Supporting Public Humanities at the Critical Intersections: An Imagining America Manifesto

IA Faculty Director, Erica Kohl-Arenas, has recently published in the journal Public Humanities, which continues to offer a space for scholars, artists, activists, and non-specialist practitioners to “ask big questions and pursue bold answers” across the humanities.

“Working against the grain of institutional reward structures and disciplinary norms, public scholars have long recognized that impactful research on real-world problems requires imaginative, interdisciplinary, collaborative methods grounded in communities.”

In this research paper and manifesto, Kohl-Arenas proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, she articulates how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.