This Cultural Studies course explores public scholarship as both an outcome and a domain of inquiry. This course will ask how humanities research engages various publics and how that engagement can be made legible beyond the university – through publication or dissemination of resultant scholarship – and how that engagement can be treated as itself a domain of scholarly inquiry.  We will do this by studying one sample practice: collaboration across geographies or architectures of incarceration. Readings will be drawn from the humanities, social science disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, and various public sectors including mainstream journalism, alternative media, digital platforms, community-based organizations, and currently incarcerated groups.  Course outcomes will include content knowledge in critical carceral studies; skills acquisition in multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral literacies and communication; and production of a project in “public scholarship” connecting content knowledge and skill versatility, including self and collective reflection on process and outcomes. While the main readings for the course will focus on incarceration, students may develop individual course projects focused on collaboration across walls in other domains.  If you have questions about how your individual project fits with the goals of this course, please feel free to email me directly.

More on our approach: This class will take a two-pronged approach to the status of public scholarship in the humanities by asking students to consider public scholarship as means or ends. In considering public scholarship as a means, we will ask: How does public scholarship become a means to achieve specific research, teaching, or community-action goals? How does it become a means to change who counts as a knowledge-producer and how the value and rewards for producing knowledge are distributed? By attending carefully to public scholarship as a means to specific goals, how might the university participate in circuits of knowledge production and dissemination without asserting copyright or other domain privilege over the product? In considering public scholarship as an end in itself, we will ask: What does public scholarship do that traditional academic scholarship does not? What is the role of publication – in print, online, in community fora – in defining a public? What is the role of research – in print, online, or community fora – in defining scholarship? How can attention to cross-sectoral protocols of research and publication change how we define the goals of humanities scholarship?