How can a single-day cluster of public learning activities contribute to a larger ongoing public humanities agenda? This essay’s co-authors—facilitators of a public lecture and associated activities sponsored by a university academic department—revisit their strategic efforts to provide leadership for the one-day series of interconnected events, anchored in a Native scholar’s public lecture on sovereignty and citizenship. We write from a predominantly white university geographically removed from Native nations’ reservations and lacking a full-fledged curriculum in Indigenous studies. Yet we also write as members of a consortium committed to enhancing reciprocal learning with Indigenous peoples. Thus, we aimed to set this one-day program within our local collaborative’s sustained work to develop curriculum; engage multiple audiences in topics important to Native studies; and foster networks linking students, faculty, and staff with Native community members. In making visible aspects of “doing” public humanities that often remain unrecorded, this case study will assist others interested in taking on public humanities work, whether a small-scale, single-day program or initiatives extended across a long-term calendar. After describing the ongoing work, one university and Native community partners have been carrying out through a Native and Indigenous Peoples Initiative, and situating those efforts in connection with our collaborative’s shared values for community building, the essay revisits event management steps taken to tap into and support that endeavor. Acknowledging successful elements alongside challenges and opportunities not fully achieved, our case study also offers approaches for collaborative evaluation of public humanities programming.

This article shares a unique form of public humanities created with an ethical community partnership between a university team, a community nonprofit organization, and a museum. Our podcast focuses on the stories of the staff of an organization that is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee and that resettles refugees, asylees, and immigrants. Most of the staff were immigrants themselves and shared their experiences as both outsiders and insiders in the communities that they serve. Given this historical moment of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, we aim for this podcast to serve for conversation and education about immigration not only in our local area but also in similar small cities and towns. Our podcast takes place in an upstate region of New York, approximately 200 miles outside of the city. We share our experience of putting into practice the methods and concepts drawn from public humanities, critical community engagement, ethnic studies, digital humanities, and podcast studies.

Who has been considered human by the humanities? Along with its emancipatory potential, the humanities have historically also been related to imperial states whose military conquests have implicated the dehumanization of other peoples. Many times, the humanities have offered foundational narratives sustaining imperial projects. This essay takes a constructivist epistemology to explore the concept of humanism, and how it has emerged and changed in different contexts, beginning with the Roman idea of humanitas that focused on civilization to legitimize domination. A critique of colonial Christian humanism reveals how it was used to justify violence against those defined as non or less human, be they women, Africans, or indigenous people. The historical exclusion of many groups from educational institutions and knowledge production shows how the humanities have perpetuated hierarchies of power that, ironically, dehumanized. Movements such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which sought to reform the humanities, continued to favor a Eurocentric culture. This essay advocates for an intercultural approach to the humanities, one that frees itself from imperialism and promotes inclusive dialogues among peoples. This effort must go beyond overcoming Eurocentrism. It must also overcome anthropocentrism to incorporate a more respectful relationship with Nature, recognizing the cultural practices of indigenous peoples, who have maintained a more conscious and harmonious link with beyond human lifeways.

The city of Indore in Madhya Pradesh, India, is home to over 1 million individuals with disabilities. Despite this significant population, the public schools serving these communities often lack visibility and a dependable online presence. Information about these institutions is usually dispersed through unreliable channels, leaving the pedagogies and amenities primarily misunderstood. This article discusses the ideation, development, and completion of a public humanities initiative, “‘Only Connect!’ Empowering Public Schools for the Disabled in Indore to engage in a participatory and inclusive online public sphere,” a U.S. Alumni micro-grants project initiated and finalized in 2022. Only Connect! is a pioneering online platform that offers verified contact details for all public schools in Indore, catering to children who are Deaf, Blind, and those who suffer from speech difficulties between the ages of 6 and 18. The project’s central mission is to dispel the myths and inaccuracies surrounding disability education. Based on the narratives sourced from comprehensive fieldwork, surveys, and extensive interviews with key stakeholders, including school principals and parents, Only Connect! aims to foster a better-informed and supportive community. The goal of this project is to facilitate dialogue about the challenges and opportunities in educating disabled students in Indore, promoting greater understanding and inclusivity.

It is often claimed that public history represents a democratisation of historical knowledge, but how is “the public” being imagined here? This short article provides a report from a collaborative, student–staff research project that investigated how key stakeholders involved in public history—students, academics, and heritage professionals—understood their publics. It reflects on two key themes that emerged from the testimonies: issues of inclusion and positionality. We analyse a selection of telling cases, situating these extracts in the context of financial pressures, neo-liberal marketisation and the politicisation of DEI agendas. We suggest that there is a need for more open, reflexive, and cross-disciplinary dialogue between different stakeholders about the various publics they construct and engage.

In 2023, Little Central America, 1984: A Sanctuary Then and Now by Elia Arce and Rubén Martínez premiered in Washington, DC. The play illuminates a historical moment known as the Sanctuary Movement, whereby religious institutions, nonprofit organizations, activists, and everyday people sought to create a safe place for Central Americans fleeing state-sponsored and state-condoned violence. The play was a community-based production, relying on local Latinxs—namely, Central Americans—and African Americans to bring it to life. Little Central America demonstrated how community-based theatre could (re)create sanctuary, challenge racial ideologies about Central Americans and Latinxs, and value diverse Central American lives on and off stage. Drawing on my experiences as a field producer, I examine how community-based theatre is a useful tool for Central American and Latinx communities. Ultimately, I argue that community-based theatre is necessary for enacting, processing, and understanding Central Americans’ converging and diverging pasts, presents, and futures.

Here, we describe the creation of a new program, Public and Applied Liberal Arts, at a regional public university in the Midwest. We discuss the values of transdisciplinary research and teaching for the public good, and how we put together a willing group of faculty from across the university to create a new kind of academic program that moves the humanities into our communities and beyond.

What do students of the humanities know, and how do they come to know it? What can they do with that knowledge and skill? Students struggle to answer such questions because they cannot name what they know or can do in the “real” world. Exploring the teaching of the humanities as a form of public practice, this piece focuses on how knowledge is created and transferred in the humanities as part of an initiative called The Being Human Project. This project helps students “name” what they are learning through a set of humanities threshold concepts called SEAM: Storytelling, Empathy, Ambiguity, and Memory. Defining knowledge transfer in terms of recognition, recurrence, and application, students learn to use SEAM as a recombinant palette of problem-solving tools in the public sphere. If we imagine the humanities as a figurative sky filled with stars, the question is how best to prepare our students to navigate that vaunted space as the humanities “constellate” with public problems and practices. How can we help students recognize the value and instrumentality of what they are learning when such knowledge appears more like far-flung points of light than an array of constellations they might steer by?

This is a reflection on the experience of carrying out an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded public humanities project during the pandemic, focusing on one pathway to impact – a collaboration with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books – as a case study. I want to explore how we adapted these programmes in the light of global and personal circumstances and embraced digital media in unexpected ways. Looking back on what we accomplished, I now believe that, despite considerable challenges, we ended up with outcomes that were even richer and more rewarding precisely because of the challenges we faced and the unexpected paths that the project took us down. The second voice in this article is that of Charlotte Lancaster. Through her role as a Postdoctoral Impact Fellow at Bath Spa University, she worked to evidence the wider public impact of the “Into the Forest” project retrospectively. Here, she evaluates the impact of the project with Seven Stories and offers a coalescent voice to the argument underlining this article: that we need more realistic and flexible approaches to research planning, funding, and evaluation.

This article addresses the potentials and shortcomings of prominent current attempts to articulate platforms for public literary humanities. While the pressing polycrises of the twenty-first century call for a resurgence of committed literature—and, accordingly, a public-facing critical practice and ethics—a scenario for public literary humanities still remains to be scripted. We argue that the vagueness of the term “literary value” is one crucial obstacle in this context. It weakens the opposition to literature’s commercialisation and in fact tends to lead to an unproductive reiteration of traditional, canon-bound conceptions of what “good” literature is. We perceive a similarly weak definition of “value” in the public humanities at large, but find in Judith Butler’s encouragement to trust in extra-academic publics a promising perspective that we deem applicable to a budding public literary humanities as well. Drawing on historical (Bertolt Brecht) and current (Vinod Kumar Shukla) examples, we are able to show that such a literary and critical practice can only be conceived when the established notion of literature as private and solipsistic is overcome.

In the spring of 2024, I taught an Introduction to Public Humanities course at Yale University, with the support of a teaching fellow. My primary aim was to expand student understanding of how the humanities could be practiced beyond the walls of the university for a wider public. However, to accomplish this goal, we first needed to situate the more abstract concepts of the “public” and the “humanities” historically and conceptually. This stimulated us to divide the course into three parts. The first, The Humanities and Publics in Context, focused on the history of the humanities within the broader American discourse. The second part, Humanities in Public Life, brought guest speakers from various areas of the program’s concentrations: Place and Space, History and the Public, Museums and Collections, Public Writing, Documentary Studies, Arts Research, and Digital Humanities. Finally, the third part, Public Humanities: Making It as We Do It, provided students the opportunity to engage directly with the public humanities through hands-on projects, allowing them to put their learning into action. This paper captures the lessons we learned, the challenges we encountered, and the work we created throughout the course. My hope in sharing this process is that it can serve as a useful resource for others looking to explore or develop their own public humanities projects.

This essay uses the history of Cossitt Library—from its founding in 1893 to its renovation and reopening in 2023—to explore how the Southern public library has faced, and continues to face, unique opportunities and challenges for public humanities projects. As a scholar-in-residence at Cossitt from 2020 to 2022, I worked alongside the branch manager, staff librarians, community outreach specialists, local arts organizations, and special collections managers to document the history of Cossitt’s role in the city’s civic life and to create policies and programming that encouraged many different constituencies to see the space as their own. It offers an example of where the qualitative research skills of a humanities scholar can impact both large-scale and targeted public humanities projects.

This brief piece addresses the dispute sparked by Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to two classes of people traditionally included under the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A primary goal is to provide a historical perspective on arguments made by both sides that are too frequently neglected in media coverage of the dispute. The piece does not predict how SCOTUS might rule, but it does make a case for the nation’s responsibility to children who have violated no law. Through textual and historical analysis, it also refutes two law professors who propose an originalist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that supports Trump’s effort to deny birthright citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants. Drawing on works of literature, this article hopes to clarify the consequences of the complicated legal issues involved, including the bigoted history of previous efforts to restrict birthright citizenship.

This article argues that, as they are currently designed, UN climate talks fail to address the environmental catastrophe they aim to address. While dialogue is the primary means through which the world’s population can get together, discuss the scope and nature of the problem, and put appropriate measures into action, these talks are, year after year, employed as a way to create the illusion that democratic decision-making occurs. As a result, these kinds of events can only succeed in entrenching positions, exacerbating the impasse at which we currently find ourselves. This, in turn, solidifies the notion that we indeed need to engage in a dialogue about climate change, thus perpetuating a never-ending cycle that protects, under the veneer of planetary engagement, the continuation of capitalist business as usual. The article, therefore, proposes that a dialogic path to finding a solution to the climate catastrophe can only be successful if climate talks are rethought, placing at the helm voices from the most affected populations in the Global South. Otherwise, these talks will continue to fail in making a significant change that ensures the possibility of an environmentally just and viable future for the planet.

This article connects infrastructural violence to environmental injustice in the South Durban Basin, the industrial hub of the Durban metropolis in South Africa, where escalating ecological difficulties have negatively impacted living standards. The combination of the racially insensitive apartheid regime in South Africa and the harmful effects of toxicity requires a decolonial repair perspective founded on egalitarian dialogue and the inclusion of affected viewpoints and participation. In advocating for this repair framework, this article calls for horizontal discussions that thoroughly examine these issues, which can subsequently facilitate equitable environmental policies, regulations, and laws.

South Dakota, home to nine federally and state-recognized tribes, bears witness to a rich Native American history that predates colonialism. Yet, the representation of Native Americans in institutional archives remains sparse, often curated through the lens of non-Native creators. Addressing this gap involved a collaborative effort among Augustana University, Native American students from a federally funded tribal boarding school, and a regional cultural institution to facilitate the reclamation of archival narratives and the re-presentation of Native American histories through an innovative public humanities initiative. This project aimed to re-present archival material through creative interventions by young Native American artists, adhering to the First Nations principles of ownership, control, access, and possession. By transforming existing archival material into new artworks, the project fostered a deeper understanding of Native American history and its contemporary implications. Public exhibitions of these reinterpretations facilitated engagement with historical traumas and challenged normative perceptions of Native American experiences. The interdisciplinary approach highlighted the importance of Native American agency in curatorial processes, resulting in reflective public exhibitions. This project exemplifies how public humanities research can bridge historical gaps, support cultural recognition, and facilitate the reclamation of institutionalized narratives.

There is a tendency in academia to expect humanities graduates to have an innate understanding of the significance of their educational training, even in the midst of a diminishing regard for their chosen subjects within educational policy and public discourse. This pedagogical reflection explores the experience of two tutors and eight students on a final-year module called “The Public Role of the Humanities.” Grounded in the pedagogical principle that the Liberal Arts offers interdisciplinary education for engaged citizenship, its remit is to explore the ways in which arts and humanities perspectives play a vital role in all walks of public life. The module is designed to help students understand how they can bring their educational training to bear not just on future careers but also on the kinds of paid jobs and volunteering roles in which they are already engaged. The students each create a podcast reflecting on this topic. In this article, we discuss the shared experience of thinking about the public humanities, including situations where issues and disagreements arose. We draw conclusions about how to move beyond defensive discourse about value and instead integrate interdisciplinary insights and approaches with daily living and working practices.

This article presents a short selective history of contemporary collecting at the Smithsonian Institution. I explain what contemporary collecting is and show how contemporary collecting in the 1960s and 1970s produced histories of political reform movements and participatory democracy. I argue that many material records would not exist today if it had not been for a small group of committed curators who pioneered this practice in the absence of policy guardrails—and often despite a lack of institutional support. I present a brief overview of contemporary collecting methods and outcomes to argue that it is more important than ever for us to collect evidence of diverse political activity in our current moment—a moment in which cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, are being attacked by executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, despite their long-standing reputation for maintaining truth and public trust in times of political change and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting how people can approach this work today.