Resources

Each year, PAGE asks Fellows to submit a few readings that have informed the practical and theoretical aspects of their own engaged scholarship. Many of those readings, and others, can be found in the resource archive list below.

Please help us build our resources by sending the books, articles, or media that is important to your work by sending them to Adam Bush at asbush@gmail.com.

 

Introduction to Civic Engagement and Public Scholarship

This  is a perfect first stop for those new to Imagining America or just beginning to think of their projects in terms of engaged scholarship.  The below readings can help to define terms like Public Scholarship, Arts, and Engagement, and work to highlight contemporary debates about the meaning, purpose, and value of “public scholars” or “public intellectuals.”  Talking through these terms in relationship to our individual projects as well as (briefly) the work of scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Paulo Freire, and John Dewey, we will touch upon major areas of civic engagement for academics, including performance studies, public sociology, and urban studies, and how positioning our work through this lens of engagement in graduate school can help us successfully navigate these disciplines allow our projects to flourish.

Questions to Consider:

  • What is civic engagement as it relates to higher education?
  • How is it different from other types of scholarship?
  • What do you need to know before you begin engaging with community partners?
  • What are the implications of pursuing such work in regard to writing a thesis or dissertation, to publishing, or to thinking about career trajectories inside and outside of the academy?

Suggested Readings:

 

Understanding, Initiating and Maintaining Successful Partnerships

How can graduate students work best with faculty and community partners in building community in the arts, humanities and design?  These readings are geared toward helping understand best practices in developing and maintaining ongoing partnerships with community leaders and university constituents. They address how to create effective and transformative community-academy partnerships balanced by one’s own practical needs and degree requirements as a doctoral student, as well as ways to navigate challenging power dynamics, partner accountability, and methods for fostering and maintaining supportive partnerships in publicly-engaged projects.

Suggested Readings:

 

Scholar-Activism and Activist-Scholars

At the center of deciding to invest in civic engagement is a desire to integrate our graduate work with our community commitments. In the hustle and bustle of organizing, writing papers, and developing projects there is rarely an opportunity to reflect on what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how others have done it before us. These readings discuss the meanings, implications, challenges, and opportunities involved in scholar-activism.

Questions to Consider:

  • What are different ways of envisioning scholar activism?
  • What impact do we carry with us as PhDs in off-campus community settings?
  • How can we leverage university resources to benefit our community partners?

Suggested Readings:

 

Publicly Engaged Scholarship and the Arts

As critics and theorists debate whether or not “community-based art” should be judged by its artistic and aesthetic merit or its efficacy as a social “service,” how do we, as artists and scholars working collaboratively and with communities, evaluate the successes of our own projects? Should we be the ones to evaluate the work? Should it be left to the critics? Or should the voices and opinions of the community participants be most important?  How do we evaluate arts/work, especially in the context of the academy, which has its own set of expectations?

These readings discuss creative, personal, ethical, and political challenges in community-engaged scholarship in the arts, and issues and challenges related to arts-based community scholarship.

Suggested Readings:

 

Other Readings