Distributaries

The Archive to Come Is a Garden

No Research About Us, Without Us: Discussing the Public Science Project’s Community-Based Research Practice with Co-Founder Michelle Fine

Michelle Fine, co-founder of the Public Science Project at The Graduate Center, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about about the work that the Public Science Project does, Critical Participatory Action Research as an epistemology shaping publicly engaged research commitments, as well as how the task of collaborating with communities demands researchers to center their accountabilities.

The Value of Early and Diverse Public Engagement: An Interview with Linda Alcoff, Co-Director of the Mellon Public Humanities Program at Hunter College

Linda Martín Alcoff, co-director of the Mellon Public Humanities Program at Hunter College, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about encouraging students to think about publicly engaged work early in their educational trajectories, while also emphasizing that publicly engaged humanities projects are not necessarily funnels into graduate school.

Optimism, Even Amidst Austerity: An Interview with Anne Valk, Executive Director of the American Social History Project

Anne Valk, Executive Director of the American Social History Project, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about ASHP’s mission and work, oral history as a public humanities methodology, and how public humanities centers have navigated the climate of perpetual austerity.

The Public Humanities at Brooklyn College: A Conversation with Dr. Rosamond King, Director of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities

Rosamond King, Director of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about her goals for the institute, the mission undergirding their work, as well as Dr. King’s own public practice—as scholar, teacher, leader and poet.

Surveying Ukraine’s Musical Landscape: 2020 to 2022

In anticipation of the 2022 Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival which takes place Friday, March 18th to Sunday March 20th, and is now in its third year, organizer and creative director Leah Batstone offers an update on Ukraine's musical landscape since the inaugural Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in 2020.

Public Humanities at CUNY: An Interview with Dr. Stacy Hartman and Dr. Bianca Williams from the PublicsLab

In this conversation with Queenie Sukhadia, PublicsLab Director Stacy Hartman and Faculty Lead Bianca Williams discuss how they are working to transform doctoral education to be more publicly engaged, as well as the meaning and role of public humanities within CUNY and beyond.

Blue Humanities: Interview with Eric Dean Wilson

I had the pleasure of interviewing Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort, and Teaching Fellow in the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research through the Center for Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Eric gave insight on the fascinating intersections of environmental humanities, discussing his recently published book from conception through publication.

Embracing Your Whole Self through Your Public Commitments: An Interview with Kendra Sullivan

Kendra Sullivan, Director of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, speaks with Queenie Sukhadia about the potentials and practices of public humanities including how they break down the binary of inside/outside academia, integrating the manifold expertise each person brings toward this work, and building institutional structures that support publicly engaged scholarship.

Meet the Mindscapes 2022 Cohort

In this post, Mindscapes Graduate Research Assistants Helena Najm and Dunni Oduyemi introduce the Mindscapes project and the rest of their cohort at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Public Engagement, Collaboration and Post-PhD Career Exploration: A Conversation with Katina Rogers

Author, researcher, administrator, and educator, Katina L. Rogers, and Queenie Sukhadia discuss the public humanities as ways of listening to and amplifying ongoing engagement, understanding the architecture of academic systems and structures, and creating possibilities for graduate students to envision alternative career paths.

A CUNY Public Humanities Map

In this blog post, Aurash Khawarzad describes a creative mapping project, The Public Humanities Map, which charts the scope and relationships among publicly engaged humanities work across CUNY and our Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research.

The Uses of Blue-Sky Thinking in an Imperfect World (of Graduate Education)

In this essay, Michelle May-Curry, Project director of Humanities for All, reflects on a session from The Graduate Education at Work in the World conference, in which session organizer Kristen Galvin invited participants to not only chart existing public humanities initiatives but also to engage in blue-sky thinking around what this work could look like and do in a world without practical restrictions. Here, May-Curry extends Galvin's invitation to a broader consideration of the field of public humanities and how this more unhindered thinking can yield surprisingly practicable solutions as well as means of illuminating the challenges and obstacles to producing publicly engaged scholarship.

Podcasting and Pedagogy

Sociology scholar Ellen Meiser shares an essay discussing the pedagogical possibilities of using podcasts and audio material as a tool in college classrooms and how she has employed them while teaching asynchronously during the Covid-19 pandemic. Connecting this teaching approach with her work as co-host of the sociology-focused podcast The Social Breakdown, Meiser makes a case for how bringing other voices and sounds into the classroom through podcasts can "show not only what our world sounds like, but also how it feels."

Creating Space within Constraints: A Reflection on Conference Planning in a Pandemic

In this reflection, GC PhD student and Futures Initiative Fellow Cihan Tekay writes about her experience of co-organizing the conference "Graduate Education at Work in the World." She narrates the process of having to adapt not only structures but also expectations––that themselves reflect the conditions under which academic work is performed pre- and post-pandemic––in re-conceiving a physical convening as a series of remote gatherings. She also discusses how the conference's presentations––on topics ranging from prioritizing accessibility in research formats to creating digital primary sources in college classrooms––reflect back on what it means to organize a virtual conference.

“Love is the most subversive praxis.” On reading together as a working of love

In this interview, Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Marco Saavedra discuss their work creating a collaborative public syllabus that traces Saavedra's constellation of influences and proposes reading together as "an(other) act of love." At the heart of their conversation is a question of how love is a constitutive element of both collaboration and liberation.

The Craft We Didn't Learn: Retroactive Writing Advice from the Archives

Lost & Found editors Iris Cushing, Megan Paslawski, and Zohra Saed discuss with L&F Publisher Kendra Sullivan what they've learned about writing through working in the archives of Diane di Prima, Marty Korte, Lucia Berlin, and Langston Hughes, as a continuation of their discussion for the 2021 AWP conference. Among many things, they reflect on the 'magic transmissions' of poetry, thought, and communication between the living and dead, archival research as 'pushing a hand through the veil of time,' and "the extreme 'outside' at the very heart of life."

Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Ryan Mann-Hamilton

In this interview, Ryan Mann-Hamilton and Queenie Sukhadia discuss Ryan's project Environment Community Humanities Oasis (ECHO), which seeks to connect communities around environmental justice actions; how public universities can make good on their claims of social impact; and the inclusion of publics in the process of not just making but also brainstorming projects.

Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Ángeles Donoso Macaya

In this interview, Ángeles Donoso Macaya and Queenie Sukhadia discuss questions and concerns arising from Ángeles's project Archives in Common, including how to share "knowledges, experiences, and memories [of immigrant communities] in a way that is non-extractive, where these knowledges, experiences, and memories don’t then become data," the relationship of these forms of sharing to mutual aid, and imperatives to transform both the university and practices of academic work.

Researching—Mae West—in the 2020 Pandemic

In this report, Carolyn A. McDonough gives an overview of the activities of the team of GC-based research assistants working on Virginia Heath's in-progress documentary, Mae West –– The Constant Sinner. In addition to dispatches from each of the research assistants, whose work has been both upended and productively reoriented by the Covid-19 pandemic, director Virginia Heath provides an account of the how her process and vision for the film has changed and developed over the last year.

Flipping It Horizontal

In this essay, GC PhD student and educator Katherine E. Entigar reflects on the process of working collaboratively with pre-service teaching students to shift parameters, timelines, expectations, and notions of participation in their shared classroom, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Together, redefining education as necessarily determined by realities in students' lives outside the classroom, Entigar writes about how the class sought to create a horizontal structure among teachers and students.

Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Yarimar Bonilla

In this interview, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Yarimar Bonilla and Queenie Sukhadia discuss Yarimar's project, The Puerto Rico Syllabus, along with the importance of "valuing public scholarship as scholarship" and conceiving of one's work as inseparable from the communities in which it is situated.

Meet the Mellon Seminar Cohort: Chloë Bass

In this interview, Mellon Seminar Faculty Lead Chloë Bass discusses her project "Here and Not There" with Queenie Sukhadia, as well as the responsibilities of the public university, how to make research accessible to non-academic audiences, and how the resources of the university can be used "towards a larger good rather than controlled through scarcity mentalities and ongoing austerity."

Centering Global Literature in the English Studies Classroom

In this blog post, Sonia Adams outlines strategies for both pedagogical and curricular development approaches that integrate the importance of global literature in English classrooms across CUNY and beyond.