Graduate career development has grown over recent years with increasing interest in public scholarship and career diversity. In interviews with 41 public humanities leaders, participants agreed that public humanities introduces students to various career opportunities through community-engaged work and allows them to develop skills needed for those careers, such as event planning and fundraising. Some participants also noted that career diversity is becoming an important area of public humanities leadership roles. However, participants shared that faculty have not been formally prepared for their public humanities roles, and, in turn, faculty have not been prepared to teach graduate students for public humanities or career diversity. How do faculty prepare students for opportunities when they do not feel prepared for those same opportunities? This piece offers answers to that question.

The essay aims at discussing visual arts and gender issues, with specific reference to models for female empowerment by means of aesthetic paradigm shifts. These took place thanks to pioneering video artists in the 1990s and were then upheld by new millennium music pop stars in highly influential videoclips. I argue that videos by artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Cheryl Donegan, Mona Hatoum, Andrea Fraser, and Susan Hiller matter today for how they tackled gender issues by means of the moving image, especially by challenging the male gaze and creating gender specific perspectives long before women could claim a similar influence on the television business and in the movie industry. They offered ground-breaking strategies in visual representation and video narratives of considerable impact since they were later adopted in public life, particularly through female pop stars’ aesthetic transfer into music videoclips, such as with Beyoncé. In this regard, I observe how art historical references are applied in recent videoclips to challenge the male gaze, letting a threefold strategy emerge: thematic reprise, iconographic substitution, and aesthetic transposition.

We all consume the humanities through our engagement with the cultural, creative, and historical materials that influence our views on ourselves, others, and the world around us. However, can consumers also be considered humanists? We argue the answer is yes when consumption choices become symbols and expressions of one’s authentic self and meaningful connective points to others. Using hard-core surfing enthusiasts and thrifters as examples, we introduce the notion of fringe consumption as a form of cultural entrepreneurship and public expression of the humanities that centers individuality, authenticity, and otherness in an otherwise dominant mainstream environment that pushes people to always want more of the same.

This manifesto is a case study of a new method of configuring Humanities wisdom. Following the 2008 financial crisis, students and parents questioned the value of Humanities disciplines in relation to debt and future employment prospects. The experiment described here is an attempt at Arizona State University to reinvigorate humanistic pedagogy by means of an entirely new transdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts degree that abandons the disciplinary nomenclature that goes back to Aristotle and was instantiated, then ossified, in the twentieth-century university. The problem, it is argued, is not in the content, but in the naming: History, Literature, Philosophy, Language, and Religion. The experiment is to begin not with these discrete and seemingly moribund bodies of knowledge, but with the most pressing concerns of present and future publics. We name these, and so we name the new degree, Culture–Technology–Environment. The manifesto describes the design and content of the degree and raises the hope that curricular innovations of this kind will create Humanities-wise citizens for the future.

There is nothing unprecedented about prosecuting Donald Trump. While it’s certainly true that no president has (yet) to be indicted, if we look at to the long stretch of English political-legal history, we find many precedents. Because what happened in England fueled the American Revolution and the Framers’ view of the chief executive. As Richard II and Charles I discovered to their cost, acting as if they were above the law could lead to their deposition and eventual death, and the framers agreed. Thomas Jefferson asserted in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), retained “the powers of punishment or removal” of their rulers. Holding the chief executive, whether a king, a prime minister, or a president is irrelevant, to account for alleged crimes is, as the phrase goes, baked into American constitutional law. But the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise. The president now enjoys the immunity Charles I claimed. We are now at the cusp of something without precedent: an absolutist presidency.

The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) has played a significant role in American government since its establishment by President Reagan in 1982. Although not part of the President’s Cabinet, the PCAH serves as an advisory body directly appointed by the president to support and promote arts and humanities across the nation. Despite its non-partisan mission, the PCAH has not been immune to political turmoil. In 2017, following President Trump’s controversial comments on the Charlottesville violence, the PCAH members resigned en masse, leading to the committee’s temporary disbandment. President Biden reinstated the PCAH in 2022, emphasizing its importance in fostering civic engagement, social cohesion, and equity through the arts and humanities. This article features an interview with current PCAH members, including National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Shelly C. Lowe, Oscar- and Tony-award winner and PCAH Co-Chair Bruce Cohen, and PCAH member and interdisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. The discussion highlights their personal and professional journeys within the arts and humanities, underscoring the profound impact of cultural experiences on their lives. They advocate for continued government support, citing the arts and humanities as essential for a functioning democracy.

As an African American deeply impacted by the personal and communal trauma from the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and alleged “racial reckoning” that took place globally immediately thereafter, I have personally wrestled with the responses of many non-Black persons to these events. Though the responses came from well-intentioned friends and colleagues trying to be helpful and conciliatory, they resonated as an empty refrain: “I don’t know what it means to be Black, but….” Each time I heard this refrain, I found myself pondering more deeply what and how these folks, and all folks, understand and practice empathy. My experiences and research revealed a similar concern that I witness across many situations in which people think they are being helpful when in fact they are not doing what real empathy requires – being with the person rather than trying to imagine what the person is going through. This article challenges the faulty ways that people have been taught to think about and practice empathy in hopes of offering a model that might facilitate in more meaningful ways ties that bind human hearts and minds.

In the 2020 video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the player builds the collection of the impressive Animal Crossing Museum (ACM). Exploring the visitor experience of this video game museum’s art wing from the perspective of museum professionals allows for the discovery of inventive ways to deepen connection with museum patrons in the virtual space. The ACM is more successful at engaging visitors than traditional virtual museums. It meets visitor needs by offering an immersive, interactive experience, and depends on direct action from the visitor to expand and grow its collection and space. By taking lessons from the player interaction design of the ACM, virtual museums can be designed to meet the psychological needs of visitors and build long-lasting relationships between the visitor and the institution. From the text, this essay proposes seven lessons for designing virtual museums: start with visitor experience at the center of virtual museum design, allow the visitor to collaborate on the creation of the virtual museum, make the virtual museum a habit with intermittent rewards and increased access over time, build social interaction into the virtual museum, add an avatar, show off curator personality, and address colonial roots of museums.

In his novel Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman imagines that we will one day engineer an artificial intelligence that will mimic humans in every way. In order to reproduce “the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being,” however, the computer that houses it will have to be bigger than the Earth. This essay takes Grossman’s novel as the start and endpoint for a discussion about the role of the public humanities in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The response of the humanities to the pervasive fatalism about an AI-driven future should be twofold. First, they can serve as an antidote to a credulous, amnesiac present which sees the future as already decided, with inexorable effects that we can only adapt to. Second, they can challenge the now pervasive view of intelligence as computational and algorithmic. The humanities refuse to see humans as codable, or as just part of the data stream. We should certainly study the ways in which AI is changing what it means to be human, but we should never lose sight of what is most astonishing, and uncopiable, about us.

During the political regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), public knowledge in India has been tarnished with political colors. The BJP has used the color saffron, which is closely associated with the Indian National Flag, as a sociopolitical tool to signal patriotism, nationalism, indigenization, and decolonization. However, the government’s policies and messages focus on the self-profiting mechanisms of Hindutva ideology. According to the BJP, the notions of pre-colonial knowledge systems and patriotism are only related to the Hindu religion. Thus, public knowledge in India has been politicized through “saffronization”: the color saffron, rightwing political ideologies, and religious fundamentalism combine to create false beliefs about Indian history and culture, which then inspire and excuse hate and crime.

A decade ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published The Heart of the Matter report to much acclaim. But what has been the impact of such a high-minded report? In the decade since its publication, we have seen a prevailing anti-humanities rhetoric with significant consequences to the security and persistence of humanistic principles. This article focuses on what many consider to be the most crucial problem of our time, climate change and its consequences, in thinking about how this overwhelming problem offers a rallying point for the insertion of the humanities into practical solutions which require an upending of discrete disciplinary perspectives as well as a bridging of the academic and public divide so that any space between the practice of the humanities and advocacy for social and environmental justice is vastly diminished. It argues for a thorough review of academic reward systems, for a broadening of scholarly definitions, and for a pedagogical focus that demands theory commit to empirical application. Finally, it suggests that we reengage our storytelling prowess with an emphasis on the power of metaphor in order to bolster imaginative response and methodological flexibility that is both cogent and compelling.

In this piece we argue for the revolutionary power of collective and collaborative work through the most maligned aspect of academic labour: service. The co-authors are the heads of academic units at Concordia University, who in fall 2023 organized a coalition of unit heads from across their university who worked collecitvely to push for greater budget transparency. Their experience challenges the false paradigm that would identify the “public humanities” exclusively with academic research and teaching, to show how service to one’s unit, faculty, and university is an important site of resistance, activism, and struggle. Done with intention and by modelling democratic and collective processes, service is not only a form of resistance to the erosion of any thinking and doing that is not under the thrall of capitalism, but it is also a way of enacting the public humanities themselves, through thinking, writing, talking and working out ideas together, a potential site for creating intellectual life by co-opting bureaucracy to creative and political ends.

This essay brings Black Studies, now commonly referred to as Africana Studies, further into the public humanities dialogue. Scholars in the public humanities field are urging a practice of humanities that is collaborative and committed to racial and social justice, especially in the context of community-based scholarship. The origin and current protocols of Black Studies are also community-centric and operate within a liberatory framework in that it is ultimately concerned with the vitality of Black people across the diaspora. The essay describes the correlation between Black Studies and public humanities and discusses the usefulness of both disciplines in reckoning with slavery and its legacies at higher education institutions. In addition to giving a short genealogy of public humanities and Black Studies, the essay uses William & Mary’s Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and Chesapeake Heartland: An African American at African American Humanities Project at Washington College as examples on how to possibly navigate the challenges ahead as public humanists and Black Studies scholars critically engage with the public on memorialization, reconciliation, and redress.

This article argues that university presses are key partners in supporting and promoting the public humanities. The article offers numerous examples.

The idea that democracy is in crisis is nothing new; ancient Greek commentators like Plato and Thucydides argued that political instability was baked into democracy as a regime type. Can examples drawn from classical Athens make a useful contribution to discussions of the failings of contemporary democracy? This article considers a range of interventions from the past decade in the United States and the United Kingdom, carried out at different scales and through different methods. It considers the strengths of working with material from the distant past – its non-partisan nature offering a safe space to discuss political conflict without engaging in it – and also the weaknesses, such as the limited franchise of ancient democracies like classical Athens, and the need to consider specific historical issues in their own context. It also considers the unfamiliarity of ancient history and the way in which knowledge of the classical past can itself be perceived as class-bound and exclusionary.

Modern democracies, including the United States, rely upon three normative elements: (1) rights expressing the dignity of the citizen; (2) law expressing a commitment to public reason; (3) elections as the method of selecting representatives. In each dimension, citizens are to see a representation of themselves as popular sovereign. Morality and law are not matters to be resolved at the polls. Yet, popular opinion, supported by contemporary social sciences, tends to reduce democracy to the third element. On this view, the higher the voter turnout, the better the democracy. In an age in which we worry as much about majority, as minority, tyranny, this view is not credible. A mob at the polls is still a mob even if it is a majority. An exclusive focus on quantification represents a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of democracy. Democratic politics includes an interpretive practice across the moral and the legal dimensions. It relies as much on persuasion as on proof. Recovery of a vibrant democratic life requires a renewed appreciation of a public humanities, not as a pastime but as way of living.

Public humanities happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life. Providing a 10-point typology of public humanities, this article explains why we need the humanities – as individuals and as societies – and narrates some moments when the humanities have changed the world. We discuss the rise of “public humanities,” some critiques of the field, and a vision for its future.

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.

Lately, my students have been asking: “Why should we be here, when there are people suffering out there?” Evidently, they are asking about the public value of higher education. But they are also asking old questions, some of the oldest that human beings have seen fit to ask. Versions of these questions appear in all scriptural traditions, in ancient and modern philosophical works, in stories and novels and songs. They are questions at the core of what we call “the humanities.” Part of why we study the humanities – and why we must – is to get help in asking, articulating, and trying to answer such questions. There aren’t single right answers to any of those questions. Each of us must work answers out for ourselves. But we can work out better answers for ourselves if we spend time in the company of others who take those questions seriously. This is not just an individual task; it’s a collective task of great public import. In this short piece, I defend the idea of the public humanities on these terms.

Stew (born Mark Stewart) is a punk rocker and musical theater writer and performer. This profile combines new interviews of Stew with an analysis of his Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange, which was recently revived in the West End, to illuminate how his rock music-inspired persona influences his approach to creating musicals.