Courses

This course initiates students in the practices, research methods, and intellectual strategies in the interdisciplinary and multimedia field of the Public Humanities, which promotes civically engaged and public-facing modes of pedagogy and scholarly production. Today, humanists are called to operate in an expanded media field, to engage with publics well beyond academia, and to better think through the conditions of [environmental, racial, ableist, linguistic, legal, gender] inequality that concern them. Critical new arts and humanities scholarship and teaching now develops in close collaboration with communities and institutions that exist outside of academic silos and literary media, beyond campus and the canon. All the while, community organizers, activists, and policy makers the world over have long mobilized art, spatial, and literary practices as modes of community building and—at their best—as crucial to processes of emancipation. Yet disciplinary-bound methods of research and teaching prove limited for the art historian drawn to shape a public voice through aural media, the philosopher who aims at teaching incarcerated students through performance, and the literary scholar whose work engages climate justice and exhibitions spaces—to sketch but a few of the experimental and expanded modes of public scholarship that students from across the humanities are increasingly imagining.

Building Publics introduces such students to one another and to the central approaches of this rapidly developing field, and will ask that they apply them to the design of their own public project. Situated at the intersection of humanistic and social work and open to all students from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the course will integrate the study of projects and concepts informing the public humanities with training in methods of digital scholarship and civic field-work. Readings and discussion sessions will provide students basic familiarity with socially engaged humanistic practices developed chiefly through art, architecture, and literature and expose them to underlying theories on praxis, intersectionality, coloniality, digital scholarship and oral history. In the process, we will discuss the complex logistics of community building and social action, consider the possibilities and limitations of the engaged humanist, and develop methods for research on and engagement with non-academic publics and organizations. The course is aimed at students who look to develop civically engaged scholarship, to expand their career prospects, and to explore genres other than the research paper and the traditional curatorial setting such as podcasts, mapping, and zine-writing, among others. The course offers introductory training workshops in such expanded media, what will assist students in conceptualizing and developing their own public humanities project. This will pertain New York sites and community partners and can take any form—from a storytelling digital platform to a community reading workshop series—to name two of the many intermedia and cooperative approaches to humanistic work we will explore.