PLAN, Manage Your Professional Development as a Graduate Student
Posted Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
For most graduate students in the humanities, scholarly work involves solitary research in libraries or archives and publishing articles in specialized journals for expert audiences. But a dozen students in the Rackham Public Humanities Institute wrestled with other questions. What is the nature of public scholarship in cultural fields? How can cultural research and arts practice generate collaborative partnerships between academic and non-academic communities? How can public scholars navigate the arc of an academic career?
The week-long Public Humanities Institute was sponsored by the Rackham Graduate School in August. Addressed to students pursuing careers in academia, the goal of the PHI was to hone students' capacity to imagine and enact collaborative culture work across multiple sites inside and outside the university, and to foster the capacity to represent their own aspirations and abilities as publicly-engaged scholars.
Co-directed by Julie Ellison, Professor of American Culture, English, and Art and Design, and Kristin Hass, Assistant Professor of American Culture, the institute engaged students in an intense week of site visits, presentations, workshops, and discussions. This pilot cohort was comprised of students eager to integrate their careers as academic professionals with the opportunities of public scholarship. During the week they also discovered shared interests across their various academic disciplines.
The readings and discussions were provocative and useful, but the students found the site visits had the most impact on their thinking. They heard from cultural leaders at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, the Earthworks Urban Farm, a project of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen in Detroit, and the University's own Detroit Center, Ginsberg Center for Community Service, and Arts of Citizenship Program. U-M faculty who are involved in collaborative projects at these sites include Evelyn Alsultany of the Program in American Culture at the Arab American National Museum and Nick Tobier of the School of Art and Design at Earthworks. The visits featured speakers who themselves move between the academy and the community and work with members of the public to produce knowledge for the public good. The students found inspiration from these engaged practitioners, including Karl Pohrt, founder of Shaman Drum Books and the Great Lakes Literary Center, and poet Terry Blackhawk, Executive Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit.
"Being pressed to think and to imagine how I as a student of English lit studying a rather esoteric area could find ways to collaborate with groups outside of the university was both rigorous and rewarding," noted student Adam Mazel. "I've come away with an understanding of a wide range of possibilities that my public scholarship might take."
According to Professor Ellison, the PHI was a "leadership seed bed for the next generation of publicly engaged scholars." The Institute provided a space for the students to reflect on their growing expertise as scholars whose cultural work moves across multiple sites both inside and outside academia. Professor Hass noted that over the course of the week the students realized "they were participating in a national conversation about the public humanities and civic engagement."
The group dedicated the last afternoon of the Institute to probing evaluation of the pilot version and, most importantly, brainstorming about the future. Professors Ellison and Hass plan a series of follow-up workshops during the Fall 09 and Winter 10 terms. The application process for the 2010 Institute will be announced in early winter.
