Querying Public Scholarship: An Unfinished List of Questions toward More Meaningful University–Community Partnerships

Abstract

How do we do public scholarship? It might seem like a simple question, but as anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms—let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities—is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, the authors offer a set of sticky and thorny questions that are both theoretically minded and practice oriented, as possibilities to consider throughout the process of working on public projects or with community partners. Questions are grouped thematically—Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, Evaluation and Reflection—though are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. In so doing, the essay insists that public scholarship not be codified into a clearly-defined discipline, but rather acknowledged as both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. To that end, the authors also invite direct engagement with these questions, both inside and outside of the space of the text, encouraging readers to generate and share their own questions as well.

How do we do public scholarship? As anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms – let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities – is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, we find ourselves energized by the sticky and thorny questions of working in partnership and in the public interest (and they sometimes exhaust us too). Here, we offer a set of questions that we often find ourselves asking, in the hopes that they might guide others’ work – and provoke new queries.

By alighting on questions, we mirror the orientation toward process and open-endedness within public scholarship: we insist that the public humanities, like other forms of engaged research and teaching, not be codified into a clearly defined discipline.¹ It is both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. On the one hand, scholars (especially those marginalized by academic institutions) have long worked from situated positions within and alongside communities and movements as part of their research. Roopika Risam describes this as a form of “academic insurgency,” as she highlights the historical and ongoing contributions of scholars of color in transforming both universities and their local communities through organizing practices of caregiving and generosity – while often not being credited for their contributions to theorizations of public scholarship.² On the other, academic institutions often position public scholarship as a perpetual process of innovation, whether invoking buzzword-filled hype, or in genuine attempts to decolonize, queer, and reimagine institutional norms and structures. While these conditions present many opportunities, navigating the needs of various constituencies remains a strategic challenge: How can we create knowledge that is meaningful and legible to both scholars and community partners while also fulfilling requirements for academic promotion or institutional funders?³

Our guide pursues the ethos and relationships of the communities we want to be a part of, creating a collective place for anecdotes and inquiries culled from workshops, readings, collaborations, and daily life.⁴ We are committed to the back-and-forth rhythms needed to find densities and plotlines in our collective work, elaborating something akin to what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have theorized as an alternate conceptualization of “debt,” in this case, not merely an economic relationship, but “a principle of social life…something that doesn’t resolve itself into creditor and debtor, [and] allows us to say, ‘I don’t really know where I start and where I end.’”⁵ For us, asking these questions offers an opportunity to lean into the nagging provocations that have lodged in our minds, especially when the daily grind of work delays these concerns. In constructing this list, we have paid attention not only to the questions that perhaps felt hostile but also to the ones that drove us to the next level within a project or partnership (or arose from such transitions). We ask the questions we wished we posed when the scene of discussion stewed in toxic positivity, got stuck in the weeds, or became pregnant with possibility. Likewise, using the attributes of list-makers – earnest persistence, orientation toward action, and a sense of urgency – the format allowed us to be specific without devolving into randomness, offering a mode of inquiry-in-tandem rather than an obligatory checklist.

Our format, method, and ideas echo the structures of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’ term, for the emergent world that “public scholarship” is perhaps placeholding.⁶ Attuned to the dominant and residual cultures of academic knowledge production, we want to produce work oriented to more just futures, as limned by Sarah Ahmed’s desire lines, heralded by Michael Warner’s counterpublics, and held in safekeeping by Leeanne Betamosake Simpson’s articulation of the resurgence of Indigenous knowledge of land, to name only a few guiding concepts that have persisted with us.⁷ Similarly, we find inspiration in Ananya Roy’s theorization of research justice as always “concerned with the accumulation of knowledge for the purpose of structural transformation” and “the refusal to participate in the dispossession of knowledge.”⁸ To that point, Eve Tuck warns against the ways that research can be extractive, arguing that it often “functions as yet another layer of surveillance” aimed at communities already damaged by being “overresearched yet, ironically, made invisible.”⁹ To quote her own pointed query: “what questions might we ask ourselves before we allow researchers entry?”¹⁰

Our questions are also rooted in our own public scholarship, including Harris’s on drag pedagogies and digital cultures in partnership with organizations like Drag Story Hour; Jacqueline’s on literature and the urban humanities via creative placemaking projects like LitLabs in Los Angeles and the Southwest, or documenting community urban memory in Tucson’s Southside; and our recent collaboration with Favianna Rodriguez on her Desert Symphony installation and workshops.¹¹ However, as we considered both the form and “content” of questions focused on engaged scholarship, we also turned to a number of examples of, and provocations on, the public humanities for inspiration.¹² For example, the mapping visualizations of the Spatial Analysis Lab (SLAB) and Anti-Eviction Mapping Project whose respective spatial ethnographies in Ho Chi Minh City and public histories in San Francisco enable new visibilities and desires in urban space.¹³ Or the monumental work of preserving and activating histories of early Black organizing conducted by the Center for Black Digital Research, guided by clearly-articulated principles aimed at social change.¹⁴ We also find some of our best models from organizers that do not center the university as the origin or destination of their engagement. These projects provide some of the most innovative lessons for how public scholarship is always entangled in public life, intertwining the work of the archivist and the activist, the policy-analyst and creative entrepreneur, the artist and the developer – from the asset mapping of Takachizu, to the Chinese Chorizo Project’s festivals, the incubation of Latine-owned business by Mi Reina Mobile Boutique, and the narrative change driven by Visualizing Palestine.¹⁵

Ultimately, these questions help us navigate various liminal states, moving between binaries such as specificity and generalizability, reflection and action, or care and harm. Our approach is especially inspired by the What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) collective, whose thoughtful interrogations on the relationships between HIV and COVID-19 helped us consider how to move beyond some of the seemingly clichéd questions that are often asked in this kind of work (and very rightfully so), allowing ourselves space to ask pointed, messy, or even playful questions toward cooperative action.¹⁶ Our queries are hardly meant to be exhaustive, and though there are many, we hope they are not exhausting: we encourage readers to consider them a set of provocations and to dig into the ones that feel most curious or challenging, without feeling the need to address them all. We have grouped questions thematically under several headings to reflect various components of the kind of work we do: Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, and Evaluation and Reflection. Still, we note that many questions could appear in multiple sections – and indeed, warrant asking, often again and again, at various stages of a project or partnership – so we encourage readers to not dwell too heavily on these categories. Instead, please consider our questions more as a database, choose-your-own-adventure, or cut-up poem, rather than a linear list. Finally, we also hope that the provisionality and indeterminacy of these questions will lead readers to ask their own questions as well (Figure 1), and at the end, we will invite you to share your responses with us.

Figure 1. Examples from an early workshop of these questions, written on index cards. The authors invite readers to submit their own questions (http://queryingpublicscholarship.org/).

Framing

1. 1. In the words of Katherine McKittrick: Where do you “know from?”¹⁷ What other forms or sources of knowledge might you need to gather and how will you do so? What counts as knowledge (e.g., research, lived experience, “data”) and how is that shaped by existing discourses and biases? How do you honor knowledge that is already present?

2. 2. How are you defining public, a public, and/or the public?¹⁸ Who is the you or the we?¹⁹ What are the differences in the grammar of these constructions?

3. 3. What desires drive you and the partners you are working with? How is, as Eve Tuck urges to consider, our “theory of change” subtended by a “desire-based framework” over a “damage-centered” one?²⁰

4. 4. What are the questions this work enables you to ask? How does your work reflect and expand on values, methods, and theories of the humanities? What sets this apart from other approaches? Where does it intersect? What are you making visible (palpable, knowable, and interpretable) and why?

5. 5. What are your (buzz) words and what underlying complexities are they placeholding? In what discursive moments do you deploy the terms “co-creative,” “reciprocal,” “engaged,” or alternatively, “extractive,” “weaponized, “performative,” and why? Are they used to ward off criticism, to virtue-signal, to imply solidarity, or to create common goals and accountability?

Planning

1. 6. What do you need to plan from the start? What areas will you leave open for improvisation, deviation, or emergence? In the words of Taylor Mac: “what’s going to happen?”²¹

2. 7. What existing work serves as inspiration? Are there ways to directly connect with that work? How can you avoid recreating the wheel? How do you honor, as Harney and Moten write, “the incessant and the irreversible intellectuality of these activities [that] is already present?”²²

3. 8. Where does your timeline start? What pre-histories predate your project? What possibilities might come after? Will this project need to be sustained past a particular deadline or budget cycle, and how? How will the project be archived? What are the benefits of time-boundedness or ephemerality?

4. 9. In what areas does your project demand complexity? In what areas does it demand concision and clarity? Can you add productive constraints (temporal and spatial) to your brainstorming process?

5. 10. Where is there urgency in this project? Where is there potential for lasting and systemic change? How do you scope a project to be able to deliver on a promise, rather than aim for something too broad like trying to “change the world?”²³ How does this not only inform but also shape ongoing public discussion?

Partnerships

1. 11. What practice, community, and/or movement are you contributing to, amplifying, or sharpening via your training and expertise? What labor, histories, and/or networks might your presence obscure, diminish, or imbalance?

2. 12. What unexpected roles might people be invited to play? What might they be unfairly coerced into? How does thinking expansively about a range of responsibilities – such as producer, consumer, steward, translator, student, teacher, curmudgeon, and connection-builder – reframe the labor involved?

3. 13. What intersectional diversities exist within the public your project engages? How are you centering those most impacted? How do you uproot hierarchies without idealizing partners as “innocent” or beyond reproach?²⁴

4. 14. How do you begin relationships, care for them, and set up boundaries? How can they evolve over time? How will you know if they need to end? What happens if someone gets sick? What obligations, in the sense of “debt” invoked above, do you enter into, and pass on?

5. 15. Who experiences…

   power

   vulnerability

   accountability

   benefit

   harm

   access

   credit

   labor

   need

   risk

   … and in what ways?

6. 16. How can we think of the above experiences in a multitude of ways: materially, epistemologically, politically, etc.? Where do you fit in? How will you hold vulnerability and interdependence as generative realities rather than liabilities?

7. 17. How would your partners describe you or the work you are doing? How might a detractor, an ally, a bystander? How do you respond to misreadings of your work?

Institutions

1. 18. How might existing institutions seek to colonize or profit from your work? What is your plan to negotiate or mitigate these attempts? How do you guard against absorbing the territoriality and inertia of those with power over you?

2. 19. What do you do when you sense that an institutional barrier is disingenuous (i.e., someone saying they “cannot” help might actually be a matter of they or the institution “will not” support you)? What isn’t affirmed, validated, or made possible by winning the grant, publishing the article, or achieving tenure?

3. 20. Are you organized in solidarity with the “undercommons” of the institution and community, such as undergraduates, unions, children, and QTBIPOC coalitions? How do you make an effort to build a genuine community across perceived or structural borders?

4. 21. What institutions are you building? In what situations is institution-building counter-productive?

Tools

1. 22. What tools and technologies will you use? What values, ideologies, or politics are they enmeshed in? To paraphrase Audre Lorde: can they actually “dismantle the master’s house?”²⁵

2. 23. In what ways is this project embodied? Where is physicalness, or fleshiness, an asset, and where is it a limitation?

3. 24. In what ways is this project digital? How do mobile devices, algorithms, or QR codes expand access, and how do they preclude it?

4. 25. How are you building replicable templates and toolkits (e.g., policies, procedures, or protocols) for something greater than this project? Is that infrastructure necessary? How can you remain agile?

5. 26. What tools do you need to make responsive and equitable decisions under difficult circumstances? What are your decision-making processes and structures? How might they be put to the test, or where might they bend or break?

Outputs and Forms

1. 27. How will you and your partners make your work legible to different audiences? Does your format or genre of engagement lead the usual suspects to the party? Does the form reproduce dominant publics, or is it aiming to create new ones? How can you build the publics for the work you want to do that does not exist yet?

2. 28. Why do you value the form – archive, exhibition, digital platform, event, etc. – of the public engagement you are choosing? What are the material, contextual, functional, or critical affordances of that form? How does your focus on form not merely pander to trends, engage superficial aesthetics, or plagiarize other projects? Is your form a gimmick – and when can a gimmick be an invitation?

3. 29. How attuned and exploratory are you with contemporary, popular, and avant-garde forms of communicating information? How do you avoid being a snob, a gatekeeper, a devotee to form? Alternatively, what are the ways in which your form is a part of caring for everyday life, provides an unexpected amenity or hospitality, or honors the desires of actual users and communities (e.g., providing air-conditioning, a living room, childcare, food, public space, translation, or a sense of belonging)?

4. 30. How does your work balance wayfinding with the freedom to explore? How might different participants manage their own needs, and will they know how or when to ask for what they need? How will you respond if they try to take an uncharted path?

5. 31. What are the locations for this project? How are users arriving and departing, and what are the barriers and porosities in these venues? Do people know public transit routes? Where will people park?

Documentation

1. 32. What data or tools do you need to tell the story of this project? How will you preempt a frantic post-mortem by collecting these, on an ongoing basis, throughout the project?

2. 33. How can you resist the fetishization or performativity of documentation? What experiences can or should not be documented? Who owns and maintains the archive? Who does documentation ultimately serve (i.e., participants, editors, funders, institutions)?

3. 34. What does it mean to be credited as an author, creator, or contributor?²⁶ How do you distinguish between contributing time, ideas, musings, sweat, jokes, feedback, snacks, and other forms of intellect and labor? How can you preserve a multiplicity of voices?

Evaluation and Reflection

1. 35. How are feelings forms of information? Must all affects be positive, empowering, or feel-good? What unsettling possibilities do negative, alienated, or ambivalent feelings allow for?²⁷

2. 36. What indicators might suggest a need to re-evaluate your goals or process? What dealbreakers might cause you to pull the plug?

3. 37. What forms of evaluation feel inauthentic, limited, invisibilizing, or devaluing to you and your partners, and why? What is the intrinsic impact of the work, and how can you allow the project speak on its own terms? How can you resist calls to demonstrate its worth outside of those involved? How do you prevent “success” metrics and instruments from producing clout-chasing, needless labor, redundancies, and power imbalances?

4. 38. How can you avoid romanticizing your project or the communities involved?²⁸ What other types of engagement and evaluation might this invite?

5. 39. What is your plan for aftercare?²⁹

Inconclusion

We hope the above questions will not only support readers in developing hands-on approaches to projects, but also raise new questions – both in practice and in response to our inquiries themselves. We are, after all, but two people, and we know that there are many themes and angles we have not considered. As publicly-engaged scholars, we are eager to hear others’ questions as well. Rather than offer a conclusion, we invite a state of inconclusion in which we hope to buy a bit more time to collectively “stay with the trouble,” in Donna Haraway’s words, in interrogating how we might thoughtfully, creatively, and ethically work in partnership with and service of diverse publics.³⁰

To that end, we ask you, the reader, to spend a few moments now generating questions – ones that we hope you might consider sharing with us. We mean this quite literally: inspired by Max Liboiron’s work on and reciprocal intellectual exchange (rather than consumptive reading), we respectfully ask that you take a moment now, before you put down this paper or close your PDF, to jot down at least one question in the space below (or beyond), as a reflection of what ours have raised for you.³¹ It may feel awkward, but please imagine we were in a room together, and this is your chance to write out a sticky note, raise your hand, or start up a conversation.

We encourage you to share your question(s) at http://queryingpublicscholarship.org/.³² Our plan is to collate these into a web-based resource as well as a follow-up publication that will not only be grounded in the collective knowledge shared but also acknowledge the collective labor of those who participate.³³

Ultimately, we look forward to conversations about other pathways to public scholarship that might emerge: What’s going to happen, and what other possibilities might we explore together?