Teresa Mangum and colleagues at University of Iowa are up to all sorts of intriguing projects that address the idea of the engaged humanities and public intellectuals. It's exciting to see this field of study and application growing at multiple institutions.

Platforms for Public Scholars: A Three-Day Symposium

From Engaged Teaching to Engaged Scholarship: Pedagogy, Practice, and Publication

2009 Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy

And there are a few Hastac Scholars at U of Iowa who are exploring these issues in an upcoming forum as well, I gather from Teresa.

Since I am trained as a historian, this morning I was thinking about the lineages this kind of work joins:

In many ways, the topic of the engaged humanities is an old one: dating back to Matthew Arnold and even earlier, and certainly kicking around in the modern American university as an issue since World War II, if not before. I think of figures such as C. Wright Mills and Paul Goodman, of course, and many others who moved between campuses and the larger public world, between specialied scholarship and broad engagement.

But at the same time, in some sense, we're all trying to address new incarnations of old situations. A lot of the issues are the same, but there are new factors: the possibilities and dilemmas of digital technology, the shifting (well, let's just say it: bad) economic situation of the academic job market, the increasingly professionalized and corporatized atmosphere of university hiring processes, and, frankly, forty some-odd years of neoliberalism, which has included an assault on any kind of labor that is not profit-oriented (such as people sitting around in seminar rooms talking about the humanities or spending time in archives working on obscure corners of specialized knowledge).

Thinking as a humanities scholar, here's another question I'm starting to ponder. I call it the "spinning wheels" problem:

There is so much going on, so many disparate efforts to make sense of the humanities and push the field in new directions, that one gets dizzy. The goal we keep in mind is interdisciplinarity, but how do we balance breadth across different fields and conversations with focus and depth? How do we develop the tools for ourselves and our students to move to different perspectives on topics of interest, so that we can all dance across multiple topics intelligently while honing in on sustained study of particular areas? On a practical level, but so too on an intellectual and conceptual level, this seems crucial to investigate further. In the end, of course, it's great and wonderful to have abundance of humanities scholarship and engaged research. But developing the right tools for navigating it all, that seems like an important job at hand.