154 lines
22 KiB
Markdown
154 lines
22 KiB
Markdown
# Working in Public
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### [Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.info)
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#### [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
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Note: What I want to talk a bit about this afternoon is the importance for 21st century scholars of making connections with the public: with 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. We need to find ways to make clear to those off-campus constituencies why the work we do in the humanities is important, in order to make sure we keep getting to do it. I explore this issue at much greater length in Generous Thinking; today's thoughts are drawn from a chapter that focuses on the role that making our work more public might serve in that process.
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## background
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Note: First, a bit of background. 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.
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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.
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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.
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## 2009
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Note: Okay, that was 2009. 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.
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Note: I tested that belief in spring 2018 through an open review of the draft of _Generous Thinking_. I first invited a group about of 40 readers to spend two weeks reading and commenting on the manuscript, and then opened the project to the world. 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 going to be better for having gone through this public process.
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## public
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Note: So what I'm focused on today is 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.
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## challenges
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Note: There are real challenges to that process, however. Some of them have to do with today's communication platforms. Blogs don't generate the level of engagement that they once did, partly because their massive proliferation, partly thanks to the death of some related technologies like Google Reader, and partly because of the dispersal of online conversations onto Twitter and Facebook and other networks.
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## trolls
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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.
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## no easy answers
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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.
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## publics
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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 academic.
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## access
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## accessibility
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## participation
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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.
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## access
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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. Which is to say: the value of open access lies not just in making the most "popular" work publicly available, but in making all work as available as possible, even where that work might seem to have a vanishingly small audience.
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## economic model
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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.
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## engagement
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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. Enabling greater public access to scholarly work is not just about changing its business model but about making public engagement with that work possible. If we publish in ways that enable any interested reader to access our work, that work will be more read, more cited, creating more impact for us and for our fields. 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.
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## why it matters
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Note: And yet, many of us worry about opening our work to broader publics, sometimes because we fear the consequences of making it open -- and not without justification. The general public often seems determined to misunderstand us, to interpret what we say with focused hostility or, nearly as bad, utter dismissiveness. As a result, we 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. Keeping our work to ourselves might protect us from public criticism, but it can't protect us from public apathy, a condition that may be far more dangerous. 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.
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## prestige
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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.
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## access
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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.
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## accessibility
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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.
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## public-facing
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Note: Of course, many scholars have recently pushed against this trend by developing public-facing venues that bring the ideas of humanities scholars to greater public attention, such as _Public Books_, the _Los Angeles Review of Books_, _n+1_, and a host of individual and group blogs and newsletters. These venues open scholarly concerns and conversations to a broader readership and demonstrate the public value of scholarly approaches to understanding contemporary culture. But if we are to open our ideas to larger public audiences, 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.
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## public register
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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. We need, in other words, to learn a professional form of code switching.
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## code-switching
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Note: "Code switching" has its origin in linguistics and is used to explore how and why speakers move between multiple languages within individual speech instances. The concept was borrowed by rhetoric and composition as a means of thinking about students’ need to move between vernacular and academic languages in addressing particular audiences at particular moments. However, as many scholars have noted, there is a highly racialized power dynamic deployed in most pedagogical injunctions to code-switch, which carry the assumption that students of color must learn "standard" varieties of English in order to succeed, enforcing a double consciousness that ultimately accommodates, rather than eradicating, racism.
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## power
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Note: The command to code switch in an unequal environment is inevitably a tool of power. But so, I want to argue, is scholars’ assumption that academic English as we perform it is the “standard variety”; in fact, ours is as much a lived vernacular as any, but a vernacular based in privilege, one that risks undermining our ability to build alliances with other communities. This is not to say that we can simply adopt a common language that will make us understood and beloved by all. Nor should we abandon the precise academic languages that undergird the rigor of our work. But it's worth asking how judicious code switching, as a means of acknowledging the effects of our educational and professional privilege and inviting others into our discussions, might become a more regular part of our scholarly work.
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## learn
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Note: It's also worth asking what we need to learn in order to do that kind of work. Public-facing writing -- as many editors of mainstream intellectual publications would note -- is very different from academic writing, and by and large it is not something scholars are trained to do. But numerous initiatives 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.
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## public / intellectual
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Note: We also need to recognize that scholars who work in public modes are doing work that is not just public, but also intellectual. Our 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.
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## participation
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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.
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## citizen humanities
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Note: There's been a lot of attention paid to “citizen science” projects of late, projects that go beyond crowd-sourcing, enlisting networked participants not just in mass repetitive tasks but in the actual process of discovery. We might consider what a similar citizen humanities might 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, which presents first-hand accounts 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 explores a cultural concern of compelling interest to the public that the project engages, precisely because that concern is 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.
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## peers
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Note: One key thing that this mode of work also does is foster a new understanding of the notion of the "peer," 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.
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## finally
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Note: So, finally: what might be possible for the 21st century English department if we were to open up our practices to fuller public engagement? What if we were to hold our institutions, especially our public universities, accountable for living up to the mission of bringing knowledge to the people of our states? How might we draw public support back to our institutions by demonstrating the extent to which the work that we do is intended for, in dialogue with, and in the service of the public? If the university is to win back public support, it must be prepared -- structurally, strategically, at the heart of not just its mission statement but its actual mission -- to place the public service at the top of its priorities. And that must begin with us, finding ways to do our work in and with the public.
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## thank you
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#### [Kathleen Fitzpatrick](http://kfitz.info) // [@kfitz](http://twitter.com/kfitz) // [kfitz@msu.edu](mailto:kfitz@msu.edu)
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