Virtual Borders and Broad Scale: CHCI’s Annual Public Humanities Network Meeting on Community, Communications, and the Humanities During the Pandemic
Amidst the pandemic, the story of how an in-person meeting is transformed to a virtual gathering is not a new story these days. However, this story is a little different. CHCI’s Annual Meeting, which brings together diverse voices from its global network of more than 250 humanities centers, institutes, research libraries, and related organizations, was originally planned to take place in Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A. The location had been a strategic choice, as the theme of the 2020 Annual Meeting was Borders, Mobility, and Displacements and the group had intended a day-long visit to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands area of Nogales, including a guided tour by representatives of the Tohono O’odham nation.
Instead, a group of more than 130 Public Humanities Network members from 84 organizations joined a virtual meeting on May 11. The chair of the Public Humanities Network meeting, Nicholas Allen (University of Georgia), opened the meeting by stating, “Today is very much by way of an experiment, a learning experience. It’s also an expression of our global solidarity however imperfect or uneven.”
For the humanities especially, the loss of in-person connection is a common and challenging refrain; the group acknowledged that it’s important to continue to catalog what we miss when we’re apart, physically. But it also saw a benefit of this virtual transformation, and the topic of borders nevertheless emerged as a theme in the context of virtual public humanities gatherings, programs, and initiatives around the world.
“It allows us to think about a larger scale for our efforts. That is something that this pandemic is doing for us. Although people are experiencing the pandemic in very different ways, we are all experiencing it in some way and we’re finding ways to reach beyond borders and to communicate with each other,” said Pauline Strong (University of Texas at Austin).
Jennifer Ho (University of Colorado Boulder) shared an idea that the pandemic is actually making humanities work more visible as people come together to do things at a larger scale. “How they can have a textured locality but also be visible in the largest way,” she said.
John Paul Christy (American Council of Learned Societies) suggested that we catalog and archive these efforts in places that are visible to people who might consider themselves outside of the humanities.
This is especially resonant in the context of public humanities efforts. Nicholas Allen said, “The public humanities are not just a network, but at the heart to the consortium, at the heart of our larger projects, at the heart of our institutions, and, perhaps even most importantly, at the heart of our citizenship at the moment.”
The speakers (listed below) received a set of questions in advance of the meeting on the theme of community, communications, and humanities. They responded to these questions and also took further questions and insights from meeting participants.
- Shaul Bassi, Ca’Foscari University of Venice
- John Paul Christy, American Council of Learned Societies
- Daniel Fisher, National Humanities Alliance
- Jennifer Ho, University of Colorado Boulder
- Teresa Mangum, University of Iowa
- Phoebe Stein, Federation of State Humanities Councils
- Pauline Strong, University of Texas at Austin
- Kathryn Temple, Georgetown University
- Nicholas Allen, University of Georgia (Chair)
On the theme of community, participants discussed how they are maintaining public partnerships during challenging times, honoring issues of equity and social justice, and reaching out globally.
Also on the topic of community, Shaul Bassi talked of the humanities in Venice, a city that he said had been linked to climate change and sea level rise, before COVID-19. He talked about the city as a community but also envisioned the kind of community that was needed for the near future.
“If we were thinking of how the city had to be reinvented before, I believe that now, today, even more so, the humanities have a very specific role – ambitious, chaotic, utopian – to contribute to a whole new notion of the city. And not just of the city of Venice as such, but of the city of Venice as both a very singular place and also a kind of pragmatic place,” Shaul Bassi said.
On the theme of communications, Jennifer Ho discussed issues of racism and shared a project to record instances of hate directed toward people who are perceived to be Asian or Asian American, in the context of COVID-19.
On the theme of humanities, several people mentioned the power of poetry during these challenging times and shared innovative ways they’re sharing or receiving poetry with old and new audiences, including with front line healthcare workers through existing health humanities initiatives at the University of Texas at Austin.
“We’re also posting publicly to perform a broader service by bringing humanities perspectives to people on the front lines of the crises,” Pauline Strong said.
It was fitting, then, that Nicholas Allen closed the virtual meeting with a poem by Seamus Heaney called Postscript (or watch Heaney read it here):
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
We will share materials from this meeting soon.
A recording of the session can be found below.