We’re writers, artists. We’re intake valves, immersed in paradox and desire, sponging up the mess of our incomprehensible world. We pause and linger in the slop of the creative process; we often, if not always, double back to reimagine and revise. We veer, wait, and witness. Academia, however, requires us to be exhaust valves, combusting fumes to stabilize an industry in crisis, with the humanities being no exception. This is not news. “Publish or perish” is real. Operational. It determines vocational futures through output, quantifiable objects, and line items. Organized by academic milestones (comps, defense, and tenure), the system forces the forfeiting of creativity and complexity to privilege the swift, slick manufacturing of ideas. This article brings together the author’s experience in harm reduction to translate public health to the public humanities. This “how-to” essay isn’t about how to rehab your Humanities Center. It’s about how to center care despite the rapid currents of capital and productivity. Just as principles for harm reduction reject universal definitions and diagnostics, so too do I reject universal (i.e., singular) methods for how to run your Humanities Center. Rather, here I show you how to embrace the multiples: the relapses and revisions.

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.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong is launching a pioneering BA program in Public Humanities, combining two existing units—Cultural Studies and Cultural Management—to form a socially relevant undergraduate education that promotes community-building, critical and creative skills, and humanities values. Hong Kong’s public sphere has been shrinking, necessitating a deeper reflection and conceptualization of the public within its historical and cultural contexts. The term “public” in Hong Kong has diverse meanings and overlaps with private and communal aspects, influenced by Chinese cultural history and colonial experiences. Despite the decline of civil society, various public activities, such as markets, performances, and talks, continue to foster local culture and community engagement in Hong Kong. The program emphasizes collaboration, participatory arts, and media technology to foster civic agency and public engagement, encouraging students to work with diverse community stakeholders. The program promotes care and connection as guiding principles for community-building, aiming to cultivate responsible citizens and rebuild trust through open communication and meaningful civic participation.

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.

This article argues that a public education in method—specifically, close reading—is the only viable role for literary studies within the public humanities. Drawing on recent discussions about the uses of the public humanities—and setting itself against recent interventions that have proclaimed a different public role for public literary studies—this article takes the form of an overt but minimalist manifesto: it tries to make the minimal case for public literary studies that is sufficient to give it a public usefulness. In so doing, it breaks down previous efforts of understanding the utility of literary studies as related to literature’s utility, but also to large-scale interventionist ideals such as climate-change activism. It proposes close reading as training in public debate, as an exercise towards better public meaning-making, and thus as a signal contribution to the making of better democratic citizens in a deliberative public sphere.

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.

In early January 2025, wildfires swept through several regions of Los Angeles, California. The fires’ proximity to Hollywood, the epicentre of Western visual and cinematic production, led to the creation and wide circulation of real and artificially generated images on social media. In this article, I argue two things: first, these images capture human concerns in the age of polycrisis; and second, by interpreting these images as symptoms of an attempt to articulate a sense of reality in which human imagination has itself become under threat, public humanists of the present and future need to be attuned to their role as mediators of diverse publics and their way of making sense under these crisis conditions. This article thus uses selected imagery of Los Angeles’s wildfires circulating on social media to excavate how ways of meaning-making in a digital age (memeification, use of generative artificial intelligence) reflect real public concerns about polycrisis, rendering these images productive beyond their satirical or misinforming values.

Some humanities fields, understanding the growing importance and relevance of public work, have been relatively quick to incorporate teaching public work into their courses. But the arts have been slow to catch up, for example, the relatively recent fields of public musicology and public music theory. However, teaching students how to do public work and why it is important is often removed in favor of course coverage. The reality is that teaching students to do public-facing work can enhance a course’s coverage while also teaching valuable workforce skills, in or out of the arts. At a time when applied careers in the performing and visual arts are dwindling, it is crucial to include the pedagogy of public-facing work in one’s arts classroom to show students what careers are possible using their disciplinary knowledge. In this manifesto, I discuss the importance of teaching public arts methods with a view from my own field, public musicology. As a case study, I will show how teaching public musicology can be both incorporated into stand-alone courses and built into programs, as I have done in the only public musicology undergraduate program in the United States.

Indigenous Studies seeks to affirm the distinct worth of “Indigenous Knowledge” and to question, as colonial, the privileging of Western Knowledge. How should Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu be taught, after it has been persuasively criticised by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe in Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate. Australia’s “culture wars” have encouraged readings that sharply distinguish the two books’ theses, and this paper attempts to soften that polarity. After noting a point of convergence between Dark Emu and Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? I outline two ways to think about knowledge that may help answer the question: How should Dark Emu be taught? Paul A. Cohen distinguishes among three ways that we can know the past: as event, as experience, and as myth. Martin Nakata considers the relationship between Indigenous experience and university-authorised critique. This paper seeks to draw out what is useful in each author: an acceptance that our thinking about the past is both mythical and critical. We can teach Dark Emu as “myth” without equating myth with error.

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.

What would an approach to public humanities that centers the principles of LANDBACK, a movement that locates liberation for Indigenous people in “putting Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands,” look like? In this conversation with Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, Meredith McCoy, and Elizabeth Rule—facilitated by Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam—the team behind the Landback Universities project explores the possibilities and urgency of public humanities informed by Indigenous ways of knowing, cultural protocols, and the responsibility of universities to undertake repair work to be in right relation with Indigenous communities they have dispossessed. Topics addressed in this conversation include the limits of “decolonization” as a university discourse and buzzword that, at best, results in land acknowledgments—brief statements about the Native nations whose lands universities occupy, typically without any commitment to address the university’s ongoing participation in dispossession; the tensions between diversity, equity, and inclusion and “decolonization,” which undercut very real, decolonial calls for land restoration and the remaking of systems of power on campuses; the ethics of collaborations on humanities-related initiatives with Indigenous communities; and negotiating right-wing politics that curtail opportunities for this work.

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.

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.