Introduction: American Studies as Engaged Scholarship: Doing Public Humanities from the Local to the Transnational
Regina Schober (Mannheim), Alexander Starre (FU Berlin)
Sustained engagement with the wider public has been a long-stated goal of the modern university. Most institutions in American higher education actively foster community outreach, encouraging both students and faculty to become involved in local schools, cultural societies, arts initiatives, and other community organizations. Recent years have seen the swift ascendance of new humanities-related approaches to this interface between scholarship and the public. Often crucially inspired by the work of American Studies scholars and activists and closely tied to innovative trends in research communication developed in the Digital Humanities, these approaches seek to challenge traditional, hierarchical relationships so as to spark dialogic partnerships and collaborative knowledge creation. Much of this work builds on the foundations laid by pioneer programs in public history as well as on frameworks of public outreach initiated and sustained by the American state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The “New Public Humanists”, however, as Julie Ellison calls them, arose more recently, so that “the public humanities” in the sense we use it here would come to recognize itself as a field only by the 1990s. At that point, the label had already been used at cross-purposes for a couple of decades: “In essence,” Robyn Schroeder writes, “the idea of ‘the public humanities’ had first been leveraged against academic humanists, in an effort to induce them to engage broader publics–and then by academic humanists, in order to build space for alternative methods of engagement against reigning paradigms of humanistic inquiry.” As the Public Humanities started to become institutionalized after 2000—first at Brown and Yale, then in various shapes and locations at other U.S. universities—these directional tensions running from the inside out and from the outside in wove themselves into the fabric of individual projects great and small. For scholars used to the essay and the monograph as the only valid currency of academic life, the types of work produced here can be dizzying: from exhibits, to guided tours, from digital archives, photo books, public art installations and documentary film to creative writing, literacy education, and hack-a-thons.
From our perspective, what marks this present moment in the relationship of American Studies and the humanities in general with the wider public is the shifting paradigm of what it means to truly “engage” with the public. In their report on this emergent ideal, Ellison and Eatman define publicly engaged scholarship as “scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area” that encompasses “different forms of making knowledge ‘about, for, and with’ diverse publics and communities.” This definition first strikes us for what it is not: it’s not a vindication of the modern scholar as an “expert” referenced in public forums—ideally the quality publications of the middle class—to lend his or her credentials to the ideal of educating citizens. Neither does this definition directly overlap with a current buzzword in Germany – Wissenschaftskommunikation, i.e. science communication, which presumes that the results of scientific inquiry need to be broken down into forms and formats palatable to the general public. By highlighting the making of knowledge, “about, for, and with” specific communities, Ellison and Eatman encapsulate several notions that current public humanities scholars often share: the public here morphs from the object of study to a collaborating partner and from an addressee in a one-way broadcast to an interlocutor in a two-way conversation. Nevertheless, the tension that’s resolved in this phrase with a simple “and” (“about, for, and with”) often sparks debate.
In many ways, our workshop is meant to be an exploratory event. German and European American Studies is itself placed in a liminal position, as it is modeled after US-based academic practices while being situated within wholly different cultural frameworks and public arenas. So from our transatlantic outpost here in Berlin, we wish to ask: Why Public Humanities? Why now? And what does “America” have to do with it?
The Public Humanities and the Digital Humanities
A good share of public humanities work in recent years has emerged within or in close connection with the digital humanities, although the terms ‘public’ and ‘digital humanities’ are by no means mutually exchangeable. Sheila A. Brennan is right in asserting that the humanities “are not inherently ‘public’ digital humanities projects merely because they have a presence on the Web.” Still, it has been one of the shared aims of the public and the digital humanities to make academic knowledge accessible and relatable to the public. Furthermore, both fields tend to value and openly employ the resources of participatory media to explore more collaborative forms of knowledge production and exchange. Many projects that are involved in digitization and in the creation of archives (e.g. Walt Whitman archive), platforms (e.g. Humanities Commons, Omeka…), and open source tools (e.g. Zotero, Voyant Tools, StoryMap JS) have a distinctly democratic spirit. One of the first digital public humanities projects, for example, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, declares in its mission statement: “We use digital media and computer technology to democratize history: to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past.”
The democratic claim made in many digital humanities projects often echoes the cyberlibertarian rhetoric that accompanied the emergence of the World Wide Web. It is reflected in the consideration of the public as potential audience (which includes building user-friendly interfaces), the bypassing of traditional hierarchies involved in the dissemination of knowledge (for example in open access publishing), new means of mapping complex data (infographics), and interactive features that challenge concepts of exclusive ownership, while suggesting a view of knowledge as accessible, open, and processual. At the same time, most digital humanities projects require collaborative efforts and therefore, contrary to traditional view of the solitary humanities scholar, foreground the idea of community based knowledge formation also on a methodological level. Where the digital and the public humanities overlap most visibly is the field of scholarly communication. Especially in the US, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have become standard tools for reaching both an academic and a non-academic community. Alan Liu, founder of the humanities advocacy project 4Humanities, even goes so far as to ascribe the digital humanities a privileged leadership role in the current ‘crisis of the humanities’. With the rise of networked public knowledge, specialized humanities knowledge receives less and less public authority. Liu thus claims that “as digital humanists simultaneously evolve institutional identities for themselves tied to the mainstream humanities and explore new technologies, they become ideally positioned to create, adapt, and disseminate new methods for communicating between the humanities and the public” (Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”). It can be debated, of course, to what extent social media use helps to increase the visibility of humanities research, facilitate public dialog, and play a role in scholar activism, or whether it is first and foremost a tool for self-marketing and self-branding in an increasingly precarious academic work environment.
As Rita Raley has warned, the digital humanities certainly has its own “critical blind spots and assumptions“ in its tendency to be instrumentalized within a neoliberal understanding of ‚knowledge work’. Besides, Tara McPherson has called attention to a lack of diversity in the fundamental structures of the digital humanities, both on the level of its demographics and on the level of design. Yet, as Jesse Stommel argues against such tendencies, the public digital humanities is at its best when it „is built around networked learning communities, not repositories for content, and its scholarly product is a conversation, one that engages a broad public while blurring the distinction between research, teaching, service, and outreach.“
For scholars working in the field of critical infrastructure studies, the biggest public merit that the digital humanities may have is that they make visible the fundamental structures, power relations, and assumptions of the digital environments that surround us. The digital humanities, understood as critical infrastructure studies, can help us understand the constructedness of knowledge within technological systems. It can teach us about algorithms and metadata and can therefore enable us to gain agency in the digital sphere that is to a large extent controlled by the abstract power of large corporations. According to Alan Liu, the “critical potential” of the digital humanities, if understood in an antifoundationalist way, “is precisely the ability to treat infrastructure not as a foundation, a given, but instead as a tactical medium that opens the possibility of critical infrastructure studies as a mode of cultural studies” (Against the Cultural Singularity). Will Fenton has recently claimed that “it’s time that digital humanists own their role as public humanists.” This is true not only because of the public accessibility of many digital humanities projects but also to a large extent because of its critical potential to reveal the underlying structures and assumptions of knowledge and agency in an increasingly digital world.
Debates in the Public Humanities
At the heart of many public humanities debates are questions surrounding the politics of a deepened engagement with the public. Wendy Brown, in her 2011 essay “Neoliberalized Knowledge,” makes a strong case for the role the reintegration of the public in humanities research in order to resist a neoliberal rationale of economic value and profit. Rather than employing scientific or entrepreneurial criteria for the legitimization for the humanities, Brown argues, “the challenge facing humanists today is to persuade a public that our worth lies apart from science and the market and that this elsewhere is one that a democracy, a self-governing or even self-regarding people, cannot do without. This means developing a compelling account of what we do that articulates with extant public meanings, desire and anxieties without capitulating to the dominant normative valuations and schematics of them and especially without submitting to neoliberal criteria” (125).
Mission statements like Brown’s tend toward the use of pathos. A strong democratic claim of the public humanities is also present in the 2009 essay “The Future of the Humanities” by Kathleen Woodward, a veteran of several humanities centers and institutions. At the end of her essay, Woodward contends: “What is ultimately at stake in the public humanities is a form of scholarship and research, of teaching and learning, that honors commitment and concrete purpose, has a clear and present substance, reduces the distance between the university and life, and offers civic education for all involved, revealing the expansive future of the humanities – in the present and in public” (123). Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a field where critique is a prime mode of intellectual exchange, Woodward’s emphatic stance (along with that of several other programmatic statements) has seen its share of critical revaluations, most notably perhaps in an essay by Mary Mullen from 2016. Mullen, who also knows the work of public-oriented humanities centers from the inside, argues that the new embrace of the public humanities as a benign force within and beyond the university is 1) not new and 2) not benign.
Grounding her argument in a historical parallelism between contemporary modes of thought and the Victorian cultural theory of Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, Mullen finds that not only are Victorian hierarchies still present today, but the work of public humanists actively fosters and encourages these lines of inequality: “Although scholars celebrate the public humanities because they are committed to the ‘democratic impulse’ or ‘civic education’,” Mullen writes, “these programs reinforce Victorian divisions between popular and national culture, define democracy through the state and state institutions and maintain social and racial inequality” (185). This will be quite a pill to swallow to scholars and practitioners of the public humanities. However, as convincing as Mullen’s critique may be, we also have to note that Mullen transfers Mill’s and Arnold’s ideas directly to the American context without thinking through the American adaptation of their thought (the U.S. was never “Victorian” in the way that Britain was). We also wonder: is the state really the right enemy to pick at a time when it appears as an increasingly vulnerable entity in the face of corporate capital?
Aside from these thorny questions surrounding power structures and cultural authority, one of the biggest concerns within new public humanist practice lies with the notion of “the public” itself. In the theoretical literature on the public sphere from Habermas onwards, we can find an ever-growing recognition that the democratic fiction of an enlightened, deliberative public in its own right enabled a set of discriminatory exclusions that relegated many individuals to the sidelines of public debate. In turn, the formation of counterpublics as collective spaces of a struggle for recognition and emancipation has received much scholarly attention, for example in the work of Michael Warner and Catherine Squires (both of whom will deliver keynote lectures at the DGfA conference). These more fine-tuned accounts of struggles and negotiations between plural publics have generally ascribed positive values to smaller-scale oppositional communities. Yet with the eclipse of radio, network television, and printed newspapers and the rise of cable TV and social media, many scholars and cultural commentators now bemoan the existence of filter bubbles and echo chambers that isolate citizens in their in-groups and undermine the foundations of public consensus building.
Whether they appear to “the public” in general or to more specific local communities, the public humanities cannot well escape these fundamental concerns of our present cultural moment, be it in the U.S., here in Germany, or elsewhere. Among several other concerns, our panel of public humanists will therefore confront the question: what, where, and how are the publics are the publics addressed in our work?
References
Brennan, Sheila A. “Public, First.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field. Ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/83.
Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalized Knowledge.” History of the Present, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 113–29.
Ellison, Julie, and Timothy K. Eatman. Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University. Imagining America, 2008. http://imaginingamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ScholarshipinPublicKnowledge.pdf
Ellison, Julie. “Guest Column—The New Public Humanists.” PMLA, vol. 128, no. 2, Mar. 2013, pp. 289–98.
Fenton, Will. “Literary Scholars Should Use Digital Humanities to Reach the Oft-Ignored ‘Public.’” Inside Higher Ed, 29 Jan. 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/29/literary-scholars-should-use-digital-humanities-reach-oft-ignored-public-opinion.
Fenton, Will. “Literary Scholars Should Use Digital Humanities to Reach the Oft-Ignored ‘Public.’” Inside Higher Ed, 29 Jan. 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/29/literary-scholars-should-use-digital-humanities-reach-oft-ignored-public-opinion
Liu, Alan. “Drafts for Against the Cultural Singularity (book in progress).” 2 May 2016. http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/drafts-for-against-the-cultural-singularity.
Liu, Alan. “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, 2012. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/20.
McPherson, Tara. Feminist in a Software Lab. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018.
“Mission.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Department of History and Art History, George Mason University. https://rrchnm.org/our-story/.
Mullen, Mary L. “Public Humanities’ (Victorian) Culture Problem.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, Mar. 2016, pp. 183–204.
Raley, Rita. “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities” (with Wendy Hui Kyon Chun, Richard Grusin, and Patrick Jagoda.”) Debates in the Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field. Ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/89.
Schroeder, Robyn. “What Is Public Humanities?” Day of Public Humanities, 20 Mar. 2017, https://dayofph.wordpress.com/what-is-public-humanities/.
Stommel, Jesse. “The Public Digital Humanities.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities, 9 Jan. 2015, http://www.disruptingdh.com/the-public-digital-humanities/
Woodward, Kathleen. “The Future of the Humanities in the Present & in Public.” Daedalus, vol. 138, no. 1, 2009, pp. 110–23.