Querying Public Scholarship: An Unfinished List of Questions toward More Meaningful University–Community Partnerships

Abstract

Abstract How do we do public scholarship? It might seem like a simple question, but as anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms—let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities—is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, the authors offer a set of sticky and thorny questions that are both theoretically minded and practice oriented, as possibilities to consider throughout the process of working on public projects or with community partners. Questions are grouped thematically—Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, Evaluation and Reflection—though are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. In so doing, the essay insists that public scholarship not be codified into a clearly-defined discipline, but rather acknowledged as both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. To that end, the authors also invite direct engagement with these questions, both inside and outside of the space of the text, encouraging readers to generate and share their own questions as well.