Public Humanities across Campus

THE HEMISPHERIC INSTITUTE

Interview with Ana M. Dopico and Marcial Godoy-Anativia

1) Tell us a little bit about the Hemispheric Institute?

Ana: The Hemispheric Institute was started 20 years ago as a place within the university to help create archives and scholarship around performance, around activism and around scholarship that wasn't then understood as proper scholarship in the Americas. 

Hemi was really one of the first original digital scholarly humanities institutes where new work that was taking place across Latin America and the United States was made available to everyone for free. The Institute created the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) in partnership with Bobst library and the Mellon Foundation and that collaboration yielded a collection in which sometimes ephemeral and sometimes very canonical works of artists and of theater performers, and activists, individual and collective,  are preserved in perpetuity. 

Marcial: Our notion of public scholarship really centers around the creation of networks. It's not simply just kind of broadcasting out to a world that we hope is listening. It's an act of creating partnerships and collaborations. We have over 60 what we call member institutions, which are universities, primarily across Canada, the United States and Latin America and then cultural centers, NGOs, activist collectives, performance collectives, and so kind of our work kind of generates outward from us, but also outward from all of those nodes in the network. 

2) How does knowledge production look different at the Hemispheric Institute than it might in a more traditional academic space?

Ana: What Hemi has done over its history and continues to do is to really decenter kind of a place of knowledge production one by recognizing that artistic practice and expressive practice is a form of knowledge making. It’s not simply that we scholars study producers of art and humanistic objects, but that producers are equal and engaged in similar knowledge making practices that we make legible to each other, and can speak across the modes and ways and forms whereby we all create knowledge together and collaboratively. 

One thing that Hemi has done beautifully and continues to do is to redefine and push the humanities. And we've done that in terms of thinking performance, theater, music, dance and other forms of collective practices. When you take a bunch of undergraduates to the Garifuna community in the Bronx and they understand what orality is, what musical knowledge is, what matriarchal cultures are, and what dancing clubs are among women, there's a series of very tangible things they can experience. That breaks the bubble of what the humanities is as the novel, the sculpture, the more static notion of the humanities. 

One great case in point is the Nuyorican Poets Cafe founders archive which is a collection at Hemi that was inaugurated last year. That archive was created by a doctoral student at NYU, Karen Jaime, and she brought it to Hemi through the life of her dissertation. She is now a professor at Cornell with a book based partly on that archive, called Queering the Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida. She is in this beautiful circuit of connection to the community of the founders. And so we inaugurated the archive, celebrated her book, created a digital publication honoring one of the poet's, Miguel Algarín and we were part of an event at the Nuyorican where it all began and where Karen herself had been DJ and MC.

I want to underline one last thing, which is about keeping public humanities practices from being extractive, from just creating this collection and that collection. When you do you sort of amputate it from the agency and community that created it. In a way it ceases to be public. That's how we come to define the public as something that retains and nurtures and empowers that connection of the makers to the work as it kind of lives archival lives. At the moment at which that's amputated, maybe that's kind of where the line of the public is.

Marcial: I think that we've also thought of the Institute as an archive or as a place where archives that may become at risk can live. The HIDVL is a very important repository for preserving artistic, cultural and political expression. But we also have thought about it historically, and I think to this day, as a place where we're archives that are at risk in particular countries or places might come and live and be protected. 

I want to underline one last thing, which is about keeping public humanities practices from being extractive, from just creating this collection and that collection. When you do you sort of amputate it from the agency and community that created it. In a way it ceases to be public. That's how we come to define the public as something that retains and nurtures and empowers that connection of the makers to the work as it kind of lives archival lives. At the moment at which that's amputated, maybe that's kind of where the line of the public is.

3) What obstacles does working from within the university put in place for doing this kind of work? 

Ana: It’s a 24/7/365 fundraising extravaganza. And we are among the fortunate because we have an endowment, but we are coming to the end of the Mellon grant. The limitation of always chasing grant money means that on the one hand, it drives you forward, but on the other hand, it can interrupt durations of projects and commitments that you would otherwise extend. 

University leadership and departments also need to understand that public work has to be hardwired into the curricula. I think there's still a sense that the public humanities are supplementary. How can the university support more intensely the networking of these public humanities projects into curricular content? There's a million things happening in departments and everybody has their own class. So creating something that can integrate more of those conversations would be great. And also underlining the commitment to the archival and to the democratization of new archives.

Also, if public humanities work is not recognized or visible as counting toward tenure or assessments for professors, then academic freedom is limited because you can't do the work because it won't count. It's absolutely key that public humanities work is visible, is recognized and is counted toward tenure toward academic evaluation all the way through. Otherwise, you don't really have the freedom to do the work that needs to be done.

THE KEVORKIAN CENTER

Interview with Mohamad Bazzi and Jared McCormick

1) Tell us a little bit about the Kevorkian Center.

Mohamad: So much of the Kevorkian Center's mission is grounded in public outreach and programming because we have been awarded a Title VI grant that underwrites many of the center’s activities. This grant has two components: We are a National Resource Center in Near Eastern Studies, and we also manage a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) scholarship program. Aside from an MA program with 40 students each year, we organize dozens of lectures, panel discussions, debates, and art-related events that promote the study of the Middle East, broadly defined.

Jared: There's also a K-12 teacher outreach component. We run a whole summer institute for teachers, and we have teacher fellows from the public schools during the academic year. This had to become a whole online entanglement for two years during the era of COVID restrictions.

2) How does knowledge production look different at the Kevorkian Center than it might in a more traditional academic space?

Mohamad: We have been experimenting with our Problems and Methods course, which is the required class for all incoming Master’s students and first-year PhD students in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (MEIS), our partner department. We’ve tried to reorient it from a traditional introduction to methods course into something more publicly engaged. The idea is to integrate elements of our public programming within the course.

Jared: Our MA program is very interdisciplinary. We have to think about where students are coming from and the very broad directions they're going after just a Master's program. To do this they need to develop academic rigor, but take for instance an assignment in this class where students are asked to develop two internships: one in NYC and one remote that they might possibly pursue across their coming 3 semesters. These internships provide practical training and professional contacts in NGOs, policy research organizations, media institutions, and cultural groups.

During COVID we tried to leverage the fact that we were doing our events on Zoom and to build a whole syllabus around those events. So we formed small groups and we asked students to help organize the events. We put students in groups based on their interests and they helped to organize various online conversations. They had to decide: Do you want to do a panel? Do you want it to be online? Do you want this to be something more creative? Do you want this to be something in Washington Square Park? How do you guys want to come together? And then they had to do some kind of an academic extension of that event. That meant collecting resources, creating writing that went on our website, etc.

It was great. Now those students have graduated, and it's amazing to see the friendships and collaborations that formed. It achieved many things that we had hoped it would, but was also an immense amount of work.

Mohamad: We have also been experimenting with our Practitioner-in-Residence program. We repurposed our adjunct funds into funds for a practitioner in the broad sense of the term – artists, writers, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, etc. We've been steadily building on that model.

It started as a non-credit workshop. A practitioner would come in and run a five- or six-week workshop on a theme connected to advocacy, the arts, journalism, or public policy. Then during COVID, Jared started inviting organizations, not just individuals, to serve as practitioners, which expanded the program’s reach. We started with the Arab Image Foundation, and we began expanding each workshop into a semester-long course. For Spring 2023, we’ve organized a workshop on “Reimagining Middle East Coverage,” with New Lines Magazine, a new digital publication that is doing innovative journalism from the Middle East.

Jared: It is amazing, but it takes so much time to organize because it's not a normal class. It's five or six long conversations with prospective practitioners to help frame what it is, how you do it, to collect prior examples, and to develop a workable syllabus. You have to be ready to fail and for things to fall apart. That's part of it. But we understand that within Middle Eastern studies, or area studies, we're doing something that is actually really exciting and at the cutting edge of sharing knowledge and expertise.

You have to be ready to fail and for things to fall apart. That's part of it. But we understand that within Middle Eastern studies, or area studies, we're doing something that is actually really exciting and at the cutting edge of sharing knowledge and expertise.

3) What obstacles does working from within the university put in place for doing this kind of work? 

Mohamad: In terms of larger challenges and obstacles, there is the intersection between public and digital humanities. Our website, social media channels, and overall digital capacity to reach the outside world is really important for us. Currently, there are rules and restrictions on how we design and manage websites hosted on NYU’s servers. We feel like our website is bursting at the seams, and it still doesn’t meet all of our digital needs!

Jared: We have two websites that were built out of student work and that we are calling the Digital Middle East Lab. We'd like to have a more robust capacity to showcase work with practitioners and our events as well as for dynamic syllabi. 

This is one way to catch those students that are maybe on the fringes or trying to do something new. And with improved digital capacities we can ask students, “What are you going to do for your thesis?” “What kind of format does that take?” “How is it not just a piece of paper?” We are preparing them for that world where knowledge production isn't just the paper you produce that goes into an academic journal.

THE URBAN DEMOCRACY LAB

Interview with Gianpaolo Baiocchi

1) Tell us a little bit about the Urban Democracy Lab?

Gianpaolo: The idea of the Urban Democracy Lab owes more than a little bit to ideas of “popular education” that existed all over Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and were influential during the aftermath 15M Movement (the “Indignados”) of Spain that I had the opportunity to observe and learn about in 2012.  The methodology goes by different names, like “socio-praxis,” or Factories of Dreams. The idea was to create democratic spaces of conversation to imagine and build things together. Those spaces are about democratizing knowledge production, bringing different kinds of expertise together, facilitating a “forward looking” conversation across different experiences.  This is instead of the university going out to capture other people's ideas and digest them in some way. 

We started in 2014, first focusing on public events of the sort and then building out a scaffolding for students to be engaged through our fellowships, then followed by working groups we have had over the years.  We have worked on all sorts of topics - from urban humanities, to participation, to mutual aid, abolition, municipalism, displacement and housing.  Since the pandemic we have been focusing a lot on land and non-market kinds of housing.  

Sometimes our work has taken the form of bringing people together to ask, “Okay, what would it mean to just cancel rent for everybody for a month? What would that look like?” And then academics and different kinds of people come to the table and we sort of cook it up together. So that is the big picture vision.  

Partnership and collaborations are obviously central to our work, and a bedrock principle for us is that all our relationships be non-extractive. We are concerned in everything we do that collaborations have a horizontal feel to them and that we're democratically accountable. We spend a long time on the process of collaboration because we believe that the kind of knowledge that we can produce this way is different. And we believe that the university can provide resources and space for collaboration that other institutions cannot. We are knowledge producers and we have spaces and resources and time.

2) How does knowledge production look different at the Urban Democracy Lab than it might in a more traditional academic space?

Gianpaolo: When we started doing this, I was new to this sort of institutional role. So I talked to people in movements and organizations who told me that university-based “parachute” projects come up with deliverables from the university side, but are often useless and exploitative for those outside of the university. I remember someone literally said to me that “the last thing we need is undergraduates walking around housing projects with clipboards, talking about how forlorn and sad people of color are.” 

There is this phrase that this group called Black Space uses, which is to  “move at the speed of trust.”  And so that's something else that guides our intellectual production.  So we move at the speed of trust and try to have long term relationships. We have worked with Right to the City for eight or nine years. We've worked with SEDOAC which stands for the Domestic Workers Alliance of Spain for like five years, Housing Justice for All for four or five years. 

We've been very fortunate to have partners that we work with over a longer period of time. This means also they have no compunction in calling us up and saying, “Oh, by the way, this sucks or we disagree with this thing you're saying. Change that.” Building those relationships where there's enough trust to then “Can you tell me why?” In my experience that has only been possible with longer term things.

I realized, too, after about two semesters people don't live on the semester schedule. Our lives are semesterly and cloistered behind private space. And we naturalize the semester, but the semester doesn't exist for most people. The fact that you have to do a report by the end of the semester means nothing to someone who's involved in some campaign or trying to put the means together to survive. 

I suppose it goes without saying that we try to be responsive when people ask us for stuff. For example, right now we have a request to help do a new oral history that's a counter history of the housing movement in New York City. That was a request and we have a grad student who is going to do it. Another one we got was to produce a story-telling toolkit.

We get policy type requests, like with all the social housing stuff we've done as of late, that are “on spec.” We ask “what would this look like?” and then we try to help facilitate a meeting where we partner and sit down. It’s not frictionless and it's not super fast. You cannot speed write articles, like I was taught to do.   

I will say that there is a lot of joy in doing work this way. This can be an attractive and meaningful way to do work and we have been very fortunate over the years to have very talented and committed younger scholars who have worked collectively with us and our partners to produce really wonderful work. I am very proud of all the work we have done and facilitated over the years. 

There is this phrase that this group called Black Space uses, which is to “move at the speed of trust.” And so that's something else that guides our intellectual production. So we move at the speed of trust and try to have long term relationships.

3) What obstacles does working from within the university put in place for doing this kind of work? 

Gianpaolo: The university can be a very privileged setting to do this kind of work owing to the resources we have.  Library access, time, convening power, space are things we sometimes take for granted.  But there are barriers.

Number one is the tyranny of deliverables. Stuff that is great is also intangible sometimes.  It can take time. Whether 100 people showed up for an event or not says nothing about the quality or its impact. The eventual output of some work in a peer-reviewed journal can make a lot of difference to a scholar looking for work or for tenure.  But it takes away from the bigger purpose. Similarly, sending two dozen students out to parachute into communities for a couple of months in the Summer gives a greater return in terms of deliverables than the slow work of building trust and preparing students like we do.       

Number two is this broad emphasis on branding. It can be difficult to attract faculty to work on a project because they feel they should be out there promoting their own personal brand or project.  And generally, we are encouraged to chase funding and recognition as an individual initiative within the university rather than collaborate.  

And third is that doing things at NYU is very difficult. There is a constant struggle to schedule things because of the semester schedule. Of course, strictly academic events can be scheduled on a semester basis and with lots of advance notice. But doing community-facing programming requires a flexibility we do not have or is very difficult to cultivate. Paying a symbolic honorarium for “regular” people who are not consultants is also extremely difficult and unfriendly. And actually hosting things on campus can be difficult.  Getting people on campus can be inhospitable and intimidating.  During COVID it was a nightmare.  I suppose I am naive, but we are a private university serving the public good. We get property tax breaks. Why isn’t it easier for someone to just walk in and feel welcome at an event?