Annie Dwyer
The Humanities Doctoral Student in the Community
Graduate education can be a particularly powerful fulcrum of cultural change within departments and institutions, since the training doctoral students receive will influence how they pursue their scholarship and teaching throughout their careers. Thus Sidonie Smith’s Manifesto for the Humanities rightly centers doctoral training as a crucial consideration in shaping the future of higher education, which despite more troubling trends, also increasingly evidences new modes of scholarly production and communication that have enormous potential to make social change. As Smith argues, “To prepare a generation of humanists to be change agents for the humanities, the academy needs flexible, imaginative, and rigorous doctoral programs” that might “foster openness to new possibilities for scholarly communication to multiple audiences via multiple forms and vehicles,” among other things.1 The 21st-century doctoral education that Smith advances is inextricably bound up with what 21st-century humanities scholarship might bring to the public sphere and examined life, not only in spite of but also in response to the challenges of this historical moment, both within and beyond academia.
But PhDs in the humanities are already pursuing professional pathways in private, non-profit, and government sectors—they are, in fact, already bringing their humanities training to bear beyond the university in ways that we have only begun to track. We are witnessing the emergence of a generation of scholars who are applying their academic expertise to domains beyond higher education more than ever before. This trend of course is shaped by the dismal state of the academic job market, and indeed, recent reports from professional organizations such as the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association that call for the broadening of career prospects for PhD graduates are spurred in part by narrowing opportunities for sustainable employment in academia.2 Yet less cynically, the building momentum around the reimagining of doctoral study in the humanities also stems from the positive recognition of the critical importance of the humanities in public life. As Anthony Grafton and James Grossman, among others, have suggested, the “alt ac” career, so often discussed in terms of practicalities and material realities, can otherwise be cast as an aspirational project, an imagined (rather than imposed and inferior) trajectory, indeed, a valuable end of graduate education in itself.3
As Miriam Bartha and Bruce Burgett have rightly noted, the problem with simply “framing the ‘crisis of the humanities’ as a ‘crisis of the job market’ is that it ignores students’ motivations for entering into graduate programs in the first place.” 4 Recognizing that many graduate students pursue their training with experiences and commitments that inevitably exceed and often take priority over any aspiration for a tenure-track job, Bartha and Burgett suggest that the “crisis talk” of the past few decades has principally functioned to “insulate the guild apprenticeship model from critique and to block the development of cross-cutting, assets-based approaches to graduate curricula and pedagogy.” 5 Without any guild to guard, the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities has been positioned to pursue a number of initiatives and programs over the years to support graduate students’ pursuit of interdisciplinary work, digital humanities projects, and publicly engaged scholarship more broadly. However, it seemed possible to facilitate more enduring cultural change within humanities departments themselves and develop broader institutional supports for new visions and models of graduate education.
The Simpson Center has launched a program, now well into its fourth year, which extends its historical commitment to public scholarship. Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics began in 2015 under the leadership of Kathleen Woodward, Director of the Simpson Center, with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.6 I’m honored to have more recently stepped into the role of Assistant Program Director, a post previously occupied by Rachel Arteaga, now Assistant Director of the Simpson Center and Associate Director of the program. The Mellon grant is helping us pursue the transformation of graduate education through three main programmatic components. First, it offers summer fellowships for doctoral students to pursue public projects that are often unrecognized and even discouraged during the traditional course of doctoral study. Second, the program provides summer support for faculty to develop publicly engaged graduate seminars, aiming not only to increase the frequency or legitimacy of community-based research and teaching but also to foster the theoretical knowledge and thoughtful approach that ensures its successful realization. Finally, the program develops partnerships between the University of Washington and two-year colleges in the Seattle District in recognition of the vital role of two-year colleges in the wider landscape of higher education. In brief, six UW doctoral students in the humanities are paired with faculty mentors in their disciplines from North Seattle College, South Seattle College, and Seattle Central College. These six Mellon Fellows for Reaching New Publics, as they are designated, “shadow” their faculty mentors over the course of the academic year, and in the process, they deepen their understanding of the teaching and learning that takes place in the community college context.
If the community college figures so centrally in this initiative that aims not only to reimagine the humanities PhD but also to reach new publics, it is because we recognize that the classroom itself can be a highly potentialized space of public mediation, where new ideas and conversations might be taken up by members of diverse communities, refigured in relationship to incoming knowledges, translated into multiple idioms, and ultimately be put to work in the world. The potential for the classroom to emerge as a site of public practice is particularly potent in the community college context, given the relative accessibility and attendant racial and socio-economic diversity of these institutions, which educate 44 percent of all undergraduates and nearly 50 percent of students of color in the United States.7 Arguably, the teaching that takes place at community colleges does not simply reach new publics but actually plays an important role in the formation of new publics and counter-publics. Given the importance of the community college to increasing educational access and opportunity and, indeed, enabling the very prospect of social mobility and participatory democracy, we wanted to change the narrative so often promulgated in doctoral training that discounts the community college job as a viable choice and equates the “desirable” position with the research university professorship. Leonard Cassuto, among others, has noted how “the two-year college ranks low in the hierarchy of our research culture,” and the stigmatization of community colleges becomes a significant obstacle to PhDs who have the desire and drive to become community college professors.8 As one of several Community College-Research University Partnerships funded by the Mellon foundation, we are paying close attention to the growing evidence that this perception is slowly shifting on the national stage.9 What we didn’t fully anticipate is the leading role that Mellon fellows themselves would play in this process at the University of Washington.
Far from simply individually benefitting from a short-term professional development opportunity, Mellon fellows are catalyzing enduring cultural change in their departments. The immersive experiences that fellows pursue at their respective community college campuses—observing classes, attending advising sessions, joining departmental meetings, interviewing community-college faculty and deans, and occasionally co-teaching courses with their mentors—often prompt them to rethink their career trajectories, and in any case, convince them of the worthiness of a community college career, regardless of their future plans. But further, fellows have proven to be quite voluble in sharing their experiences and attendant insights and have become staunch advocates for community college students and faculty. To cite just a few examples, fellows have arranged community college campus visits for other graduate students at UW who are interested in teaching-intensive jobs; they have worked to improve communication and especially transfer agreements between their home departments and the community college departments in which they are placed; and they have sought to strengthen community college supports for humanistic study, such as study-abroad opportunities.
For it not only who is in the community college classroom but what is being taught that our fellows have found so compelling and transformative: they’ve seen how an entry-level English class, for instance, can equip students with the rhetorical awareness and writing skills they’ll need to adapt to and succeed in subsequent college classes of any subject. They’ve witnessed how a history class can situate the current political climate in ways that empower immigrant students and students of color to emerge as campus leaders. I could cite additional examples, but the point I want to underscore is that the humanities in particular play a vital role in these educational contexts, and there is evidence of this beyond the anecdotal. Significantly, while student enrollment in the humanities has declined over the last few decades, humanities enrollments in two-year colleges have actually increased, and not only so, but also among minoritized populations. A report recently released by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences reveals that, in 2015, 32.1 percent of associate degrees in the humanities were awarded to black, Latinx, or Native students—a 149 percent increase from 1989, when the data was first collected.10 Such statistics reveal, as Kathleen Woodward has argued, that “the educational purposes” of community college and research institutions “are not as divergent as they once were perceived to be.” 11 Echoing Woodward, I would underscore the need to work toward greater “articulation—and more formal articulation agreements—among different kinds of institutions of higher education” as part and parcel of the push for the public humanities.12 The articulation of higher education institutions is critical for the success of transfer students, and taking the long view of the conditions of student success also entails preparing future faculty for community college teaching, which often requires greater pedagogical savvy and cultural competency than graduate students gain through traditional TAships at elite institutions.
As we are finding, developing community college-specific professionalization opportunities for graduate students does not only proceed or follow from the establishment of institutional ties—such opportunities can likewise deepen and strengthen institutional relationships. Recognizing that the Mellon fellows are more effective at transforming their departmental cultures than any institutional entity might be, in recent years we’ve simply sought to amplify their voices and widen their reach. For instance, we’ve begun regularly to invite fellows’ UW faculty advisors to attend program-related events; we’ve launched the Reimagining the Humanities PhD blog, where fellows frequently post thoughts and explore questions that emerge from their immersion in the community college context.13 We’ve asked our incoming cohort of fellows, together with their faculty mentors, to present major takeaways from their fellowship experiences during a departmental faculty meeting at the close of the academic year. We have already witnessed significant shifts in faculty and student perspectives as a result of fellows’ influence, and we anticipate these perceptible changes will only accelerate in the final year of the grant.
While the development of these relationships, institutional networks, and professionalization opportunities is crucial for the future of graduate education—and the public humanities—we’ve also found that curricular change within university graduate programs themselves can have substantive effects, both within departments and across wider publics. Many of the graduate seminars that have been developed through the Mellon initiative have seamlessly integrated scholarly training and professional development for careers beyond academia. For example, Leigh Mercer, Mellon fellow and Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Washington, developed a seminar to train graduate students in the critical implications of film festival organization. The resulting course, “Hispanic Film and Film Festivals,” provides students with a foundation in Spanish and Latin American film history and acquaints them with the central questions and concerns of film studies. But further, students gain practical curatorial experience by planning a film festival for Latinx high school students, which was successfully piloted at Chief Sealth High School in May of 2018.14 The course is exemplary, insofar as it eschews a bifurcated understanding of scholarly training and alternative professional development: the either/or understanding of career diversity efforts that often eventuates in either sad resignation to or peeved avoidance of rethinking the humanities PhD. As Sylvia Gale has noted, there is limited usefulness to “trajectory thinking,” which implies that professional development is a “linear experience involving the accumulation of credentials” that leads to some clearly defined goal.15 After taking Mercer’s class, the graduate students enrolled may become professors or film programming professionals or something else altogether, but in any case, they will be better prepared to “fully activate the roles and projects” that matter to them.16
Yet in Mercer’s seminar—and in other graduate seminars that have been developed with Mellon support—students practice public scholarship in the present even as they cultivate a thoughtful orientation to publicly engaged work that will of course shape any future endeavors. In other words, the seminars are often constructed around an actual public project that has palpable impacts upon broader publics and/or creates sustained engagement with wider communities. The film festival for Latinx high school students that Mercer’s students planned is a significant public project in itself. But further, Mercer and her students hope this pilot festival might be replicated across Washington State, and so they have pursued this work with an eye to sustainability. As part of their planning, for example, Mercer’s students have created accompanying educational materials for high school teachers that might be used to facilitate classroom discussions about the films during future iterations of the festival, as well.
Another graduate seminar that will create and query a durable public project is currently being developed by Rich Watts, Mellon fellow and Associate Professor of French & Italian Studies at the University of Washington. “Translation and Its Publics” will reposition translation as a public practice, underscoring how translation both expands publics laterally and delimits the terms and modes of public discourse (as in imperial and nation-building projects). While exploring the public dimension of translation theoretically, the seminar will also create authentic opportunities for “public translation” assistance for low-income individuals and/or community organizations through a “public translation collective.” Like Mercer’s seminar, then, Watts’s course will productively blur the lines between scholarly and applied knowledge, preparation for public engagement and practice. While training graduate students for a range of roles and opportunities, the seminar will simultaneously instantiate and actually expand Julie Ellison and Timothy Eatman’s classic definition of publicly engaged academic work, as indeed, translation is an activity that is both scholarly and creative, amalgamating as much as alternating between multiple modalities of making knowledge “about, for, and with” diverse communities, and in the process, actually widening the parameters of the public participation.17
Yet what is most powerful and somewhat singular about the “artifacts” or public projects that emerge from these graduate seminars—considered qua project, rather than qua pedagogy—is the thorough, collective examination they undergo, which is of course still an aspect of their pedagogical function. As Mercer’s students face the challenges entailed by translating their scholarly expertise for new publics or carrying out collaborative cultural labor, for instance, they have a forum that encourages the constructive confrontation and analysis of these challenges, i.e., the classroom. I say this opportunity afforded by the classroom context is somewhat singular, since the series of summer meetings involving both faculty and doctoral fellows, during which fellows workshop either their public projects or publicly engaged seminars, actually functions in a similar way. Doctoral students have often voiced the benefits of making connections with faculty who can offer sound advice about successfully navigating the profession as a public scholar, and faculty have often commented on the usefulness of having doctoral students’ fresh experiences and insights on offer when working through the challenges of graduate course creation. The advantages extend beyond the insights gleaned from others in different institutional positions, however. In the context of the summer workshops, faculty and doctoral students are compelled to consider their practice as public scholars and teachers in a vigorous, concerted way. This robust community of practice at the University of Washington has extended beyond the summer workshop sessions and across different cohorts, and it has been an important outcome of the Mellon initiative in itself.
For faculty fellows during the summer workshops, questions often surface around the confluence of pedagogy and public engagement. For instance, in the summer of 2017, Regina Lee, faculty in Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, developed a graduate seminar in feminist new media studies. When workshopping her course, we explored, among other things, the quandaries involved in tasking students with feminist digital object creation when such an assignment might render them vulnerable to trolling. Carmen Gonzalez, faculty in Communications at UW, used her workshop to troubleshoot the teaching of community-based research methods in a way that would not only maximize graduate student learning but also foster an equitable relationship with the community partners involved. As we watch successive cohorts help one another to identify and address such complications and challenges of publicly engaged teaching, which no single person could recognize and resolve on their own, the importance of pursuing this work in the context of a collaborative learning environment becomes more and more evident.
So too, the public projects that graduate students pursue are refined and rethought through conversations with the cohort. But just as faculty fellows’ graduate seminars shape the publicly engaged work of the graduate students who enroll in them, during the summer workshops, doctoral fellows’ public projects often instantiate models or raise questions that inform the current and future public practice of doctoral and faculty fellows alike. To take one example, Joshua (Griff) Griffin, a summer Mellon fellow and doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, is currently collaborating on a participatory digital archive project that documents the effects of climate change on Kivalina, an Inupiaq community on a barrier island off the coast of Alaska.18 In light of the inadequate government response to the destruction of Kivalina’s shoreline—along with eroding space for housing, access to clean water, and economic opportunities for youth—the digital archive aims to preserve and leverage Kivalina’s history, enabling tribal members and their allies to counter misinformation about climate displacement, attract partners across the globe, and foreground cultural knowledges in relocation planning, among other goals. As Griffin and his collaborators have pursued these project objectives, they have explored a number of equally important questions attuned to their underlying values and commitments: How might the Kivilina Archive model ideals of accompaniment and allyship? How might the Kivilina Archive both prioritize and protect tribal knowledges in relocation discussions? How might the Kivilina Archive meet the disparate needs and objectives of multiple users and effectively reach multiple intended audiences? On the one hand, these questions have contributed to practical solutions, such as the use of a digital platform, Murkutu, that allows the general public and tribal members differential access to the contents of the archive. On the other hand, as Griffin prompted us to examine these questions with him during one of the summer workshop sessions, we found that many of them have no easy answer, yet still generate the productive exploration (and sometimes unease) that is often the basis of ethical, reflective praxis. Not surprisingly, perhaps, we also noticed how questions and issues we raised during one session were often refracted through the other projects underway in the room during other sessions—Lee’s interrogation of the circulation of digital objects and the construction of alterity in online spaces, Gonzalez’s will to balance reciprocal relationships with community partners and the advancement of learning objectives, for instance, usefully overlapped with or reframed the questions raised by Griffin’s presentation. Despite the wide range of interests and public engagements represented by the Mellon fellows, then, the summer workshops prove to be a fertile arena for the cross-pollination of ideas and the co-production of problematics.
In fact, what I especially want to underscore as I highlight this work is the way in which the public humanities, in the context of the Mellon program, are allowed to emerge as a problematic. Michael Warner usefully distinguishes between the practice of problematization and the work of problem-solving in his classic essay, “Styles of Intellectual Publics.” In Warner’s rendering, problematization is a necessary part of public engagement—though it may not address any immediate exigencies or realize practical political ends, the intellectual work of problematization extends the horizon of what can be imagined.19 And the imaginative work of problematization, I want to suggest, is necessarily meta-critical as well as critical—it encompasses more than the “content” of any given critique or argument in a public forum. As public scholars, we also need to problematize the modes, the means, the methods of address and engagement that we use. In order to advance the public good of the humanities beyond its current horizons, in other words, we need to shuttle between the critical project of “doing” work in the public humanities, and tackling all the pragmatic challenges this entails (from securing resources to identifying platforms), and posing the public humanities as critical project to be consistently interrogated and reimagined. While events such as the Western Humanities Alliance conference afford this opportunity, so often the performance of mastery overrides the posture of learning—at academic conferences, as elsewhere. And this is perhaps the most compelling reason to turn to graduate education when we consider the humanities in the community.
If graduate students are so often at the vanguard of exciting work in the public humanities, this is not simply because they are frequently younger, more energetic, and technologically savvy. While we often talk about shaping the next generation of scholars or supporting graduate students as they pursue public-facing work, and it is imperative that we pursue institutional supports for 21st-century scholarship and scholars, we need to learn from graduate students as well, specifically, the way they unabashedly position themselves as learners. In advance of receiving any support in this endeavor, many graduate students in humanities have already abandoned, albeit perforce, the “apprenticeship” model of graduate education, the careful imitation of the master scholar, and assumed the role of an investigator: driven by curiosity and encounter rather than disciplinary dictates, asking questions and seizing opportunities rather than doggedly pursuing established pathways, failing and fumbling as often as succeeding—and in any case, holding open the question of what “success” means. Though one measure of the “success” of any programmatic or institutional effort to reimagine doctoral training might be the degree to which it positions graduate students as co-investigators in this endeavor. For what we’ve learned at the Simpson Center about reimagining doctoral education for humanities graduate students is how much we have to learn from them.
Notes
1 Smith, Manifesto for the Humanities, 128.
2 MLA Task Force, Report on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature.
3 Grafton and Grossman, “No More Plan B.”
4 Bartha and Burgett, “Why Public Scholarship Matters for Graduate Education,” 39.
5 Ibid.
6 Simpson Center for the Humanities, “Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics.”
7 Century Foundation Task Force, Bridging the Higher Education Divide, 3.
8 Cassuto, The Graduate School Mess, 50.
9 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “Community College-Research University Partnerships.”
10 Humanities Indicators, Demographics of Associate’s Degree Recipients in the Humanities.
11 Woodward, “We Are All Nontraditional Learners Now,” 57.
12 Ibid., 61.
13 Reimagining the Humanities PhD (blog), Simpson Center for the Humanities.
14 For more information about Mercer’s class, see Joseph, “A Hispanic Film Festival, Curated for Teens.”
15 Gale, “Arcs, Checklists, and Charts: The Trajectory of a Public Scholar?” 319.
16 Ibid., 325.
17 Ellison and Eatman’s definition reads, “Publicly engaged academic work is scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area. It encompasses different forms of making knowledge about, for, and with diverse publics and communities. Through a coherent, purposeful sequence of activities, it contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value.” See Ellison and Eatman, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University.
18 At the time of writing this essay, the archive has yet to launch. However, more information about the project can be found on the project website. See “Re-locate Kivalina.”
19 Warner, “Styles of Intellectual Publics,” 125-58.
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