20 KiB
Generous Thinking
Working in Public
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @kfitz // kfitz@msu.edu
Note: Thanks so much for being here! Quick introductions?
Note: The thoughts that I'm starting with here are drawn from 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 afternoon on the good of those public connections, which are crucial both for the publics with whom we work and for us as well. 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 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.
background
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.
2009
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 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 were a little less visible, but I'm convinced that the book is better for having gone through this public process.
public
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.
challenges
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.
trolls
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.
no easy answers
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. I am convinced, however, that countering these destructive forces will require advance preparation, focused responses, and a tremendous amount of collective labor, in order to create inclusive online communities that can be open to, and yet safe in, the world. But despite these problems, I want to explore a few ways that we might help draw a range of broader publics to the work that we do.
publics
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.
access
accessibility
participation
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.
access
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.
economic model
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.
engagement
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.
why it matters
Note: And yet, many of us worry about opening our work. The general public often seems determined to misunderstand us, hostile to or dismissive of our ideas. That dismissiveness in particular leads us to see no harm in keeping our work closed, because we’re only writing for a small group of specialists anyhow. So why would public access matter? It matters because the more we turn away from dialogue across the boundaries of our campuses, the more we undermine the public’s willingness to support our research and our institutions. If one key component of the crisis facing higher education today is an increasingly widespread conviction that education is a private responsibility rather than a public good, we wind up strengthening that conviction when we treat our work as private. This is not to say that working in public doesn’t bear risks, but only through dialogue that moves outside our own discourse communities will we have any chance of convincing the broader public of the relevance of our work.
prestige
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 project, 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.
access
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.
accessibility
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.
public-facing
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, opening scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrating the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But in order to do so, 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.
public register
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.
learn
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.
public / intellectual
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.
participation
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.
citizen humanities
Note: We might think about ways to extend and expand the university's ability to convene conversations into the facilitation of the citizen humanities, opening up cultural concerns of compelling interest to the publics that the project engages, precisely because those concerns are theirs, and the resulting work is theirs too, not just to learn from but to shape and define. 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.
peers
Note: This mode of work also fosters a new understanding of the notion of the "peer," however, encouraging us to understand our peers not just as credentialed colleagues but instead as participants in a community of practice, whoever those participants may be. Changing this definition has profound consequences not just for determining whom we consider under that label but also who considers themselves to be a part of that category. Opening our sense of who "we" are to a much broader range of participants has the potential to reshape relations between the public and the academy and to create an understanding of the extent to which the work we do matters for our culture as a whole.
your turn
Note: So what I'd like to hear a bit about at this point is your projects: what brought you to the Next-Gen program and what you hope to do in connecting your scholarly work with the publics you engage. I'm going to ask you to take two or three minutes to talk a bit with the person next to you, to surface questions or ideas that you'd like to get on the table, and then let's spend the rest of our time together discussing your work.