This article addresses the potentials and shortcomings of prominent current attempts to articulate platforms for public literary humanities. While the pressing polycrises of the twenty-first century call for a resurgence of committed literature—and, accordingly, a public-facing critical practice and ethics—a scenario for public literary humanities still remains to be scripted. We argue that the vagueness of the term “literary value” is one crucial obstacle in this context. It weakens the opposition to literature’s commercialisation and in fact tends to lead to an unproductive reiteration of traditional, canon-bound conceptions of what “good” literature is. We perceive a similarly weak definition of “value” in the public humanities at large, but find in Judith Butler’s encouragement to trust in extra-academic publics a promising perspective that we deem applicable to a budding public literary humanities as well. Drawing on historical (Bertolt Brecht) and current (Vinod Kumar Shukla) examples, we are able to show that such a literary and critical practice can only be conceived when the established notion of literature as private and solipsistic is overcome.

This is a reflection on the experience of carrying out an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded public humanities project during the pandemic, focusing on one pathway to impact – a collaboration with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books – as a case study. I want to explore how we adapted these programmes in the light of global and personal circumstances and embraced digital media in unexpected ways. Looking back on what we accomplished, I now believe that, despite considerable challenges, we ended up with outcomes that were even richer and more rewarding precisely because of the challenges we faced and the unexpected paths that the project took us down. The second voice in this article is that of Charlotte Lancaster. Through her role as a Postdoctoral Impact Fellow at Bath Spa University, she worked to evidence the wider public impact of the “Into the Forest” project retrospectively. Here, she evaluates the impact of the project with Seven Stories and offers a coalescent voice to the argument underlining this article: that we need more realistic and flexible approaches to research planning, funding, and evaluation.

What do students of the humanities know, and how do they come to know it? What can they do with that knowledge and skill? Students struggle to answer such questions because they cannot name what they know or can do in the “real” world. Exploring the teaching of the humanities as a form of public practice, this piece focuses on how knowledge is created and transferred in the humanities as part of an initiative called The Being Human Project. This project helps students “name” what they are learning through a set of humanities threshold concepts called SEAM: Storytelling, Empathy, Ambiguity, and Memory. Defining knowledge transfer in terms of recognition, recurrence, and application, students learn to use SEAM as a recombinant palette of problem-solving tools in the public sphere. If we imagine the humanities as a figurative sky filled with stars, the question is how best to prepare our students to navigate that vaunted space as the humanities “constellate” with public problems and practices. How can we help students recognize the value and instrumentality of what they are learning when such knowledge appears more like far-flung points of light than an array of constellations they might steer by?

Here, we describe the creation of a new program, Public and Applied Liberal Arts, at a regional public university in the Midwest. We discuss the values of transdisciplinary research and teaching for the public good, and how we put together a willing group of faculty from across the university to create a new kind of academic program that moves the humanities into our communities and beyond.

In 2023, Little Central America, 1984: A Sanctuary Then and Now by Elia Arce and Rubén Martínez premiered in Washington, DC. The play illuminates a historical moment known as the Sanctuary Movement, whereby religious institutions, nonprofit organizations, activists, and everyday people sought to create a safe place for Central Americans fleeing state-sponsored and state-condoned violence. The play was a community-based production, relying on local Latinxs—namely, Central Americans—and African Americans to bring it to life. Little Central America demonstrated how community-based theatre could (re)create sanctuary, challenge racial ideologies about Central Americans and Latinxs, and value diverse Central American lives on and off stage. Drawing on my experiences as a field producer, I examine how community-based theatre is a useful tool for Central American and Latinx communities. Ultimately, I argue that community-based theatre is necessary for enacting, processing, and understanding Central Americans’ converging and diverging pasts, presents, and futures.

Who has been considered human by the humanities? Along with its emancipatory potential, the humanities have historically also been related to imperial states whose military conquests have implicated the dehumanization of other peoples. Many times, the humanities have offered foundational narratives sustaining imperial projects. This essay takes a constructivist epistemology to explore the concept of humanism, and how it has emerged and changed in different contexts, beginning with the Roman idea of humanitas that focused on civilization to legitimize domination. A critique of colonial Christian humanism reveals how it was used to justify violence against those defined as non or less human, be they women, Africans, or indigenous people. The historical exclusion of many groups from educational institutions and knowledge production shows how the humanities have perpetuated hierarchies of power that, ironically, dehumanized. Movements such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which sought to reform the humanities, continued to favor a Eurocentric culture. This essay advocates for an intercultural approach to the humanities, one that frees itself from imperialism and promotes inclusive dialogues among peoples. This effort must go beyond overcoming Eurocentrism. It must also overcome anthropocentrism to incorporate a more respectful relationship with Nature, recognizing the cultural practices of indigenous peoples, who have maintained a more conscious and harmonious link with beyond human lifeways.

The city of Indore in Madhya Pradesh, India, is home to over 1 million individuals with disabilities. Despite this significant population, the public schools serving these communities often lack visibility and a dependable online presence. Information about these institutions is usually dispersed through unreliable channels, leaving the pedagogies and amenities primarily misunderstood. This article discusses the ideation, development, and completion of a public humanities initiative, “‘Only Connect!’ Empowering Public Schools for the Disabled in Indore to engage in a participatory and inclusive online public sphere,” a U.S. Alumni micro-grants project initiated and finalized in 2022. Only Connect! is a pioneering online platform that offers verified contact details for all public schools in Indore, catering to children who are Deaf, Blind, and those who suffer from speech difficulties between the ages of 6 and 18. The project’s central mission is to dispel the myths and inaccuracies surrounding disability education. Based on the narratives sourced from comprehensive fieldwork, surveys, and extensive interviews with key stakeholders, including school principals and parents, Only Connect! aims to foster a better-informed and supportive community. The goal of this project is to facilitate dialogue about the challenges and opportunities in educating disabled students in Indore, promoting greater understanding and inclusivity.

It is often claimed that public history represents a democratisation of historical knowledge, but how is “the public” being imagined here? This short article provides a report from a collaborative, student–staff research project that investigated how key stakeholders involved in public history—students, academics, and heritage professionals—understood their publics. It reflects on two key themes that emerged from the testimonies: issues of inclusion and positionality. We analyse a selection of telling cases, situating these extracts in the context of financial pressures, neo-liberal marketisation and the politicisation of DEI agendas. We suggest that there is a need for more open, reflexive, and cross-disciplinary dialogue between different stakeholders about the various publics they construct and engage.

How can a single-day cluster of public learning activities contribute to a larger ongoing public humanities agenda? This essay’s co-authors—facilitators of a public lecture and associated activities sponsored by a university academic department—revisit their strategic efforts to provide leadership for the one-day series of interconnected events, anchored in a Native scholar’s public lecture on sovereignty and citizenship. We write from a predominantly white university geographically removed from Native nations’ reservations and lacking a full-fledged curriculum in Indigenous studies. Yet we also write as members of a consortium committed to enhancing reciprocal learning with Indigenous peoples. Thus, we aimed to set this one-day program within our local collaborative’s sustained work to develop curriculum; engage multiple audiences in topics important to Native studies; and foster networks linking students, faculty, and staff with Native community members. In making visible aspects of “doing” public humanities that often remain unrecorded, this case study will assist others interested in taking on public humanities work, whether a small-scale, single-day program or initiatives extended across a long-term calendar. After describing the ongoing work, one university and Native community partners have been carrying out through a Native and Indigenous Peoples Initiative, and situating those efforts in connection with our collaborative’s shared values for community building, the essay revisits event management steps taken to tap into and support that endeavor. Acknowledging successful elements alongside challenges and opportunities not fully achieved, our case study also offers approaches for collaborative evaluation of public humanities programming.

Welcome to our ship—a vessel for flow as methodology. While flowing, we think; while thinking, we flow. With the sea as our center, this method expands other-than-human voices in public humanities. Our ship has technology aboard, yet the navigation of tides, currents, and saltwater is guided by ancestral wayfaring methods. Flow (2019–) is a method for fostering collaboration among elders, cultural bearers, children, and more to nurture Indigenous oceanic stories. We decolonize stories by actively restoring “Restorying” oral traditions from the islands we reside on. Embracing the 黒潮 (Japanese: Kuroshio; Chinese: Heichao) Current as our guiding teacher, this article challenges land-centric perspectives by embracing the fluidity of cultural exchanges in Austronesian communities. We navigate toward “Going back into a future of Simplicity” by relying upon strong waves of the past alive in the complexity of the present. We turn (return) to the flow of currents as a mode of connecting with knowledge rooted in native senses of the ocean as “an extension of the land”. Flow shares lessons on how Indigenous practices can facilitate interspecies community empathy and care for public humanities scholars in diverse fields.

This article shares a unique form of public humanities created with an ethical community partnership between a university team, a community nonprofit organization, and a museum. Our podcast focuses on the stories of the staff of an organization that is affiliated with the International Rescue Committee and that resettles refugees, asylees, and immigrants. Most of the staff were immigrants themselves and shared their experiences as both outsiders and insiders in the communities that they serve. Given this historical moment of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, we aim for this podcast to serve for conversation and education about immigration not only in our local area but also in similar small cities and towns. Our podcast takes place in an upstate region of New York, approximately 200 miles outside of the city. We share our experience of putting into practice the methods and concepts drawn from public humanities, critical community engagement, ethnic studies, digital humanities, and podcast studies.

This essay makes a case for the crucial role of performance in higher education as a way to help students become more responsible world citizens. It asserts that a culture of problem-solving rooted purely in metrics is not sufficient to tackle the complex global challenges that we face moving forward. Instead, we need methods for collaboratively assigning value and making decisions that are not beholden to ones and zeros or the market logic of capitalism. Theater—the applied craft of making a world (big or small), an experience (long or short) that’s livable and sharable—offers one place where we can develop these aptitudes.

It has long been acknowledged that the past can be a weapon. In Palestine, reports of the targeting of archaeological sites, museums, archives, and other locations of cultural heritage by Tel Aviv have been increasing drastically since 7 October 2023 (although they took place before). This article seeks to contextualise these destructions of heritage within a larger project of controlling history and understands this project to be a cornerstone of European colonialism, comparing it with Britain’s colonial control over how ancient sites are interpreted in what is now Zimbabwe. It asks what the role of the historian is in a time of genocide and revisits what it means to do “decolonial” work while history is being weaponised for colonial occupation. And it requires those of us who are interested in the past (and especially the ancient past) to reckon with our position in the belly of the beast.

The Shona people of Zimbabwe hold rich social histories that should be approached as public humanities. This article explores the oral traditions, pre-colonial sociopolitical systems, and the profound impacts of colonial and post-colonial developments on cultural identity to understand the cohesion of the Shona people. The Shona people’s rich culture of myths, folktales, and storytelling serves as a repository of collective memory that preserves the values, beliefs, and cosmologies underpinning their society. In examining pre-colonial Shona governance, this article highlights the decentralised political systems rooted in chieftaincy, kinship networks, and communal land tenure still in practice today. Using a hybrid methodological approach that integrates ethnographic insights, historical analysis, and theoretical frameworks, such as Santos’ (2018) epistemologies of the South, this study positions Shona public humanities within broader debates on African Indigenous knowledge systems and post-colonial identity reconstruction. The analysis extends to the economic practices of agrarian subsistence and long-distance trade, underscoring the sophisticated socio-economic frameworks of Shona society. Despite the challenges posed by industrial encroachment and cultural commodification, a resilient Shona heritage upholds adaptive strategies. A Shona situated approach contributes to broader debates on decolonisation for the preservation of Indigenous knowledge in a rapidly globalising world.

The performing arts are, by definition, a public enterprise. Public Humanities are invested in sharing information publicly, reliably, and making it easy to find. Music, dance, theatre, and live art each have their own disciplinary methods and theories that do not necessarily align with those in the humanities. This essay explores how public works and public history projects can intersect with the performing arts. I posit that principles from the performing arts can be applied to public-facing work in the humanities and other disciplines. I detail seven key components of performing arts research and art-making and demonstrate how they can apply to Public Humanities.

Drawing on examples and lessons learned from an array of the author’s collaborative exhibit projects, this essay offers a model for making exhibits that a novice can adopt and adapt in a variety of contexts.

The phrase “much ado about nothing” in popular discourse attempts to dispel suspicion, including in response to high-profile sexual assault allegations such as those against Harvey Weinstein. This article explores how Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing speaks to this trend. In the play, Claudio falsely accuses Hero of infidelity, abandoning her at the altar. For this play to be a comedy with a “happy” ending, Claudio must admit that he was mistaken. He discovers that consent (or, in the play’s vocabulary, “good will”) is a relational agreement between two equals, not a mediated exchange of property. Claudio’s mistake, the subject of Beatrice and Benedick’s teasing, is inherent to Weinstein’s defense arguments and other usages. Much Ado About Nothing provides a model for reforming our cultural concept of consent.

Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand, is a cultural institution located in Aotearoa New Zealand. The museum’s foundational principle of biculturalism appears increasingly inadequate for addressing the fundamental injustices associated with settler/invader colonialism and can be seen as a barrier to achieving a “collective future.” This article argues that Te Papa must discard biculturalism insofar as it does not provide for tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) or mana motuhake (Indigenous sovereignty). Currently, Te Papa promotes Indigenous cultural inclusion and the celebration of Te Ao Māori (The Māori World) within a settler/invader-defined national identity and cultural memory. In the future, a decolonial and tikanga-based (Māori legal and customary practices and system) approach should be implemented at Te Papa.

This article examines the role solidarity magazines played for the first generation of global Palestine activists. Through an analysis of Scandinavian magazines of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and microhistories of the first generation of solidarity activists in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden based on interviews, memoirs, novels, and letters, this article examines how the first Palestine committees and the foundational notions of the Palestinian cause were formed. This article argues that the solidarity magazine became a central forum for the co-creation of Palestine solidarity between Palestinians and their sympathizers. Viewing solidarity as a result of joint political and intellectual labor gives agency to solidarity as a third space between national solidarity movements and Third World liberation movements. By taking this approach, this article reads magazines as an aperture into the first iteration of Palestine as a global cause.