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Text of the page (random words):
legislators also in the room so he could have been crafting specific appeals to the audience that said he also talked about two initiatives that he was excited about one was the common heritage program and let s unpack that title shall we a series of small grants designed as he described it specifically to get preservation experts to local and regional sites to consult on proper storage and preservation techniques for things like public records think courthouses and hospitals as much as libraries and museums the grant seems to encompass more than this in execution but his rhetoric was telling that this is a move that shifts resources to non experts people who need the resources to be sure but his description was definitely not referencing those who make their expertise out of the interpretation of those resources on its face it s a democratizing move humanities for the people but it also seems part and parcel of a general cultural shift that devalues expertise he also discussed with great enthusiasm the return of the infrastructure grants large scale grants 500k with a 3 1 fundraising match to ramp up humanities infrastructure in their last iteration a decade or so ago these were often the ground work for humanities centers and so you can see that i m cautiously excited about this one in fact the gorgeous building that houses the wv humanities council was supported by an infrastructure grant it is important to note however that this grant is no longer in their challenge grants office though this is a challenge grant but rather in the division of preservation and access peede here was excited to talk about the idea that infrastructure might be more than just bricks and mortar he specifically mentioned digital infrastructure as a way of thinking flexibly about this grant but even so this strikes me as a rhetorical move similar to the common heritage grants an emphasis of the materials of humanities research rather than the research itself this mitigates my enthusiasm about the center s chances for the grant though we shall see so let s take this at face value we all know that the neh is a political football with an outsized symbolic impact relative to its actual budget if i m reading the current situation correctly and i m surely missing a lot of detail then it s likely that many of the things coming out of that office in the very near future are going to look nonpartisan to borrow a word from peede s november speech whether this is like adams s approach in the last administration a survival strategy or instead a specific political stance i can t say but it seems likely that the work of scholars doing politically inflected work is likely going to have to supported by their academic institutions rather than the endowment but for those working with material cultural resources now is your time edited to add neh just announced that they were upping fellowship grants so maybe i ll back off of that zero sum theory a bit becoming a public humanist workshop notes february 20 2018 5 14 pm below are my very subjective notes on the becoming a public humanist panel held february 15 2018 at the wvu college of law hosted by the wvu humanities center panelists were dr janet snyder art history dr kirk hazen english linguistics and dr melissa bingmann public history and the panel was moderated by prof atiba ellis law janet snyder from art history was the first presenter and she set the stage by posing some big picture no pun intended questions for the remainder of the panel who is the public for the artist who is the public for the art historian students people who express particular interest more broadly those who come to the art museum professor snyder espoused a baseline practice of looking closely together looking closely allows you to ask questions this struck me as an important way of translating what we do in the classroom to other interactions that in many ways we need to be teaching broader publics not just our students how to ask questions not just of us but of the objects texts discourses and scenarios they encounter looking closely is a tool to understanding the real thing travel as a crucial component i noted this particularly out of a personal interest how does travel and tourism both scholars travel to archives etc as well as our mobility to meet public audiences where they are condition our work what are the ethical and environmental implications of those kinds of travel i also noted that professor snyder s slides were not images of art itself but of students colleagues looking closely at art the act of looking or more broadly inquiring becomes crucial professor snyder proposed global positioning studies to ask persistently what kind of art should artists be making here and now professor melissa bingmann presented attendees with more pragmatic ideas borne of working directly with local public history organizations like prof snyder she began with how do you define public for her that work happened in two key ways museums museum professionals do not always have the smoothest of relationships with academic for some justified reasons which may in turn lead to tension between academic and public history sites working with institutions institutions often want labor organizational expertise as much as expertise institutions are valuable for public humanities based on relationships built over time e g interns associations advocacy orgs one key connected from prof snyder s talk was the idea of learning together scholars and institutions and by extension publics collectively developing public knowledge it s important to ask questions about what publics organizations really want is a new institution viable assess are oral histories or any rpre defined project the best pathway is the idea the institution has going to give them the result they want public memory is a huge component of how public history works we might all do well to think a bit more broadly about how public memory functions for our fields avoid being the parachute scholar be a participant beyond the talk itself treat others teachers curators etc as scholar experts in their own right avoid critique without being asked to supply it this can hurt relationships even though it can be difficult to refrain from offering commentary based on expertise professor bingmann underscored that relationships are often as important the content an acknowledgement that requires negotiating differences in standards of work negotiating differences in priorities e g raising money for preservation vs scholarly rigor and considering the potential value of failure she also urged participants to recall the idea of writing as a public enterprise esp collaborating with public institutions that may or may not have that expertise on staff professor kirk hazen began by noting that for his field of sociolinguistics public outreach has been field sustaining at a moment beyond when the academy alone might have sustained it this raised quietly the spectre that socio linguistics might provide a model for humanities surviving into the future if as robust institutional support dries up professor hazen described a series of tactics by way of a series of historical and current examples beginning with noah webster spelling book leads to spelling bees broad cultural impact which connected to the historical impact of the dictionary itself appalshop non profit multimedia work creative acts of listening and telling etc seriously check out their link wow skills app language and life project developed statewide nc curriculum modules produced series of documentaries professor hazen then laid out a series of basic maxims that guided his interactions with the public often k 12 beyond the university classroom start with very simple goals develop interactive lessons engage audience actively pique interest through ideas that matter to the audience understand the assumptions the audience brings to the table in grant writing determine and articulate broader impacts from there the session broke into a lively q a discussion my notes there are a little more scattered since i participated too with a target public how do we find out what a public wants starting with the assumption that no one s prima facie interested in our work how do you figure out where to go consider audiences with time to listen retirement communities olli young folk and old folk people who have time it s important to developing materials approaches before the time may appear that way there s less scrambling when opportunities do arise social media is effective department of ed grants how to negotiate differing starting points on what the public wants vs challenging material vs what they don t yet know they want or need build on what people already have building trust building relationships first work on self interest how do we follow idealistic goals in the face of public resistance dialogue about what one should value already a political question what do we let go and what when do we correct writing for different audiences online resources with a wide audience anxiety provoking recycle things re usable assets clarity and concision vs density and complexity wikipedia other wikis hackathons medium com now behind a paywall blogs the conversation remember that a key element with students is about encouraging discovery over mastery how do we help publics value discovery as part of the humanities ethic the humanities center could play a role in diy public humanities skills section on website videos etc that offers how to s technical skills scholarly skills for everyday folks notes on a pragmatic humanities february 13 2018 4 47 am as yet another proposed white house budget zeroes out funding for the national endowment for the arts and the national endowment for the humanities and as sharon o dair s hot take behind the paywall in the chronicle of higher education asks whether efforts at career diversity prep in humanities phd programs is hypocrisy i simplify and as our humanities center at wvu poses questions about how and when scholars should consider pushing their inquiry out to a broader public audience a set of questions re emerges how pragmatic should the humanities be how pragmatic must they be i ll confess to being divided on the issue as a scholar i trained in modern and contemporary experimental drama and performance i find the material extraordinarily thought provoking intellectually challenging in a way that produces great pleasure politically engaged in both direct and indirect ways and in the end accessible to only a very small audience that training has led me down a path that has lent me i flatter myself to believe a great deal of insight into the histrionic world around me how much our sense of ourselves is a performance what is theatrical about real life and how different ways of being in our bodies teach us reciprocity and mutuality those are lessons that i am sometimes able to show my students sometimes i m just able to show them how to use the tools that have led me to these insights these tools have great value because they help me navigate the culture around me to communicate with other humans and to be i flatter myself to believe a better person in a late market capitalist economy these tools have less immediate value because they are very difficult to attain years of study and some amount of natural inclination difficult to measure difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to commodify i can take them to market only in the sense that a literary education is still though tenuously a signal part of american liberal higher education separated out on their own spots in the literature classroom would be very difficult to sell it would be hard to counter the argument that those seats were a luxury of course those of us on the inside of this field feel quite confident that the decline in a robust and complex humanistic education is connected to the fraying social fabric and deteriorating political discourse that we might be better equipped to spot fake news specious political argument inhumane stances if we were better trained interpreters of our culture present and past so pragmatic indeed but neither simply so quantifiably so nor commodifiably so and so as american liberal higher education sets itself about the task of marketing measuring quantifying and commodifying its various courses of study those most resistant those that themselves don t sell like widgets in the marketplace of majors which is different than the marketplace of ideas are being called upon to be pragmatic this seems to be taking several forms as my opening suggests a certain kind of blunting of the political edges of our scholarly conclusions a mandate to change the training to meet labor market demands and a call to make our work more accessible and one presumes more palatable to a wider swath to the public so while my training as a scholar resists these impulses radical feminist autobiographical performance art is political esoteric and lacking in transferable skills my training as a teacher of writing and rhetoric kicks in this other training asks me to know my audiences and analyze how to appeal to them in different contexts it tells me that i have been taught in my primary training to address a very specific audience thereby meeting very rigorous standards but with very limited efficacy it tells me that i might concede that there is luxury in the critical unpacking of a novel but only as a bridge to declaring my desire to make it a much more accessible luxury simply by bringing more people to the college classroom or that it might someday be seen as a civic necessity this is i think the pragmatic turn that we witnessed at the neh during the tenure of william bro adams his advocacy of public humanities under the banner the common good humanities in the public square seemed then to be at its heart a rhetorical move as much as a scholarly one does bro adams believe that public humanities makes for more valuable insights maybe was the program a gambit to help shore up the perceived value of our insights almost certainly did the neh fund projects under this banner that were able to thread the needle of rigor and accessibility check them out they look great if limited in scope which is to say only some kinds of projects fit postings about new projects also seem to have ceased sometime around adams s resignation as neh chair though his essay valuing the humanities to accompany the recent aaas study on employment outcomes for humanities majors reveals his continued commitment to this pragmatic turn and so i am torn in my classrooms especially at the general education level i insist that students can disagree on political terms without fear of being shot down on those terms though i will persistently defend the logic that i ve used to occupy my own position which i make clear this past fall i wrote a grant application to build different kinds of professional train...
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