Public Humanities Institute

This week, I've been a member of the Public Humanities Institute, an intensive seminar hosted by the Arts of Citizenship initiative. The goal was to provide professional development for graduate students in the Humanities with an interest in public engagement. To be honest, I was a little worried that it would be a couple days of talking about our feelings, feeling things together, and then disbanding into the mist. Fortunately, I found the experience intensely stimulating, and I found myself asking questions of myself that I had neglected for a long time.

I was one of ten graduate students, mostly doctoral students, with an MFA and a MSI student thrown in the mix. The schedule for our week was quite varied. A sampling: we read academic articles about community-oriented scholarship (like getting a class involved in a theater project in Detroit), visited public arts sites in Flint, interacted with panels of current academics whose work engages the public, saw the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, and toured urban farming sites in Detroit. Today, the mayor of Hamtramck, a city within Detroit beset recently by financial problems, came to visit us today; she brought three scenarios of current conflict in her community, and we brainstormed processes and ideas to work towards a solution.

Dome in lobby of Arab American National Museum

 Detroit's famed Eastern Market (farmer's market)

 Corned Beef Specialist? Yes, please!

 The Heidelberg Project

 Cesar Chavez mural in Mexicantown

My research usually consists of typing alone in a room with books, so it was really eye-opening for me to learn about scholars whose academic work involves interacting with living people. The diversity of projects that fall under the heading of "public scholarship" is impressive, and it's exciting to think that I could be a part of the group that helps shape its form in the future. But I still feel uncertain about how I, as a scholar of classical Greek mythology and literature, can use my skill sets and expertise to engage with community partners far outside the bounds of the traditional university. For example, we met with a theater professor who, in response to the proliferation of arson in Flint, collected eyewitness oral histories from around the city with his students, and turned those words into a play performed throughout the community. Pretty cool, right? But how on earth can I do something like that?

And so there was something distinctly discouraging about the seminar. Most of the examples we saw were visual art or performance-oriented, which Classics/literature do not easily translate into (unless I restrict myself to tragedy, which I wouldn't necessarily mind). My scholarly work is based on the reading of Latin and Greek, an obvious obstacle to sharing with others. More importantly, I still do not see a path in which a community-based project based around, say, reading an abridged version of the Ajax with a volunteer group at the Depression Center would be taken seriously by my peers as scholarship, much less count towards, e.g., tenure requirements. In fact, it may count against me, by openly busying myself with "distractions" from my "real" work instead of developing and publishing (for a tiny audience) new interpretations of Greek literature. There are dangers to being on the cutting edge.

I'm not sure where to go from here. After meeting these amazing people who manage to align their social goals with their career, I feel guilty for thinking, "not now, maybe next term, when my dissertation is done and my job applications are in." I'm also still working out for myself what publicly-engaged scholarship in my specific field looks like. Is it reading the Iliad and analyzing Achilles with youths in juvenile detention? Is it going into local public schools and talking about graduate school? Reading the Heroides at a women's shelter? Okay...scrap that last idea. There are a lot of ways to go wrong here, and one of the things that I loved about the Public Humanities Institute is that everyone was very open about the ways in which scholars can fail. Sometimes the projects never get off the ground, or the community is incredibly offended by students' attitudes towards them, or the partnership isn't sustainable and it all just melts away, leaving distrust and suspicion behind.

But I hope to carry the struggle with me. We participated in several corny self-examination exercises, and though I usually loathe that sort of thing, I found these incredibly effective. One thing that came out, on the first day, was that I had forgotten my own story. Remember when I went to Uganda for 3 months and came back and planned a career in sustainable development? Maybe in public health or public policy? Because I thought I should use my brains and education to enact concrete good for people in the world? Remember when I worked to eliminate the achievement gap in American public schools? Remember when I said that going to graduate school wouldn't necessarily change me, but that I could find a way to satisfy both my love of Classics and desire to help people? Do you remember? Because I apparently forgot! Thanks, graduate school. The rest of the week has therefore been a deeply emotional experience for me, a kind of professional (and let's face it, personal) identity crisis. We'll see how things shake out in the next few weeks – I fully expect to immerse myself in the same work I'd been doing on Monday and continue to press forward towards finishing the diss and securing employment. But maybe a dormant seed is being nurtured again, and you'll start hearing about entirely different sorts of projects for me! If you have any ideas or suggestions, I'm certainly all ears.