Susan Derwin
Civic Empowerment, Public Humanities, and Graduate Education in the 21st Century
During the Great Recession, while facing severe budget cuts, University of California administrators and faculty were called upon to develop plans to protect the core missions and programs of the humanities departments. These were difficult conditions under which to think resourcefully; nonetheless, at UC Santa Barbara, as at many other campuses, this period saw redoubled reflection about the role of the humanities in a liberal education, their place within the mission of the public university, and the kinds of careers that graduate students trained in the humanities could pursue post-graduation.1 And while the budget of University of California has recovered from the economic downturn, data released last year by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences confirm what humanities departments across the country know first-hand: nationally, there has been a steady increase in the number of advanced degrees in the humanities, but the number of academic jobs continues to decline.2 The need to ensure that humanities graduate students are prepared for career paths both within and beyond the academy is thus stronger than ever. At UC Santa Barbara, equipping graduate students in the humanities with skillsets that will enable them to pursue multiple career paths has been an undertaking in which the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) has played a central role. In 2019, the IHC will begin offering a Graduate Certificate in Public Humanities, an endeavor that gained further momentum two years ago, when the campus was awarded an NEH Next Generation Ph.D. planning grant.3
While successful job preparation and placement are shared goals of graduate students and programs, of equal priority to both is achieving those outcomes through training that recognizes and draws upon the social relevance of the humanities. It is essential for universities, especially public ones, to support graduate students and faculty pursuing publicly-engaged work that mobilizes the civic-strengthening capacities of the humanities. At UC Santa Barbara, this means preparing graduate students for multiple career paths through courses, practicums and internships that train students to work with diverse publics and communities, to understand the historical and social foundations of public humanities, and to reflect critically, as practitioners, on the work they do.
Even before the IHC began to plan its Graduate Certificate, it had been developing public humanities programs that advance the commitment to civic engagement informing the founding mission of the UC system. The UCs were established through the 1862 Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges so that higher education would be available to all children in the state. Abraham Lincoln signed the legislation, in recognition of “the right to rise…[as] what makes the American experiment so exceptional.” 4 The 2007 UC Commission on General Education affirmed the public mission of the system, emphasizing that educating California’s students meant preparing them to become agentive citizens. The Commission’s report stated that campuses should give the highest priority to advancing civic education in pursuit of four interrelated objectives: “the transmission of civically relevant information; education in ‘learning how to learn’; cultivation of an understanding and appreciation of democratic politics; and guided, structured opportunities to link civic education in the classroom with supervised service work beyond the campus.” 5 UC Santa Barbara is well positioned to ensure that its humanities graduate and undergraduate programs are public-facing and publicly engaged. As one of only two Hispanic Serving Institutions in California that are also members of the Association of American Universities, forty percent of its students are the first members of their families to attend university, and many of them desire to serve their communities.
A number of IHC community-engaged programs draw upon the skills and practices of the humanistic disciplines to foster civic empowerment. One of the most successful of these programs is “Interpreting in Our Local Schools,” a collaborative learning project with local elementary schools that brings UC Santa Barbara undergraduate and graduate students to the school sites to serve as Spanish-language interpreters during their twice-yearly parent/guardian-teacher conferences.6 Before interpreting, students receive training from a faculty member who specializes in community interpretation and who works with the interpreters to understand the family-based issues, potential content of the conferences, frequently used vocabulary, ways of keeping attention focused on the teacher-parent exchange, and issues of confidentiality that come into play when interpreting. In addition to Spanish interpretation, UC Santa Barbara students have also served as Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese interpreters for conferences and assessments for the Goleta Union School District. For parents and guardians who do not speak English, this interpreter service is crucial. It enables them to communicate with their student’s teacher, and, through this contact, engage directly in their student’s learning experience. UC Santa Barbara undergraduates and graduates studying translation and interpretation gain experience in using their academic skills in a social environment that includes community members, teachers and school administrators. Their motives for participating in the program highlight some of the goals the program enables the participants to meet. One interpreter observed, “I can relate to those kids’ experiences on a personal level. Growing up in Orange County, most of the student body throughout elementary school was Latino/Chicano, including me. As a result, interpreter assistance was also scarce for many of my peers. I remember vividly being in the 4th and 5th grades [and] being told by my teacher that all the English-Spanish slots had already been taken. I remember being frustrated trying to translate for both my teacher and mom at the same time for 30-minute teacher conferences.” Another interpreter recalls, “Having interpreted for my parents at almost all my parent-teacher conferences and back to school nights as a child, I remember interpreting being nerve-wracking. I did not know if the teacher was going to ask me to translate a word whose meaning I would not know at such young age.” About her reasons for participating in the program, a third interpreter relates, “I wanted people in my community to benefit from my education. I believe that UCSB students should have a better connection with younger students in IV [Isla Vista, the local college town], as well as their parents. Seeing that students of similar backgrounds can attend a four-year university may encourage students to put all their effort into education. I also have an interest in elementary school teaching, where I anticipate having to be my own translator at times.” Finally, as the following observation attests, the program enables the participants to experience professional environments in which they are interested: “Becoming a professional interpreter and translator is my prospective career choice. For this reason, I believe that this opportunity will further my experience in interpreting by providing me with the assets and knowledge needed to work in such field.”
As “Interpreting in Our Local Schools” demonstrates, institutions of higher education are well-positioned to meet the crucial need of local communities for language interpreters. Programs such as this one create a meeting point for the university and the local communities, and, in doing so, bring awareness to people within and outside the academy of the relevance and value of humanistic training—in this case, in language fluency and brokerage—as cultural labor that promotes greater social engagement. “Interpreting in Our Local Schools” has helped parents to advocate more effectively for their elementary school students, enabled UCSB students to serve as change-agents and role models, and given the university an opportunity to deepen ties to local public school students in ways that, it is hoped, will enable more students to become college-bound.
Another community-based IHC program, “Foundations in the Humanities,” creates educational opportunities for incarcerated citizens, and, like the interpreter’s program, embodies the democratic mission of the UCs. The program pairs individuals incarcerated in California prisons with UC Santa Barbara graduate students, who serve as mentors in correspondence courses in literature. Co-created with the Los Angeles Archdiocese’s Partnership for Re-entry Program, the courses involve periodic on-site classes with the program director (myself). Most of the learning, however, takes place long distance, with students sending written responses to essay questions to their mentors, who then reply with individualized feedback. Adam Morrison, a UC Santa Barbara doctoral candidate in religious studies, who has taught in the program, relates his belief that “we are all better served when we are able to extend our teaching and research to new and diverse communities and to include their voices and experiences in the conversation.” About his involvement he observes, “It has been an incredibly engaging experience, and one that has challenged me to really think about the way I engage my students. Without the benefit of face-to-face interaction, I have had to think about how I can meet students in a text.” English Ph.D. student Nicole Dib, another instructor, observes, “We’re in a unique situation to be able to correspond with these students. I firmly believe that research in the humanities shapes our world, and that literature in particular builds the world around us and helps us see connections between social forces and identities more clearly and with more urgency. To that end, this course teaches everyone involved about new parts of our world.” The literary works selected for inclusion in these courses, and the essay assignments developed around them, focus on cultivating critical analysis, and literacy more broadly, as a way to increase social awareness, stimulate civic participation, and cultivate care of oneself and others. To date, about two hundred incarcerated students have taken part in the program, which is now in its third year. It has been successful, because it serves all who participate, both its students and its instructors. Graduate students are able to develop their pedagogical skills in ways that will make them better teachers in any classroom and do so in the context of a learning environment that enables them to act upon their commitment to social justice.
“Interpreting in Our Local Schools” and “Foundations in the Humanities” are two of many publicly engaged university programs throughout the country. Hosting the 2017 Western Humanities Alliance meeting on the topic of “Humanities in the Community” was an ideal opportunity for the IHC to bring together colleagues from the WHA to share their experiences and research in public humanities. The presentations covered a wide range of issues, from the role of the humanities in the cultural study of quantification, to the precarity of citizenship and community-formation for those experiencing multiple forced migrations in the recent past and present. A common theme of inquiry was the pedagogy and scholarship of social transformation, and we present many of the compelling papers on that topic here in this volume.7
The collection opens with the transcript of a public dialogue that took place between Suzanne Lacy and Pablo Helguera, both leaders in the field of Social Practice Art. Concurrent with the conference, UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design and Architecture Museum mounted an exhibition, The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement, which presented a pivotal work each artist had undertaken in the Americas. The “schoolhouse” in the exhibition title refers to Helguera’s School of Panamerican Unrest, a traveling schoolhouse that accompanied Helguera on a 2006 road trip from Alaska to Chile. At each stop along the way, Helguera engaged local community members in dialogue about a specific challenge their community was facing. “The bus” in the exhibition title refers to Skin of Memory, Lacy’s mobile museum project that, for ten days, stopped in different quarters of a violence-ridden community in Medellín, Colombia and displayed a temporary “Museo arqueologico del Barrio Antioquia” in which were gathered memory-laden objects collected from local families in the region. The discussion between Lacy and Helguera explores their shared commitment to an artistic practice that strives to effect social change through a pedagogy practiced in a learning environment that is both collectively created and reciprocal. The artists discuss how their specific projects unfolded and, more broadly, the aims of socially engaged art as practiced in “public and/or a relational space where our subjectivity meets with another subjectivity, or other subjectivities.” 8 9
Scholar-artist Ruth Hellier-Tinoco’s piece, “Co-mingling Bodies and Collective Postmemory: Creative Theater and Performance Experiments as Humanities-Engaged Community Building,” is grounded in an exploration of the body’s function as a container and transmitter of memories that are at once individual and collective and whose expression through theatrical performance opens possibilities for envisioning new futures and ways of being. Hellier-Tinoco presents two “performance contexts that offer the potential to generate communities of action”: Zapata, Death Without End, an experimental collaborative piece that involved multiple theater collectives and spectators, and a course she designed and taught, “Creating Experimental Performance: Memories/Histories, Processes/Practices,” in which she deployed techniques drawn from Zapata, Death Without End as a model for creating collectively generated communities through a group process that in itself can be empowering.
Like Hellier-Tinoco, California State University, Dominguez Hills professors Vivian Price (Interdisciplinary Studies) and Michele Bury and Ellie Zenhari (Art and Design) present two socially engaged projects in the field of photography. Like Hellier-Tinoco, the authors are also educators for whom cultural expression serves as a vehicle for “participatory forms of social interaction” with transformative impact. Their first case study is of a series of posters and works of art created in their collaboratively taught classes on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Watts Rebellion that occurred from August 11 to 16, 1965, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The second project is a series of photographic reenactments and interactive practices created for an annual Labor, Social and Environmental Justice Fair that takes place on the campus of California State University, Dominguez Hills. In both projects, the affect generated in the art-makers becomes a source of empowering empathy, while the accounts of how the two photographic projects were realized spotlight the careful work of relationship-building essential to the success of projects that involve collaborations between members of academic institutions and community groups.
The contributions by architectural historians Volker M. Welter and Swati Chattopadhyay, in distinct but related ways, make exemplary interventions into community cultural arenas. Welter’s “Restoration within Reach: The Miles C. Bates House, Palm Desert, California” documents the history of the Bates House, which, this year, became Palm Desert’s first historic building to be entered into the National Register of Historic Places. In reconstructing the significance of the Bates House for mid-century desert and Southern California architecture and for the history of the planned community of Palm Desert, Welter brings into focus how the preservation of the material past can become a fulcrum for community-making in the present. In the case of the Bates House, only a limited number of people in Palm Desert and La Quinta had been familiar with it and its architect, when the possibility arose that a building developer might acquire the house for the value of the land alone. In 2015, Welter curated an exhibition for the UC Santa Barbara AD&A Museum, Walter S. White: Inventions in Midcentury Architecture, and he wrote the accompanying catalogue. In thereby documenting the extent of White’s involvement in architecturally shaping the region, Welter’s work helped catalyze the community’s investment in saving the house from demolition.
In “Colonial Sovereignty and Territorial Affect,” Chattopadhyay considers the affective force of a body of materials that includes maps and a scroll relating to the 1857 Sepoy Revolt against the British East India Company. Her analysis reveals a “territorial aesthetic” that mobilizes the symbolic capacities of material objects to perform sovereign power in Colonial India “outside the aegis of the state.” In discussing these visual documents, Chattopadhyay presents a provocative theory of the exercise of sovereignty as “contingent, layered and anomalous” and as working through extended polyphonic channels or “capillaries.” Her analysis of the performative effects of material documents reveals the multiple and, at times, ambivalent voices in which colonial power “speaks.” Given that two million people around the world are living in non-self-governing territories, Chattopadhyay’s research into the affective materializations of state power in Colonial India is not only of historical interest, but its implications also extend into the present moment.
“The Humanities Doctoral Student in the Community,” gives an important overview of the place of public humanities in graduate training. Its author, Annie Dwyer, is Assistant Program Director for the Mellon Foundation’s Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics at the University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities. In discussing innovations that the Simpson Center has made to support the next generation of humanists pursuing public-facing work, Dwyer affirms the importance of recognizing the diverse goals of graduate students, noting, “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.” Her discussion also highlights how, in important ways, the public-facing projects of University of Washington humanities graduate students have had substantive and lasting effects “both within departments and across wider publics,” an outcome that further attests to the value of innovating doctoral programs, which, as Sidonie Smith writes, is “‘to prepare a generation of humanists to be change agents for the humanities.’” 10
We hope that these essays will provide readers with new frameworks, ideas, and inspiration for publicly engaged projects and partnerships that both strengthen graduate programs in the humanities and expand the role of the humanities in the lives of our communities.
NOTES
1 For a discussion of the crisis of the humanities as recurrent, see Greteman, “It’s the End of the Humanities as We Know It.”
2 “Advanced Degrees in the Humanities” and “A Path Forward as Academic Job Market in Humanities Falters,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
3 The program is currently under review by the Graduate Council of UC Santa Barbara’s Academic Senate. Pending approval, the plan is to launch the program in Winter 2019.
4 Freeling, “Conference Celebrates UC’s Land-Grant History.”
5 General Education in the 21st Century, 28.
6 Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, “Interpreting in Our Local Schools.”
7 Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, “Conference: The Humanities in the Community.”.”
8 See Reisman and Gonzales, 22.
9 See Reisman and Gonzales, 22.
10 See Dwyer, 154.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Academy of Arts & Sciences. “A Path Forward as Academic Job Market in Humanities Falters.” The Humanities, Arts, and Education. Accessed September 19, 2018. https://www.amacad.org/content/research/dataForumEssay.aspx?i=22902.
———. “Advanced Degrees in the Humanities.” Humanities Indicators. Accessed August 2017. https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=44.
Freeling, Nicole. “Conference Celebrates UC’s Land-Grant History.” University of California News, News, April 30, 2012. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/conference-celebrates-ucs-land-grant-history.
Greteman, Blaine. “It’s the End of the Humanities as We Know It.” New Republic, June 13, 2014. https://newrepublic.com/article/118139/crisis-humanities-has-long-history.
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. “Conference: The Humanities in the Community: 2017 Convening of the Western Humanities Alliance.” Accessed September 21, 2018. http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/event/conference-humanities -community-2017-convening-western-humanities-alliance/.
———. “Interpreting in Our Schools.” https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/public-humanities/interpreting-in-our-schools/.
The University of California Commission on General Education. General Education in the 21st Century: A Report of the University of California Commission on General Education. Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2007.