This article argues that a public education in method—specifically, close reading—is the only viable role for literary studies within the public humanities. Drawing on recent discussions about the uses of the public humanities—and setting itself against recent interventions that have proclaimed a different public role for public literary studies—this article takes the form of an overt but minimalist manifesto: it tries to make the minimal case for public literary studies that is sufficient to give it a public usefulness. In so doing, it breaks down previous efforts of understanding the utility of literary studies as related to literature’s utility, but also to large-scale interventionist ideals such as climate-change activism. It proposes close reading as training in public debate, as an exercise towards better public meaning-making, and thus as a signal contribution to the making of better democratic citizens in a deliberative public sphere.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong is launching a pioneering BA program in Public Humanities, combining two existing units—Cultural Studies and Cultural Management—to form a socially relevant undergraduate education that promotes community-building, critical and creative skills, and humanities values. Hong Kong’s public sphere has been shrinking, necessitating a deeper reflection and conceptualization of the public within its historical and cultural contexts. The term “public” in Hong Kong has diverse meanings and overlaps with private and communal aspects, influenced by Chinese cultural history and colonial experiences. Despite the decline of civil society, various public activities, such as markets, performances, and talks, continue to foster local culture and community engagement in Hong Kong. The program emphasizes collaboration, participatory arts, and media technology to foster civic agency and public engagement, encouraging students to work with diverse community stakeholders. The program promotes care and connection as guiding principles for community-building, aiming to cultivate responsible citizens and rebuild trust through open communication and meaningful civic participation.

How might we learn from history in ways that help us imagine a better future? And what role might academic institutions play in making those futures imaginable? These questions informed Rosine Association 2.0, a socially engaged art project out of Swarthmore College active from 2021 to 2023. Inspired by a nineteenth-century social project in Philadelphia, Rosine 2.0 formed an interdisciplinary collective of artists, harm reduction organizers, archivists, and activists to co-imagine how harm reduction and mutual aid reduce stigma and increase community care in Philadelphia. We believe that Rosine 2.0 exemplifies the possibilities of public humanities projects that are truly collaborative and transformative. The project went beyond interdisciplinarity by bringing together the fields of archiving, history, and community engagement with communities outside of the College, including curators, artists, and individuals with lived experience. While Swarthmore was the organizing institution, the project existed outside of traditional academic frameworks, creating alternative modes of relationality between and among campus and community members. Each contributed a vital set of skills and perspectives in a networked series of collaborations. The project allowed for rethinking relationships between past and present; between the college and community partners; as well as between faculty, staff, and students in the building of social structures of community care.

We’re writers, artists. We’re intake valves, immersed in paradox and desire, sponging up the mess of our incomprehensible world. We pause and linger in the slop of the creative process; we often, if not always, double back to reimagine and revise. We veer, wait, and witness. Academia, however, requires us to be exhaust valves, combusting fumes to stabilize an industry in crisis, with the humanities being no exception. This is not news. “Publish or perish” is real. Operational. It determines vocational futures through output, quantifiable objects, and line items. Organized by academic milestones (comps, defense, and tenure), the system forces the forfeiting of creativity and complexity to privilege the swift, slick manufacturing of ideas. This article brings together the author’s experience in harm reduction to translate public health to the public humanities. This “how-to” essay isn’t about how to rehab your Humanities Center. It’s about how to center care despite the rapid currents of capital and productivity. Just as principles for harm reduction reject universal definitions and diagnostics, so too do I reject universal (i.e., singular) methods for how to run your Humanities Center. Rather, here I show you how to embrace the multiples: the relapses and revisions.

Ever since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn into office in 2016, until the end of his term in 2022, his so-called “drug war” has claimed 12,000–30,000 lives. Over 150 victims were children. Seventeen-year-old Kian de los Santos, mistakenly identified as a drug addict, was gunned down on the evening of 16 August 2017. His death prompted a group of teachers and students to express themselves through empathic creative writing. What started as an assignment grew into a community of writers, activists, artists, journalists, and curators from diverse disciplines, generations, and social classes. Four years later, the project found a name: Triggered: Creative Responses to the Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines—an illustrated young adult fiction collection with a dimension of outreach towards an orphanage. The Triggered project illustrated three key features of public humanities, especially during a time of impunity: first, an imperfect but self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration between the academe and the field; second, the book’s non-elitist accessibility in both content and material; and third, the funds of the book went to an orphanage.

Scholars writing for mainstream newspapers, magazines, and websites make the world of ideas accessible to people outside the hallowed halls of higher education – how dare you. It disrobes the habits of academic writing and respects the skills of the journalist who can turn complexity into clarity for non-specialist readers. Emphasizing the importance of storytelling, this article includes tips for style and structure in public writing and advice on submitting pieces for publication. Published models and sample process steps provide nuts-and-bolts guidance for academics looking to write for public venues but unsure where to start. Behind these strategies lies a simple truth: public writing works best when subject-matter experts do it themselves.

How do we persuade historians and history students to adjust from their familiarity with longer forms of writing to embark on a policy brief exercise? On the one hand, the need for humanities scholars to engage with policy-makers is arguably more acute than ever, given the gravity of policy choices we face; however, on the other hand, some will understandably resist what they see as the dangers of humanities becoming instruments of centers of policy-making power. We find, in a case study of historians and history students in Australia, that there is considerable willingness to tackle the task of a policy-brief, and willingness to engage with policy-making more broadly. Students who have taken on the task of writing policy briefs have said that it hurts, but they have also found it to be a rewarding and worthwhile exercise. Established scholars have done similarly, arguing that the time is ripe for more humanities scholars to take up the challenge.

This article contends that philosophy is losing its standing because of its tendency to treat its own practice as an exercise in thinking about the world. When we treat ourselves and our colleagues as thinkers of the world, we isolate both our research and each other from the world. This is affecting the way philosophers and their work are perceived by others, and subsequently, if and how they are received as contributors to public discourse. One potential solution is to acknowledge that philosophy matters in the material sense: we must return to our bodies as (1) sites of meaning-making and discovery and (2) the condition that ensures philosophical practice remains a worldly activity. We make philosophy matter by making our research matter and each other matter.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory emerged to challenge systems of oppression, but it carries a fatal flaw: it’s stuck in the Enlightenment mindset that birthed colonialism. It talks about freedom – but only from a Eurocentric lens, ignoring the wisdom of the Global South. Enter Neo-Vedanta, a revolutionary reinterpretation of ancient Indian philosophy, propelled by Swami Vivekananda’s call for a spiritual and social awakening. While Critical Theory exposes power structures, Neo-Vedanta goes deeper, arguing that real freedom starts within. It dismantles the ego – the root of domination – and replaces it with seva, selfless service. For Vivekananda, liberation wasn’t about personal enlightenment or Western-style progress; it was about merging the self with humanity’s collective struggle. This isn’t about picking sides – it’s about creating something new: a world where liberation isn’t a Western export but a global conversation. True freedom, Neo-Vedanta reminds us, isn’t just about breaking chains. It’s about dissolving the very idea of control – and finding power in service, not domination. Liberation was never meant to belong to one civilization alone.

When the European Union was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2012, the citation stated that military conflict on the continent was “virtually inconceivable” owing to its action. This article will examine what role its acts and omissions played in the origins of the Ukraine crisis. The tensions stoked by potential NATO membership have been well aired. However, this article will argue that the treatment of minorities and particularly of the Russian language was equally important. The EU’s failure to address these questions by insisting Kjiv grant substantial linguistic rights, or even regional autonomy as foreseen by the second Minsk agreement, was a significant cause of the conflict.

This article explores three projects that responded to community needs using a variety of tools and strategies for community empowerment. The first project grew out of a course that explored how Yonkers’ local history intertwined with the metanarrative of American history and policy decisions. The students created a podcast series with oral history interviews from community members, focusing on a range of topics, including climate justice, politics, gentrification, education, and shopping malls. The second project emerged as a result of a public lecture series hosted by the library. Highlighting the work of local artists, I curated an art exhibition that explored uniting the community through quilting, narratives of immigration, and the growing impact of gentrification in the downtown area. The final project sought to tell and archive stories from the community, resulting in a digital oral history archive focusing on the African American experience.

This article reflects on the meaning of “public humanities” from the perspective of research and teaching in South Africa today. I reference the ways in which people have remembered the recently deceased Professor Eddie Webster (my first sociology professor) at the University of the Witwatersrand, and how he himself saw his critically engaged public work in the trade union movement and globally during both Apartheid and the post-Apartheid democratic government. In particular, I explore how his unique form of public humanities inspired his former students to be socially engaged citizens as they entered a diverse range of occupations and careers. I draw on Michael Burawoy’s depiction of the Webster windmill (public engagement, principled intervention, social justice and radical reform, expanding research programmes with a sociology of the south, and institution building) to suggest what public humanities means in the context of research and teaching. I draw on tributes from colleagues and former students – not to focus on Prof Webster’s significant academic and political work but to distil what it was about his teaching and critical engagement that suggests he is an exemplar of what is meant by public humanities.

The hierarchical structures in which museums and galleries currently operate prohibit these cultural institutions from creating equitable and sustainable relationships with local residents. As a result, museums remain inaccessible civic spaces for many citizens in the United Kingdom and internationally. Reflecting on a case study based at the Whitworth Art Gallery, this article tests a practical tool that may be used to reimagine these hierarchies using asset-based community development (ABCD). It proposes the value of the ABCD technique, the Citizen Power Ladder, in supporting museums and galleries to become more citizen-led spaces that can be owned and used by all.

This article provides a retrospective on the formation of the Engaged Humanities Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London. It sets the lab’s development within the broader history of labs in the humanities, setting out how the Engaged Humanities Lab aligns closely with Pawlicka-Deger’s description of “infrastructure of engagement” rather than the physical spaces that characterise science laboratories. We also explain why the sub-category of “engaged” humanities was selected over the broader and more established “public” humanities. The second half of the article provides reflections on the activities and achievements of the Engaged Humanities Lab, focusing on how intra-institution collaboration between an academic school and the Research and Innovation Department supported the formation and governance of the lab, allowing for ongoing dialogue and co-creation between subject area experts and research management professionals with expertise in research funding, policy, and knowledge exchange. This article also illuminates what is needed from university leaders to ensure the success and longevity of infrastructures of engagement like the Engaged Humanities Lab.

In the late 1950s, the Minnesota Department of Transportation used eminent domain to clear the path for I-94, displacing over 700 families and 300 businesses in Rondo, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. In the 2010s, Rondo residents and faculty at Macalester College teamed up to create Remembering Rondo, a digital public history project that included (among other things) a community-based archive and map of the neighborhood’s historic businesses from 1920 to 1960. Rondo Avenue, Inc., the neighborhood’s community council, asked to host the project themselves. Then in 2020, they forgot to renew the domain. The site went dark. This essay explores where we went wrong and what we can do about it, and raises questions about how we can reimagine digital sustainability through the lens of a shared authority.

This essay demonstrates the impact of careful, intentional event design on public humanities programming. In particular, it records the practical and pedagogical methodologies we have developed through a decade of sustained collaboration between a humanities scholar and an arts administrator. We outline the ways that arts administration practices have informed our approach to public humanities, and we suggest that these practices can help us to address skills gaps in graduate training in the humanities. In the essay, we walk through our framework for the intentional design of a public humanities event (the Life Cycle of an Event worksheet) and offer practical advice on further collaboration between humanities practitioners and arts administrators. We have found that when humanities practitioners and arts administrators collaborate, accessibility and inclusivity become central to public humanities program design – an achievable expectation and not just an aspiration. Above all, our collaboration has deepened our commitment to curating relevant public humanities programming that welcomes community members and provides mentorship opportunities for students.

Students undertaking a close reading and scholars studying the practice ask the same question: What exactly is “close reading”? While we now associate the phrase with literary critics of the 1930s–1950s, they themselves infrequently invoked it as a term of art. Since then, scholars have struggled to define close reading beyond the vague notion of reading with “attention to the words on the page.” While compiling the bibliography for John Guillory’s book On Close Reading, I created a free online archive, which gathers over 2,500 statements on the practice: www.closereadingarchive.org. In harvesting key quotations from this archive, this cento adheres to Edward Said’s insight: “single phrases” can “contain a whole library of meanings.” What follows is not an explicit argument so much as a roadmap of distilled claims about the topic, with each successive entry sometimes recalling previous ones, or introducing new turns of the subject – all offering provocations to further thought. Whether from critics well known or lesser known, to poets who have commented on the subject, to government reports and school catalogs, the items cumulatively corroborate that close reading has persisted as the heart of the critical enterprise. I hope, of course, that these excerpts entice readers to survey the online archive and thereby assemble their own alternative accounts.

A former academic director and instructor in the Clemente Course in Humanities outlines the arc of this National Humanities Medal-winning program, and the arc of a career with it, discussing key elements involving academic and curricular matters, community partnerships, event planning, faculty and student recruitment, fiscal support, and public engagement extending across various institutions and organizations. Reflections on the value of adult education programs in the context of humanistic inquiry occasion further accounts and assertions about the nature of the public humanities, engaging publics not conceived in the abstract, in general, or for research purposes, but as they are configured and manifested among one’s fellow citizens, at particular times and in particular places.

This article considers the role of the public humanities in fostering conversations about climate science and policy through a transdisciplinary performance at the University at Buffalo in New York. The Great Lakes Climate Theatre Initiative is a new project that brings together sustainability scientists with theater practitioners to create new and mixed methods for climate preparedness that are both inclusive and impactful. Toward a Climate Haven was the first project conducted by the initiative with the goal of exploring how Buffalo might become a safe and equitable destination for climate migrants. This first project resulted in a public event that combined the performance of a newly-commissioned play, a talkback session, readings from a local youth writing workshop, and a presentation from a local county official. In this article, our team reflects on how we brought these various threads together to leverage the public humanities in the effort to prepare for climate change.

This article offers practical advice on how to encourage our own students to deliver dynamic presentations to local high school students as their final course projects. Based on years of experience teaching “The Holocaust in American Literature,” I offer specific suggestions on how “traveling teaching” can accomplish memorable moments for our students and high school students alike, thereby providing examples of how a new national initiative that cements a closer relationship between higher education and K-12 schools might proceed.