Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]
Note: Thanks so much to Shannon for inviting me to talk with you today, and to all of you for bearing with my needing to be on the other side of the globe this week. Part of what interested me in this conference, however, is the ways that you're experimenting with the combination of in-person and remote participation, and so what better time to have a keynote who's nine time zones away?
Note: The thoughts that I'm presenting today largely develop out of my recent book Generous Thinking, which makes the overall argument that the survival of institutions of higher education -- and perhaps especially public institutions of higher education, but other kinds of institutions as well -- is going to require us to change our approach to the work we do within them, and the ways we use that work to connect the campus to the publics that it serves. I want to focus in this talk on the good of those public connections, which are crucial both for the publics with whom we work and for us as well. I include within those publics both the folks who appear in our classrooms and the other folks we work with through our research and outreach. We can help support those publics in thinking through the pressing issues that they face in their communities and in the world today, and they can help support our ability to keep doing that work. By working in public, we can demonstrate the good of the humanities to voters who elect legislators and other representatives who determine budgets and set policies that govern our institutions; with parents who encourage or discourage our students in various directions in their educational choices; with employers who hire our students.
Note: I come to this argument through a slightly idiosyncratic path. Back in 2002, I’d just finished the process of revising my dissertation into my first book, and I was feeling stifled: years of work were stuck on my hard disk, and it seemed entirely possible that no one else might ever read it. And then I stumbled across the blog of a friend from grad school; it was funny and erudite, and it had an audience in active discussion with him. And I thought, wow, that’s it.
Note: My blog, which I started out of the baldest desire to get someone somewhere to read something I wrote, wound up helping me build a small community of other scholars working online, a community that was crucial to helping alleviate the isolation I'd been feeling. The connections I forged there helped my writing develop, and the work I published drew the first bits of scholarly recognition my work received.
Note: So fast-forward to the moment in 2009 when I’d just finished the draft of my second book and decided (with my press's blessing) to post it online for open review. I get asked a lot what made me take the risk of releasing something unfinished into the world where anyone could have said anything about it. The truth is that I ignored those risks with privileged abandon. What I knew from my blog was that there were a lot of folks out there, in many different fields and kinds of jobs, whose thoughts I wanted to hear, and who I trusted to help me make the book better. And happily, it worked.
Note: It's important to acknowledge the entire boatload of privilege not-thinking about the risks requires; I was writing from a sufficiently safe position that allowing the flaws in my work-in-progress to be publicly visible wasn't a real threat. It's also not incidental that this was 2009, not 2019. The last few years have made the risks of working in the open impossible to ignore. And yet my experiences leave me convinced that there is a community, real or potential, interested in the kinds of work I care about, willing to engage with and support that work’s development. And -- perhaps most importantly today -- willing to work on building and sustaining the connections that make up the community itself.
Note: I tested that belief in 2018 by opening the draft of Generous Thinking to a similar open review. Between early February and the end of March, I staged a process in which I first invited a group of readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, after which I opened the project to the world. In the end, 30 commenters left a total of 354 comments (and prompted 56 responses of my own). The comments are not all rainbows and unicorns: a few of them sting, and there are a few spots where I wish the gaps in my thinking had been a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
Note: So my focus today is on the ways that working in public can enable scholars to build new kinds of of communities, within our fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful multi-directional exchange, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. We can build programs and networks and platforms that don't just bring the university to the world, but that also involve the world in the university.
Note: There are real challenges to that process, however. Some of them have to do with today's communication platforms. Blogs don't readily produce the same level of engagement that they did in the early 2000s. In part this has to do with their massive proliferation, and in part it has to do with the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks. As a result, online communities of readers and writers are unlikely to develop spontaneously; instead, building community around online work has to be far more deliberate, reaching out to potential readers and participants and finding ways to draw them, and ourselves, back into sustained conversation.
Note: And then there are the trolls -- not a new phenomenon, by any means, but they certainly seem to have multiplied, and the damage that they can inflict has escalated. Taking one’s work public today can involve real risk -- especially where that work involves questions of social justice that are under attack by malevolent groups online, and especially for already marginalized and underrepresented members of the academic community who open up engagement with an often hostile world.
Note: These problems don't have easy answers. I don't have a perfect platform to offer, and I don't know how to fix the malignant aspects of human behavior. Countering these destructive forces requires advance preparation and focused responses. Ensuring that public discourse about scholarly work remains productive requires a tremendous amount of collective labor, and the careful development and maintenance of trust, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But there are several other challenges that I want to explore a bit today, challenges that are about the ways that we as scholars do our work, the ways that we can draw a range of broader publics to that work, and the ways that we can ensure that the work we do together is supported in an ongoing way.
Note: None of what I'm about to say is meant to imply that there isn't room for internal exchange among academics; there is, and should be. But there should also be means for the results of those exchanges to become part of the larger cultural conversations taking place around us. And by talking about "publics," I mean to indicate that our work doesn't need to address or engage everyone, all the time; rather, different aspects of our work might reach different audiences at different moments. Knowing how to think about those audiences -- and, indeed, to think about them not just as audiences, but as potential interlocutors -- is a crucial skill for the 21st century scholar.
Note: So I want to consider three issues in thinking about how those publics might interact with our work. The first is ensuring that the work we do can be discovered and accessed by any interested reader, and not just by those readers who have ready entry to well-funded research libraries. It should go without saying that it's impossible for anyone to care about our work if they can't see it. The second challenge lies in ensuring that the work is accessible in a very different sense: not just allowing readers to see it, but enabling them to see IN it things that they might care about. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we hope to engage the public with our work, we need to ensure that it is open in the broadest possible sense: open to response, to participation, to new kinds of cultural work by more kinds of public thinkers.
Note: So, starting with access. Mobilization around open access began in the scientific community more than twenty years ago and has since spread, with varying degrees of uptake, across the disciplines. I dig into the history and particulars of open access in the book, but the key point is that establishing and supporting a globally equitable mode of distributing knowledge turns out to increase the impact of work so published. In other words, what's good for the public turns out to be good for research, too, not least because making even the most highly specialized work openly available gives it the greatest opportunity to be found and built upon.
Note: That said, it's important to note that there are some significant challenges to enabling and supporting open access. Freeing journal articles from barriers to access is a relatively attainable goal, but as we know, in many humanities fields the most important work done takes the shape of books rather than articles, and the technologies and economics of book publishing are quite different. Moreover, the economic model into which much open access publishing has settled in the last decade, in which the exchange has bee "flipped" from reader-pays to author-pays, presents problems of its own. This flip has worked in the sciences, where grants are able to cover publication costs, but it's a model that's all but impossible to make work in the humanities. Moreover, the move from reader-pays to author-pays risks shifting the inequities in access from the consumer side to the producer side of the equation, such that researchers in fields without significant grant funding, or at underfunded institutions, can't get their work into circulation in the same way that their more privileged colleagues can.
Note: So I don’t want to suggest that creating public access is easy, but I don’t want to restrict our sense of the possibilities either, because the public engagement that we have the opportunity to create has enormous potential. Making our work more openly available enables many more scholars, instructors, and students world-wide to use it. Making our work openly available also allows it to reach other interested readers from across the increasingly broad humanities workforce who may not have access to research libraries. Expanding our readership in these ways would seem an unmitigatedly good thing.
Note: And yet, it's clear that we often resist opening our work to broader publics, for a variety of reasons. Many of us keep our work restricted to our own discourse communities because we fear the consequences of making it available to broader publics--and not without justification. The public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. Because the subject matter of much of the humanities and social sciences seems as though it should be accessible, our determination to wrestle with difficult or highly politicized questions and our use of expert methods and vocabularies can feel threatening to many readers. They fail to understand us; we take their failure to understand as an insult. (Admittedly, sometimes it is, but not always.) Given this failure to communicate, we see no harm in keeping our work closed off from the public, arguing that we're only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter?
Note: It matters because the more we close our work away from the public, and the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of the academy, the more we undermine the public's willingness to support our research and our institutions. As numerous public humanities scholars including Kathleen Woodward have argued, the major crisis facing the funding of higher education is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good. We wind up strengthening that conviction and worsening the crisis when we treat our work as private. Closing our work away from non-scholarly readers might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous in the current economic and political environment. The risks are real, especially for scholars working in politically engaged fields, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public, including our governments, of the relevance of what we do on campus.
Note: And of course engaging readers in thoughtful discussions about the important issues we study lies at the core of the academic mission. It is at the heart of our values. We don't create knowledge in order to hoard it, but instead, every day, in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and in our writing, we embrace an ethic of generosity, of paying forward knowledge that we have received as a gift. We teach, as we were taught; we publish, as we learn from the publications of others. We cannot pay back those who came before us, but we can and do give to those who come after. Our participation in an ethical, voluntary scholarly community is grounded in the obligations we hold for one another, obligations that derive from the generosity we have received.
Note: We work, however, in an environment that often privileges prestige over all other values. I dig into the institutional responsibility for that bias toward prestige in another part of the book, but I want to think briefly about its effects on us. Surveys of faculty publishing practices indicate that scholars choose to publish in venues that are perceived to have the greatest influence on their peers, and that influence is often understood to increase with exclusivity. The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so. This reasoning, though, too easily bleeds into a sense that the more exclusive a publication’s audience, the higher its value. Needless to say, this is a self-defeating attitude; if we privilege exclusivity, we can't be surprised when our work fails to make its importance clear to the public.
Note: There's much more to be said here, especially about the erasure of labor inherent in assuming that all publications should simply be made available for free online. But the thing that I'm asking us to consider is whether those of us who can afford to be generous -- those fully-employed members of our professions who can and should make a gift of our work to the world -- might be willing to take on the work of creating greater public engagement for our fields by understanding our work as a public good, by creating the greatest possible public access to it.
Note: But creating that public good requires more than simply making our work publicly available. Critics of open access often argue that the public couldn’t possibly be interested in scholarly work; they can't understand it, so they don't need access to it. Though I would insist that those critics are wrong in the conclusion, they may not be wrong in the premise; our work often does not communicate well to general readers. And that’s fine, to an extent: there should always be room for expert-to-expert communication of a highly specialized nature. But we've privileged that inwardly-focused sharing of work to our detriment. Scholars are too often not rewarded -- and in fact are at times actively punished -- for publishing in popular venues. And because the values instantiated by our rewards systems have a profound effect on the ways we train our students, we build the wall between academic and public discourse higher and higher with every passing cohort.
Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing venues and projects that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. There are also a host of other kinds of digital projects that demonstrate the ways many scholars are already working in multiple registers, engaging with multiple audiences. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But in order to open up those concerns, we need to give some serious thought to the ways we write as well. Because mainstream readers often do not understand our prose, they are able to assume (sometimes dismissively, and sometimes defensively) that the ideas it contains are overblown and unimportant. And this concern about academic writing isn’t restricted to anti-intellectual critics. Editors at many mainstream publications have noted the difficulty in getting scholarly authors to address broader audiences in the ways their venues require. We have been trained to highlight complexity and nuance, and the result is often lines of argumentation, and lines of prose, that are far from straight-forward.
Note: This is not to say that all academic writing should be done in a public register. But I do want to argue that we would benefit from doing more work in ways that are not just technically but also rhetorically accessible. After all, our work in the classroom demonstrates that translating difficult concepts and their expression for non-expert readers is central to our profession. This act of translation is an ongoing project that we might take on more broadly, getting the public invested and involved in the work taking place on campus. But for that project to be successful, we need to hone our ability to alternate speaking with one another and with different audiences.
Note: So we need to think about what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work, which by and large is not something scholars are trained to do. There are initiatives that are working to help scholarly authors focus and express the ideas contained in their scholarly publications in ways that help broader audiences engage with them. Ideally, this kind of writing should become part of graduate training across the university.
Note: We also need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. University processes of evaluation and assessment too often shove things that don’t meet a relatively narrow set of criteria for "research" into the category of "service." As a result, public work is frequently underrewarded. Writing for the public is often assumed to be less developed, when in fact it’s likely to have been far more stringently edited than most scholarly publications. Worse yet, the academic universe too often assumes that a scholar who writes for a public market must “dumb down” key ideas in order to do so. We need to recognize and appropriately value the work required to make room for the general reader in our arguments, and in our prose.
Note: But we also need to understand those arguments and that prose as one part of a larger, multi-voiced conversation. And this is the key: having worked to engage the public, how can we activate that public to work with us? This is where creating public access and valuing public accessibility transforms into the creation of a genuinely public scholarship, work not simply performed for the public but that includes the publics with whom we work, inviting our chosen communities enter into our projects not just as readers but as participants.
Note: Recent experiments in "citizen science" provide some potentially interesting examples, projects like Galaxy Zoo that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. But what might the citizen humanities look like? It might look like museum exhibits such as Pacific Worlds at the Oakland Museum of California, which engaged members of local Pacific communities in the planning and development processes. It might look like The September 11 Digital Archive, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project, which presents first-hand accounts of the events of that day, along with photos, emails, and other archival materials from more than 150,000 participants. It might look like the Baltimore Stories project at UMBC, which used humanities scholarship as a convening force to bring community organizers, educators, and non-profit organizations together to explore narratives of race in American life. What these projects have in common is that each of them explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern belongs to them. The work involved is theirs not just to learn from but to shape and define as well. Engaging these publics in working with scholars to interpret, understand, and teach their cultures and histories can connect them with the projects of the university in ways that might help encourage a deeper understanding of and support for what it is that the university does, and why.
Note: By working in publicly engaged ways, and by bringing those publics into the self-reflexive modes of humanities- and social science-based critique, we have the potential to produce a renewed conception of how intellectual life operates in contemporary culture -- but that renewed conception is going to require us to be open to a new understanding of the notion of our "peers." Open, public scholarship might lead us to understand the peer not as a pre-existing credential but instead as a status that emerges through participation in the processes of a community of practice. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we address within that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening the notion of the intellectual, or the peer, to a much broader range of forms of critical inquiry and active project participation has the potential to reshape relations between town and gown, to lay the groundwork for more productive conversations across the borders of the campus, and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work of the academy matters for our culture as a whole.
Note: And much of that work begins with establishing the networks through which new forms of collaborative, public scholarship can be realized. New networked structures -- including conferences like this one -- might enable us to ask what would be possible if we were to open up our scholarly practices up to real public engagement, to deep interdisciplinarity, to new modes of working. How can new networks enable public universities to more genuinely focus on the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of the state? How might such a network draw public support back to the institution by demonstrating the extent to which the work done here is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? For public universities to win back public support, they must find ways like this -- structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just the mission statement but of the actual mission -- to place publicly engaged work at the top of its priorities. And that starts in conversations like this, where scholars can come together to explore new work in and with the public.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // [email protected]