Spotlight on UC Santa Cruz’s Community of Practice

In this month’s member spotlight, we uplift a collaboration between institutes at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) that are prioritizing community-engaged scholarship, and we invite a close look at Watsonville is in the Heart – a community research and archive initiative undertaken in collaboration with UCSC faculty and graduate students, currently housed at The Humanities Institute.

Activating Community Engagement with IA

On March 7, 2025, IA Managing Director Stephanie Maroney and IA Communications Director Anuj Vaidya headed to UC Santa Cruz to offer a workshop on activating community engagement around public scholarship using a suite of creative tools developed at IA to help organize people, projects, and partners.

The workshop was organized by staff and faculty from the following institutes at UCSC that are each committed to community-engaged research and public scholarship: the Institute for Social Transformation, the Arts Research Institute, Campus+Community, and The Humanities Institute. Inviting IA for an engagement workshop was part of an intentional effort to increase coordination between these four impactful campus units and build capacity for deeper collaboration.

Rooted in the Social Sciences Division at UC Santa Cruz, the institute supports innovative scholarship that changes the world. It is a critical intellectual and social hub, connecting scholars across UC Santa Cruz and partners beyond the University, developing research-based solutions to urgent problems in the world.

The Arts Research Institute at UC Santa Cruz supports UC faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students involved in creative research, scholarship, and publicly-engaged practice. ARI is particularly interested in fostering critical interdisciplinary collaborations that reach across disciplines and genres and engage a broad range of off-campus partners, organizations, and communities.

Campus + Community is a hub for coordinating and facilitating partnerships between UC Santa Cruz and community groups. It supports action-oriented scholarship and applied research that advances social justice and engages the priorities, assets, and aspirations of local communities.

The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz is a hub for bold projects in the humanities. The three pillars of THI’s work – Research Excellence, Student Success, and Public Engagement – are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. For 25 years, the institute has been fostering new frames of reference to expand our thinking, spark big ideas, and work across boundaries.

The workshop began with an icebreaker that invited participants to introduce the work that they do, and to answer the following question: If you were writing a memoir about your life and times here at Santa Cruz, what would the title of that book be? And why?

This offered a chance to begin the workshop with humor and creativity, and invited participants to enter into dialogue with a sense of camaraderie and curiosity about each other. Following a presentation about IA research projects and the creation of public scholar engagement tools, attendees were given a selection of cards from IA’s Public Scholar Conversation Cards. In pairs, the cards encouraged them to reflect on their personal relationship to the numerous pathways and identities that make up the world of public scholarship, and to the successes and joys they have experienced through community-engaged work.

The gathering also offered a chance for participants to share with one another across their institutional silos, to learn about important and innovative new projects being spearheaded in collaboration with community partners, and to begin conversations toward future collaborations and resource-sharing across the various institutes.

Watsonville is in the Heart

One such project highlighted at the workshop was Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), a community-driven public history initiative to preserve and uplift stories of Filipino migration and labor in the city of Watsonville and greater Pajaro Valley, which is currently housed at THI. 

“When the United States colonized the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. government recruited Filipino farmers to come do the work previously done by Chinese and Japanese migrants. Discriminatory policies that choked off Chinese and Japanese migration left open thousands of agricultural jobs ready to be filled by “U.S. nationals,” the euphemism for the nation’s new colonial subjects.”

Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez

Assistant Professor of History at UCSC, and Co-PI on the project*

The project is spearheaded by Dioscoro Recio, Jr. (The Tobera Project) in partnership with UC Santa Cruz faculty Co-PIs Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez (Assistant Professor of History) and Steve McKay (Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Labor and Community), Digital Archive Directors Christina Ayson Plank (HAVC) and Meleia Simon-Reynolds (History PhD Candidate), and a team of undergraduate fellows.

THI at UCSC was honored as one of two inaugural winners of the “Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Community” at the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes annual meeting in May 2024 for this project. 

“At its heart, WIITH beats with a thorough-going commitment to collaborative and equal partnerships, an ethic readily evident in the ways that researchers from UCSC and the Tobera Project work together, but which has also translated into an innovative mentorship structure as well as a suite of educational and public programming that connect the team’s research with our communities.” 

Pranav Anand

THI Faculty Director**

This year, THI marks a quarter century as a dynamic hub where ideas are tested, knowledge is created and shared, and new perspectives emerge. Please visit THI’s 25th anniversary page to learn about its history and the exciting range of events planned for this this occasion.

_{^{* Excerpted from the publication: https://www.hcn.org/issues/55-8/essays-people-places-the-tractor-princess/
** Excerpted from the article: https://thi.ucsc.edu/the-humanities-institute-receives-global-public-humanities-award/}}