We all consume the humanities through our engagement with the cultural, creative, and historical materials that influence our views on ourselves, others, and the world around us. However, can consumers also be considered humanists? We argue the answer is yes when consumption choices become symbols and expressions of one’s authentic self and meaningful connective points to others. Using hard-core surfing enthusiasts and thrifters as examples, we introduce the notion of fringe consumption as a form of cultural entrepreneurship and public expression of the humanities that centers individuality, authenticity, and otherness in an otherwise dominant mainstream environment that pushes people to always want more of the same.

Graduate career development has grown over recent years with increasing interest in public scholarship and career diversity. In interviews with 41 public humanities leaders, participants agreed that public humanities introduces students to various career opportunities through community-engaged work and allows them to develop skills needed for those careers, such as event planning and fundraising. Some participants also noted that career diversity is becoming an important area of public humanities leadership roles. However, participants shared that faculty have not been formally prepared for their public humanities roles, and, in turn, faculty have not been prepared to teach graduate students for public humanities or career diversity. How do faculty prepare students for opportunities when they do not feel prepared for those same opportunities? This piece offers answers to that question.

In this piece we argue for the revolutionary power of collective and collaborative work through the most maligned aspect of academic labour: service. The co-authors are the heads of academic units at Concordia University, who in fall 2023 organized a coalition of unit heads from across their university who worked collecitvely to push for greater budget transparency. Their experience challenges the false paradigm that would identify the “public humanities” exclusively with academic research and teaching, to show how service to one’s unit, faculty, and university is an important site of resistance, activism, and struggle. Done with intention and by modelling democratic and collective processes, service is not only a form of resistance to the erosion of any thinking and doing that is not under the thrall of capitalism, but it is also a way of enacting the public humanities themselves, through thinking, writing, talking and working out ideas together, a potential site for creating intellectual life by co-opting bureaucracy to creative and political ends.

This article argues that university presses are key partners in supporting and promoting the public humanities. The article offers numerous examples.

During the political regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), public knowledge in India has been tarnished with political colors. The BJP has used the color saffron, which is closely associated with the Indian National Flag, as a sociopolitical tool to signal patriotism, nationalism, indigenization, and decolonization. However, the government’s policies and messages focus on the self-profiting mechanisms of Hindutva ideology. According to the BJP, the notions of pre-colonial knowledge systems and patriotism are only related to the Hindu religion. Thus, public knowledge in India has been politicized through “saffronization”: the color saffron, rightwing political ideologies, and religious fundamentalism combine to create false beliefs about Indian history and culture, which then inspire and excuse hate and crime.

Modern democracies, including the United States, rely upon three normative elements: (1) rights expressing the dignity of the citizen; (2) law expressing a commitment to public reason; (3) elections as the method of selecting representatives. In each dimension, citizens are to see a representation of themselves as popular sovereign. Morality and law are not matters to be resolved at the polls. Yet, popular opinion, supported by contemporary social sciences, tends to reduce democracy to the third element. On this view, the higher the voter turnout, the better the democracy. In an age in which we worry as much about majority, as minority, tyranny, this view is not credible. A mob at the polls is still a mob even if it is a majority. An exclusive focus on quantification represents a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of democracy. Democratic politics includes an interpretive practice across the moral and the legal dimensions. It relies as much on persuasion as on proof. Recovery of a vibrant democratic life requires a renewed appreciation of a public humanities, not as a pastime but as way of living.