This article reflects on the meaning of “public humanities” from the perspective of research and teaching in South Africa today. I reference the ways in which people have remembered the recently deceased Professor Eddie Webster (my first sociology professor) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and how he himself saw his critically engaged public work in the trade union movement and globally during both Apartheid and the post-Apartheid democratic government. In particular, I explore how his unique form of public humanities inspired his former students to be socially engaged citizens as they entered a diverse range of occupations and careers. I draw on Michael Burawoy’s depiction of the Webster windmill (public engagement, principled intervention, social justice and radical reform, expanding research programmes with a sociology of the south, and institution building) to suggest what public humanities means in the context of research and teaching. I draw on tributes from colleagues and former students – not to focus on Prof Webster’s significant academic and political work but to distil what it was about his teaching and critical engagement that suggests he is an exemplar of what is meant by public humanities.

The hierarchical structures in which museums and galleries currently operate prohibit these cultural institutions from creating equitable and sustainable relationships with local residents. As a result, museums remain inaccessible civic spaces for many citizens in the United Kingdom and internationally. Reflecting on a case study based at the Whitworth Art Gallery, this article tests a practical tool that may be used to reimagine these hierarchies using asset-based community development (ABCD). It proposes the value of the ABCD technique, the Citizen Power Ladder, in supporting museums and galleries to become more citizen-led spaces that can be owned and used by all.

This article provides a retrospective on the formation of the Engaged Humanities Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London. It sets the lab’s development within the broader history of labs in the humanities, setting out how the Engaged Humanities Lab aligns closely with Pawlicka-Deger’s description of “infrastructure of engagement” rather than the physical spaces that characterise science laboratories. We also explain why the sub-category of “engaged” humanities was selected over the broader and more established “public” humanities. The second half of the article provides reflections on the activities and achievements of the Engaged Humanities Lab, focusing on how intra-institution collaboration between an academic school and the Research and Innovation Department supported the formation and governance of the lab, allowing for ongoing dialogue and co-creation between subject area experts and research management professionals with expertise in research funding, policy, and knowledge exchange. This article also illuminates what is needed from university leaders to ensure the success and longevity of infrastructures of engagement like the Engaged Humanities Lab.

In the late 1950s, the Minnesota Department of Transportation used eminent domain to clear the path for I-94, displacing over 700 families and 300 businesses in Rondo, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. In the 2010s, Rondo residents and faculty at Macalester College teamed up to create Remembering Rondo, a digital public history project that included (among other things) a community-based archive and map of the neighborhood’s historic businesses from 1920 to 1960. Rondo Avenue, Inc., the neighborhood’s community council, asked to host the project themselves. Then in 2020, they forgot to renew the domain. The site went dark. This essay explores where we went wrong and what we can do about it, and raises questions about how we can reimagine digital sustainability through the lens of a shared authority.

This article offers practical advice on how to encourage our own students to deliver dynamic presentations to local high school students as their final course projects. Based on years of experience teaching “The Holocaust in American Literature,” I offer specific suggestions on how “traveling teaching” can accomplish memorable moments for our students and high school students alike, thereby providing examples of how a new national initiative that cements a closer relationship between higher education and K-12 schools might proceed.

This article reflects on the 2024 public humanities project “Susannah Darwin at The Mount: Hidden Maternal Histories,” held at Charles Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury, England. Focusing on Katy Alston’s Mapping Susannah Darwin, a co-produced creative map stemming from the project that shows The Mount from the perspective of Darwin’s mother, Susannah, I reframe the fixed project “output” as the product of much more fluid sets of relationships and circumstances. This article blends personal reflection with insights from critical cartography, concepts of the object “life cycle,” and my underpinning research on the Darwin family and home. I aim to provide an accessible but critically informed account of the practices, relationships, serendipities, and setbacks that can characterise the humanities in action.

Since 2013, Poetry in America has evolved as an educational initiative from large, open-enrollment online courses, to a TV series, and a suite of educational programs supporting learners from middle school to adulthood, dual enrollment high school students pursuing college credit, current classroom teachers, and teachers in training. Contextualizing the form and methods of Poetry in America courses in relation to the schoolroom poetry of the past, and critical debates in literary studies about poetry in public, the author suggests that a schoolroom poetry for the present can prepare students to interpret any complex text, while also nurturing creativity, and recentering classrooms, wherever or whatever they are, as essential to civic life.

I was the inaugural Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) at UC San Diego from 2016 to 2019. The job entailed running 16 undergraduate programs, but that was only half of the gig. I was also charged with creating a hub for public arts and humanities. It was exciting, but daunting. It was a chance to cultivate meaningful exchange between the University and greater San Diego, but I was not well-versed in engaging public audiences or collaborating beyond academic circles. Against the backdrop of Trump’s rise to power, my first move was to announce two public forums: Challenging Conversations, and Community Arts and Resistance. Despite my steep learning curve in doing public events, IAH came to prioritize empathy, togetherness, and social justice storytelling. Our success was measured not simply in the number of events or audience members (those mattered, to be sure!), but in community building that grew from such work. It was less about one-off events than sustained conversation with our campus and surrounding communities. The work was collaborative and political. It rested on bringing communities and institutions together, pushing beyond the University’s gates, blending arts with humanities, being adaptable, and embracing the possible.

It is possible to communicate academic thought without being reductive, but that rarely happens in U.S. news media. Instead, academia is mined to produce journalistic edutainment: a media product that turns information into entertainment. Edutainment is pervasive, particularly in U.S. public radio and podcasting, the medium in which the authors work. A major reason edutainment dominates audio is that it is difficult to convey complex ideas in sound. Listeners, unlike readers, cannot control the speed at which they engage with material, which puts them at constant risk of getting lost. In U.S. public radio, the default solution is to make information entertaining. This approach has encouraged strict rules about everything from the length of stories and use of sound to the tone of narration and narrative structure. These rules all but ensure the production of edutainment. It does not have to be this way. Audio can be a powerful medium for academic work. To succeed, one must not pander but instead challenge the rules and explore new formats that honor the complexity of academic work. This is the story of our attempt to do just that with a new audio show, Ways of Knowing.

Since 2017, St. Catherine University has partnered with the Mapping Prejudice Project to build an interdisciplinary and community-engaged public humanities project that can serve as a model for other universities. The project, titled Welcoming the Dear Neighbor?, engages students, faculty, and staff across departments who work in collaboration with community partners to advance knowledge of systemic racism and its impact both historically and in present-day disparities. The result is mutually beneficial relationships that integrate high-impact practices for student success and retention and yield tangible resources for community groups in our city and surrounding suburbs. To date, more than 1,400 students have participated in the project. We report qualitative and quantitative evidence showing that the project enhanced students’ sense of place and enriched their learning. We describe challenges and lessons learned that will be of particular interest to universities interested in projects that undertake interdisciplinary, racial justice-focused public humanities work.

How might we learn from history in ways that help us imagine a better future? And what role might academic institutions play in making those futures imaginable? These questions informed Rosine Association 2.0, a socially engaged art project out of Swarthmore College active from 2021 to 2023. Inspired by a nineteenth-century social project in Philadelphia, Rosine 2.0 formed an interdisciplinary collective of artists, harm reduction organizers, archivists, and activists to co-imagine how harm reduction and mutual aid reduce stigma and increase community care in Philadelphia. We believe that Rosine 2.0 exemplifies the possibilities of public humanities projects that are truly collaborative and transformative. The project went beyond interdisciplinarity by bringing together the fields of archiving, history, and community engagement with communities outside of the College, including curators, artists, and individuals with lived experience. While Swarthmore was the organizing institution, the project existed outside of traditional academic frameworks, creating alternative modes of relationality between and among campus and community members. Each contributed a vital set of skills and perspectives in a networked series of collaborations. The project allowed for rethinking relationships between past and present; between the college and community partners; as well as between faculty, staff, and students in the building of social structures of community care.

Ever since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn into office in 2016, until the end of his term in 2022, his so-called “drug war” has claimed 12,000–30,000 lives. Over 150 victims were children. Seventeen-year-old Kian de los Santos, mistakenly identified as a drug addict, was gunned down on the evening of 16 August 2017. His death prompted a group of teachers and students to express themselves through empathic creative writing. What started as an assignment grew into a community of writers, activists, artists, journalists, and curators from diverse disciplines, generations, and social classes. Four years later, the project found a name: Triggered: Creative Responses to the Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines—an illustrated young adult fiction collection with a dimension of outreach towards an orphanage. The Triggered project illustrated three key features of public humanities, especially during a time of impunity: first, an imperfect but self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration between the academe and the field; second, the book’s non-elitist accessibility in both content and material; and third, the funds of the book went to an orphanage.

This article explores three projects that responded to community needs using a variety of tools and strategies for community empowerment. The first project grew out of a course that explored how Yonkers’ local history intertwined with the metanarrative of American history and policy decisions. The students created a podcast series with oral history interviews from community members, focusing on a range of topics, including climate justice, politics, gentrification, education, and shopping malls. The second project emerged as a result of a public lecture series hosted by the library. Highlighting the work of local artists, I curated an art exhibition that explored uniting the community through quilting, narratives of immigration, and the growing impact of gentrification in the downtown area. The final project sought to tell and archive stories from the community, resulting in a digital oral history archive focusing on the African American experience.

A former academic director and instructor in the Clemente Course in Humanities outlines the arc of this National Humanities Medal-winning program, and the arc of a career with it, discussing key elements involving academic and curricular matters, community partnerships, event planning, faculty and student recruitment, fiscal support, and public engagement extending across various institutions and organizations. Reflections on the value of adult education programs in the context of humanistic inquiry occasion further accounts and assertions about the nature of the public humanities, engaging publics not conceived in the abstract, in general, or for research purposes, but as they are configured and manifested among one’s fellow citizens, at particular times and in particular places.

This article considers the role of the public humanities in fostering conversations about climate science and policy through a transdisciplinary performance at the University at Buffalo in New York. The Great Lakes Climate Theatre Initiative is a new project that brings together sustainability scientists with theater practitioners to create new and mixed methods for climate preparedness that are both inclusive and impactful. Toward a Climate Haven was the first project conducted by the initiative with the goal of exploring how Buffalo might become a safe and equitable destination for climate migrants. This first project resulted in a public event that combined the performance of a newly-commissioned play, a talkback session, readings from a local youth writing workshop, and a presentation from a local county official. In this article, our team reflects on how we brought these various threads together to leverage the public humanities in the effort to prepare for climate change.

During the pandemic, specifically in 2021, I established a virtual network that gathers Iraqi women academics who are based in the diaspora and in Iraq. The network is a private WhatsApp group and an X account that promotes the scholarly work of Iraqi women and fosters collaboration. We have attracted the attention of international institutions, enlarged our group to include Iraqi women academics across the continents, and introduced our work to a larger audience. Like any other group, the network has faced several challenges. We are academic women who are overloaded with endless tasks and burdened with family responsibilities, but we have found solidarity in our group. Our steps are small and slow, but we are making progress in enhancing the global visibility of Iraqi women academics and supporting the higher education system in Iraq.

This article explores the potential of public humanities to bridge the gap between academia and the public by performing the humanities in unconventional spaces. Through two case studies – adapting George Sand’s Indiana for a local theatre production and hosting an outreach booth at a football match for their Pride game – we demonstrate the value of engaging with the public, rather than presenting research to the public. By reflecting on these experiments, we discuss what it means to do the public humanities dialogically and what we learned from this process. Our experiments reveal that effective public humanities require collapsing the divide between academia and the public by meeting audiences where they are and fostering reciprocal learning. By integrating academic insights into popular contexts, we demonstrate how the humanities remain vital and relevant. These initiatives challenge traditional models of outreach, affirming the discipline’s role as a collaborative, dynamic field that thrives through active dialogue with diverse communities.

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.