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Public Humanities Town Hall

Access a recording of this event here (Youtube) or also viewable below!

The next meeting of the Public Humanities Network of the CHCI will take place virtually on Tuesday, September 26 at 2 pm EDT. The meeting will be recorded for those who cannot attend and members are welcome to email any of the steering committee with ideas or questions at any time. Please also let us know if there have been changes within your organization so that we can keep the emailing list current. And we’d be happy to welcome anyone to this network who is interested in the work we do collectively.


Agenda
Tuesday, September 26, 2 pm EDT
Zoom Meeting Link

  • Welcome
  • Group conversation: Reflections on the 2023 annual meeting
  • Discussion of call for 2024 virtual pre-meeting and annual meeting
    • Discussion of a proposed theme around the idea of community
    • Thoughts on Berkeley/area partners
    • Other thoughts, ideas and suggestions for sharing and networking
  • Discussion of a Public Humanities Network award or recognition for centers/ institutes/ programs that model innovative, inclusive practice in the publicly engaged humanities
  • Request for experienced directors to participate in a November mentoring workshop on their experience of running a center/ institute for new and recent directors
  • Brief presentation by Daniel Fisher-Livne (HUC-JIR and NHA) on survey he is conducting with Kath Burton (Routledge) and Kendra Sullivan (CUNY Graduate Center): "How might your engaged humanities work be enriched by academic and extra-academic publication?"
    • This collaborative project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, is designed to investigate the place of academic and extra-academic publication in U.S. public humanities research, teaching, and programming. The project will document and analyze the ways in which different modes of publication have impacted academic and public life, and comprises two related components: 1) a qualitative survey and 2) a series of focus groups. The results of the project will be presented at the 2023 National Humanities Conference in Indianapolis, IN and prepared for wider distribution and further engagement as the project directors work towards defining publishing solutions for publicly engaged scholars. Anyone who would like to contribute to the project is invited to complete this short survey (10 minutes) which will remain open until September 30, 2023. For further details about the project, please contact Kath Burton (katherine.burton@tandf.co.uk) or Daniel Fisher-Livne (dfisher@huc.edu).
  • Presentation by Tania Lizarazo: "Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival as 'Why Not' in the Colombian Pacific"
    • Moving beyond the negativity associated with utopia, postconflict, and survival as incomplete concepts, this talk is based on my forthcoming book, Postconflict Utopias, which explores alternative spaces, stories, memories, and practices that imagine the end of war in Colombia. As official narratives of denial and dismissal coexist with their own rupture, postconflict utopias recognize the possibility and difficulty of change as a non-linear process. I align these utopias more with Aymaran feminist scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s Pachakuti concept than with German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s utopias. In redefining survival as a deliberate embodied labor that manifests in multiple everyday actions not always recognized as political, I explore how it can alter entire communities by redefining what it means to live through ongoing multiple violences. I choose survival and not terms like survivance, resistance or resilience to recognize that survival simultaneously requires intentionality, and it is only temporary echoing “La historia de María del Socorro”—one of the stories that are part of my collaborative digital storytelling project Mujeres Pacíficas. Survival is both a utopian outcome and an everyday rehearsal in which care and showing up become a collective promise: a why not.
    • Tania Lizarazo is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics & Intercultural Communication, Affiliate Associate Professor in Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies and Affiliate Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
  • Discussion
  • Close

Yours truly,

Nicholas Allen, University of Georgia
Ulka Anjaria, Brandeis University
John Arroyo, University of Oregon
Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Joshua Calhoun, University of Wisconsin-Madison
James Ellis, University of Calgary
Teresa Mangum, University of Iowa
Kylie Message, Australian National University