for every interaction I’ve been privileged to have.

I moved into the dorms with a bunch of adults two weeks ago.  It was a scene right out of The Real World. Moving out tonight felt, well, a bit unreal.  There was a kind of regression to young adulthood in these two weeks, and I tried as hard as I could to be as open to this experience and the people I’ve met as I was in those first years of college all those years ago.  And it was extraordinary.

Below are my (very subjective) notes on the “Becoming a Public Humanist” panel, held February 15, 2018, at the WVU College of Law, hosted by the WVU Humanities Center.

Panelists were Dr. Janet Snyder (Art History), Dr. Kirk Hazen (English, Linguistics), and Dr. Melissa Bingmann (Public History), and the panel was moderated by Prof. Atiba Ellis (Law).

Janet Snyder from Art History was the first presenter, and she set the stage by posing some big-picture (no pun intended) questions for the remainder of the panel

• Who is the public for the Artist?
• Who is the public for the Art Historian? Students, people who express particular interest, more broadly those who come to the art museum.

Professor Snyder espoused a baseline practice of “looking closely together”:

• –Looking closely allows you to ask questions: This struck me as an important way of translating what we do in the classroom to other interactions–that in many ways, we need to be teaching broader publics (not just our students) how to ask questions, not just of us, but of the objects, texts, discourses, and scenarios they encounter.
• –Looking closely is a tool to understanding the real thing.
• –Travel as a crucial component: I noted this particularly out of a personal interest…how does travel and tourism (both scholars’ travel to archives, etc. as well as our mobility to meet public audiences where they are) condition our work? What are the ethical and environmental implications of those kinds of travel?
• I also noted that Professor Snyder’s slides were not images of art itself, but of students/ colleagues looking closely at art.  The act of looking (or more broadly, inquiring) becomes crucial.

Professor Snyder proposed “global positioning studies”  to ask, persistently, “What kind of art should artists be making here and now?”

Professor Melissa Bingmann presented attendees with more pragmatic ideas borne of working directly with local public history organizations.

• Like Prof. Snyder, she began with: How do you define public? For her, that work happened in two key ways:
  • Museums—Museum professionals do not always have the smoothest of relationships with academic for some justified reasons, which may in turn lead to tension between academic and public history sites.
  • Working with institutions
    • Institutions often want labor/organizational expertise as much as expertise.
    • Institutions are valuable for public humanities based on relationships built over time. (e.g. Interns, associations, advocacy orgs)
    • One key, connected from Prof. Snyder’s talk was the idea of learning together: scholars and institutions and–by extension–publics collectively developing public knowledge.
  • It’s important to ask questions about what publics/organizations really want.
    • Is a new institution viable?
    • Assess: are oral histories (or any rpre-defined project) the best pathway?
    • Is the idea the institution has going to give them the result they want?
  • Public memory is a huge component of how public history works–we might all do well to think a bit more broadly about how public memory functions for our fields.
  • Avoid being “the parachute scholar”!
    • Be a participant beyond the talk itself.
    • Treat others (teachers, curators, etc.) as scholar/experts in their own right.
    • Avoid critique without being asked to supply it—this can hurt relationships, even though it can be difficult to refrain from offering commentary based on expertise.

Professor Bingmann underscored that relationships are often as important the content, an acknowledgement that requires negotiating differences in standards of work, negotiating differences in priorities (e.g. raising money for preservation vs. scholarly rigor), and considering the potential value of failure.

She also urged participants to recall  the idea of writing as a public enterprise, esp. collaborating with public institutions that may or may not have that expertise on staff.

Professor Kirk Hazen began by noting that for his field of sociolinguistics, public outreach has been field-sustaining at a moment beyond when the academy alone might have sustained it.  (This raised, quietly, the spectre that socio-linguistics might provide a model for humanities surviving into the future if/as robust institutional support dries up.)

Professor Hazen described a series of tactics by way of a series of historical and current examples, beginning with:

• Noah Webster: spelling book leads to spelling bees, broad cultural impact, which connected to the historical impact of the dictionary itself.
• Appalshop (Non-profit)
  • Multimedia work, creative acts of listening and telling, etc.
  • Seriously, check out their link.  Wow.
• “SKILLS” (app)
• Language and Life project
  • Developed statewide (NC) curriculum modules
  • Produced series of documentaries

Professor Hazen then laid out a series of basic maxims that guided his interactions with the public (often k-12) beyond the university classroom

• Start with very simple goals
• Develop interactive lessons
• Engage audience actively
• Pique interest through ideas that matter to the audience
• Understand the assumptions the audience brings to the table
• In grant-writing: determine and articulate “BROADER IMPACTS”

From there, the session broke into a lively Q&A/discussion.  My notes there are a little more scattered, since I participated, too.

• With a “target public” – how do we find out what a public wants?
  • Starting with the assumption that no one’s prima facie interested in our work.
  • How do you figure out where to go?
    • Consider audiences with time to listen: retirement communities, OLLI,
      • Young folk and old folk—people who have time
    • It’s important to developing materials/ approaches before the time may appear.  That way, there’s less scrambling when opportunities do arise.
    • Social media is effective
    • Department of Ed grants
• How to negotiate differing starting points on “What the public wants ” vs. “challenging material” vs. “what they don’t yet know they want or need”?
  • Build on what people already have
  • Building trust, building relationships first
  • Work on self-interest
  • How do we follow idealistic goals in the face of public resistance?
• Dialogue about “What one should value”
  • Already a political question
  • What do we let go and what/when do we correct?
• Writing for different audiences?
  • Online resources with a wide audience (anxiety provoking)
  • Recycle things/ “re-usable assets”
  • Clarity and concision vs. density and complexity
  • Wikipedia/ other wikis/ hackathons
  • Medium.com (now behind a paywall) / blogs
  • The Conversation
• Remember that a key element with students is about encouraging discovery over mastery–how do we help publics value discovery as part of the humanities ethic?
• The Humanities Center could play a role in DIY public humanities skills (Section on website, videos, etc. that offers how-to’s)
  • Technical skills
  • Scholarly skills for everyday folks

As yet another proposed White House  budget zeroes out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and as Sharon O’Dair’s hot take (behind the paywall) in the Chronicle of Higher Education asks whether efforts at career diversity prep in Humanities PhD programs is hypocrisy (I simplify), and as our Humanities Center at WVU poses questions about how and when scholars should consider pushing their inquiry out to a broader public audience, a set of questions (re)emerges:  How pragmatic should the Humanities be?  How pragmatic must they be?

I’ll confess to being divided on the issue.

As a scholar, I trained in modern and contemporary experimental drama and performance.  I find the material extraordinarily thought-provoking, intellectually challenging in a way that produces great pleasure, politically engaged in both direct and indirect ways, and in the end, accessible to only a very small audience.  That training has led me down a path that has lent me (I flatter myself to believe) a great deal of insight into the histrionic world around me, how much our sense of ourselves is a performance, what is theatrical about “real life,” and how different ways of being-in-our-bodies teach us reciprocity and mutuality.  Those are lessons that I am sometimes able to show my students; sometimes I’m just able to show them how to use the tools that have led me to these insights.

These tools have great value, because they help me navigate the culture around me, to communicate with other humans, and to be (I flatter myself to believe) a better person.  In a late-market capitalist economy, these tools have less immediate value because they are very difficult to attain–years of study and some amount of “natural” inclination–difficult to measure, difficult to quantify, and therefore difficult to commodify.  I can take them to market only in the sense that a literary education is still (though tenuously) a signal part of American liberal higher education.  Separated out on their own, spots in the literature classroom would be very difficult to sell.  It would be hard to counter the argument that those seats were a luxury.

Of course, those of us on the inside of this field feel quite confident that the decline in a robust and complex humanistic education is connected to the fraying social fabric and deteriorating political discourse–that we might be better equipped to spot fake news, specious political argument, inhumane stances if we were better-trained interpreters of our culture present and past.  So: pragmatic indeed, but neither simply so, quantifiably so, nor commodifiably so.

And so, as American liberal higher education sets itself about the task of marketing, measuring, quantifying, and commodifying its various courses of study, those most resistant, those that themselves don’t sell like widgets in the marketplace of majors (which is different than the marketplace of ideas) are being called upon to be pragmatic.  This seems to be taking several forms (as my opening suggests): a certain kind of blunting of the political edges of our scholarly conclusions, a mandate to change the training to meet labor-market demands, and a call to make our work more accessible and (one presumes) more palatable to a wider swath to the public.

So while my training as a scholar resists these impulses (radical feminist autobiographical performance art is political, esoteric, and lacking in transferable skills), my training as a teacher of writing and rhetoric kicks in.  This other training asks me to know my audiences, and analyze how to appeal to them in different contexts.  It tells me that I have been taught in my primary training to address a very specific audience, thereby meeting very rigorous standards but with very limited efficacy.  It tells me that I might concede that there is luxury in the critical unpacking of a novel, but only as a bridge to declaring my desire to make it a much more accessible luxury, simply by bringing more people to the college classroom, or that it might someday be seen as a civic necessity.

This is, I think, the pragmatic turn that we witnessed at the NEH during the tenure of William “Bro” Adams.  His advocacy of public humanities, under the banner “The Common Good: Humanities in the Public Square” seemed then to be, at its heart, a rhetorical move as much as a scholarly one.  Does Bro Adams believe that public humanities makes for more valuable insights?  Maybe. Was the program a gambit to help shore up the perceived  value of our insights?  Almost certainly.  Did the NEH fund projects under this banner that were able to thread the needle of rigor and accessibility?  Check them out.  They look great, if limited in scope–which is to say, only some kinds of projects fit.  Postings about new projects also seem to have ceased sometime around Adams’s resignation as NEH Chair (though his essay, “Valuing the Humanities,” to accompany the recent AAAS study on employment outcomes for humanities majors, reveals his continued commitment to this pragmatic turn).

And so I am torn.  In my classrooms (especially at the general education level) I insist that students can disagree on political terms without fear of being shot down on those terms (though I will persistently defend the logic that I’ve used to occupy my own position, which I make clear). This past fall, I wrote a grant application to build different kinds of professional training in alongside the training that we offer PhD students as scholars and teachers, so they might also learn to do advising and program coordination and public-facing jobs.  And we are organizing activities in the Humanities Center to help our colleagues facilitate a conversation about presenting our fascinating paths of inquiry to both a rigorous audience of our peers AND also to broader audiences beyond the academy.

In each of those cases, I see the danger: backing off of the political implications of real wisdom I see through my inquiry of texts and performances; potentially diluting of, if not the quality, then the perceived value of a focused training in academic humanities; dialing back on a critical conversation that is able to achieve its levels of intense concentration precisely because we are not breaking our address to each other to see who else might be listening.

For the moment, my approach, and my vision for the WVU Humanities Center is to continue to celebrate and amplify the work done by specialists and for specialists for the wisdom and insight that work provides, but to create incentivize that encourage scholars to present their work more pragmatically and publicly.  Though perhaps no less politically.  That’s where I think my invitations to pragmatism reach their limits.

The WVU Humanities Center has just released its first RFP for internal grants each of which supports insightful humanistic inquiry that seeks to interpret human thought, culture, and history while emphasizing interdisciplinary,  and/or collaborative, and/or publicly accessible and or innovatively presented scholarly and teaching projects.  At some level, these grants are wide open for all manner of projects.  And at another level, they are trying to thread the needle: rigorous scholarship that nonetheless might make the pragmatic turn.  We’ll see what happens.