Overview

The annual Institute on the Public Humanities offers an interdisciplinary cohort of 20 graduate students an intensive week-long exploration of diverse practices of community-based cultural research, teaching, and engagement.  The goal of the Institute is to hone students’ capacity to imagine and enact collaborative culture work across multiple sites inside and outside the university, and to represent their own aspirations and abilities as publicly-engaged scholars.   It is designed as an intensive, participatory experience reconsidering, re-contextualizing, and reorienting current forms of institutional practice.

Addressed to students pursuing careers within and outside higher education, the Institute cultivates skills and knowledge that enable effective and generative culture work across academic and non-academic communities and institutions. Site- and project-based workshops engage directly, concretely, and formatively with different modes of university-community collaboration in a variety of local contexts.  Readings and discussions offer critical perspective on the structural challenges and possibilities attending community-based research, teaching, and engagement, as well as new maps and new language for navigating professional and institutional development in this field.

 More Details on the Institute (pdf)

Call for Applications

2008 Call for Applications
(The 2009 Call for Applications will be posted Winter 2009.)

Related Course Opportunities

Courses in Public Culture/Engaged Scholarship (HUM 595) explore relations among cultural research, public practice, and diverse forms of community engagement.  Crosslisted with Masters of Arts in Cultural Studies courses in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell as well as others available through UW Seattle departments. 

More Details on Course Opportunities (pdf)

Lectures and Public Forums

Discussion Forum: Collaborative Research and Praxis
Richa Nigar (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota)
Amanda Lock Swarr (Women Studies, University of Washington)
October 23, 2008, 3:30-5:00 pm, Communications 206
DETAILS: TK

Green Cultural Citizenship: A Future for Cultural Studies
Toby Miller (Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside)
Wednesday, November 12, 2008, 6:00-8:00 pm
North Creek Events Center, UW Bothell

Mailing List

Workshops on topics such as Community-based Course Design, Interdisciplinary Project Design, and Activism through Arts Practice are periodically publicized through the Public Humanities listserv. 

Click here to subscribe to the listserv; requests will be approved within 1-3 business days.

Institute Co-Directors

Miriam Bartha
Assistant Director, Simpson Center for the Humanities, UW Seattle

Bruce Burgett
Professor and Interim Director, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell