Ever since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn into office in 2016, until the end of his term in 2022, his so-called “drug war” has claimed 12,000–30,000 lives. Over 150 victims were children. Seventeen-year-old Kian de los Santos, mistakenly identified as a drug addict, was gunned down on the evening of 16 August 2017. His death prompted a group of teachers and students to express themselves through empathic creative writing. What started as an assignment grew into a community of writers, activists, artists, journalists, and curators from diverse disciplines, generations, and social classes. Four years later, the project found a name: Triggered: Creative Responses to the Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines—an illustrated young adult fiction collection with a dimension of outreach towards an orphanage. The Triggered project illustrated three key features of public humanities, especially during a time of impunity: first, an imperfect but self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration between the academe and the field; second, the book’s non-elitist accessibility in both content and material; and third, the funds of the book went to an orphanage.

This article explores three projects that responded to community needs using a variety of tools and strategies for community empowerment. The first project grew out of a course that explored how Yonkers’ local history intertwined with the metanarrative of American history and policy decisions. The students created a podcast series with oral history interviews from community members, focusing on a range of topics, including climate justice, politics, gentrification, education, and shopping malls. The second project emerged as a result of a public lecture series hosted by the library. Highlighting the work of local artists, I curated an art exhibition that explored uniting the community through quilting, narratives of immigration, and the growing impact of gentrification in the downtown area. The final project sought to tell and archive stories from the community, resulting in a digital oral history archive focusing on the African American experience.

A former academic director and instructor in the Clemente Course in Humanities outlines the arc of this National Humanities Medal-winning program, and the arc of a career with it, discussing key elements involving academic and curricular matters, community partnerships, event planning, faculty and student recruitment, fiscal support, and public engagement extending across various institutions and organizations. Reflections on the value of adult education programs in the context of humanistic inquiry occasion further accounts and assertions about the nature of the public humanities, engaging publics not conceived in the abstract, in general, or for research purposes, but as they are configured and manifested among one’s fellow citizens, at particular times and in particular places.

This article considers the role of the public humanities in fostering conversations about climate science and policy through a transdisciplinary performance at the University at Buffalo in New York. The Great Lakes Climate Theatre Initiative is a new project that brings together sustainability scientists with theater practitioners to create new and mixed methods for climate preparedness that are both inclusive and impactful. Toward a Climate Haven was the first project conducted by the initiative with the goal of exploring how Buffalo might become a safe and equitable destination for climate migrants. This first project resulted in a public event that combined the performance of a newly-commissioned play, a talkback session, readings from a local youth writing workshop, and a presentation from a local county official. In this article, our team reflects on how we brought these various threads together to leverage the public humanities in the effort to prepare for climate change.

During the pandemic, specifically in 2021, I established a virtual network that gathers Iraqi women academics who are based in the diaspora and in Iraq. The network is a private WhatsApp group and an X account that promotes the scholarly work of Iraqi women and fosters collaboration. We have attracted the attention of international institutions, enlarged our group to include Iraqi women academics across the continents, and introduced our work to a larger audience. Like any other group, the network has faced several challenges. We are academic women who are overloaded with endless tasks and burdened with family responsibilities, but we have found solidarity in our group. Our steps are small and slow, but we are making progress in enhancing the global visibility of Iraqi women academics and supporting the higher education system in Iraq.

This article explores the potential of public humanities to bridge the gap between academia and the public by performing the humanities in unconventional spaces. Through two case studies – adapting George Sand’s Indiana for a local theatre production and hosting an outreach booth at a football match for their Pride game – we demonstrate the value of engaging with the public, rather than presenting research to the public. By reflecting on these experiments, we discuss what it means to do the public humanities dialogically and what we learned from this process. Our experiments reveal that effective public humanities require collapsing the divide between academia and the public by meeting audiences where they are and fostering reciprocal learning. By integrating academic insights into popular contexts, we demonstrate how the humanities remain vital and relevant. These initiatives challenge traditional models of outreach, affirming the discipline’s role as a collaborative, dynamic field that thrives through active dialogue with diverse communities.

There is a tendency in academia to expect humanities graduates to have an innate understanding of the significance of their educational training, even in the midst of a diminishing regard for their chosen subjects within educational policy and public discourse. This pedagogical reflection explores the experience of two tutors and eight students on a final-year module called “The Public Role of the Humanities.” Grounded in the pedagogical principle that the Liberal Arts offers interdisciplinary education for engaged citizenship, its remit is to explore the ways in which arts and humanities perspectives play a vital role in all walks of public life. The module is designed to help students understand how they can bring their educational training to bear not just on future careers but also on the kinds of paid jobs and volunteering roles in which they are already engaged. The students each create a podcast reflecting on this topic. In this article, we discuss the shared experience of thinking about the public humanities, including situations where issues and disagreements arose. We draw conclusions about how to move beyond defensive discourse about value and instead integrate interdisciplinary insights and approaches with daily living and working practices.