The practice of anthropology is based on the ethnographer “being there” in time and space. And the act of writing is the reenactment of “presence” for the reader. “The field” is a romanticized space for empirical exploration. However, technological innovation and connectivity have enabled easy access to new “fieldsites” and vicarious participant-observation without being “present.” The entertainment media ecosystem is now more heterogeneous than ever and is more relevant in everyday life. The depth with which we immerse ourselves in these imaginary worlds speaks volumes about our withdrawal from other forms of engagement with the people, communities, and social problems around us. Romance and fantasy are a means to escape vulnerability and hopelessness, as well as serving as an outlet for the frustrations of failed social mobility. This essay posits that romance is a method for living today, and enjoyment is empiricism for a public anthropology. Romance is more than a genre; it is a guide to understanding how society functions. There is something deeply human about living through our imaginations to escape our present. Enjoying romance as a method to engage with the world offers insight into political infrastructures, social hierarchies, and elite intrigue. Life is full of afflictions, and romance is more than a salve; it offers a strategy for navigating social relations.

In this article, we present the field of public history, which we define as a process of making history more accessible, participatory, and connected to present-day public engagement with the past. In particular, we discuss how public history invites and develops interdisciplinary collaboration, such as between history and art. We also present the reasons, the practices, and the challenges of co-producing historical projects with non-professional members of the public. As a new paradigm, public history questions and reinvents the role of professional historians who share authority with other actors of the history-making process. We flesh out our arguments with examples from recent public history projects we developed in Luxembourg in 2024.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global public health challenge that, like climate change, demands urgent, coordinated, multi-sectoral action. Yet, responses to AMR may be ill-suited to local contexts, overlook historical inequalities, or dismiss marginalised knowledge systems. Some of these concerns can be discussed using the concept of a just transition, which aims to ensure that “no one is left behind,” “all voices are heard,” and past injustices are addressed. However, framing justice in these terms is insufficient. We argue for a more multifaceted and broader-scoped understanding of what justice demands in a just transition for AMR. We examine existing justice frameworks in AMR literature and discuss two cases that motivate our call for including both more forms of justice in a multifaceted concept of a just transition and a broader scope of justice. The first case involves over-the-counter antibiotic access in the Kibera informal settlement near Nairobi, highlighting structural injustices resulting from colonial oppression and what an Ubuntu philosophy would show as injustice. The second case concerns veterinary prescription requirements for Maasai pastoralists’ livestock farming in southern Kenya and highlights epistemic and distributive injustices, as well as injustices that befall non-human animals. These examples reveal distinct injustices shaped by socio-cultural and ecological contexts.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and antimicrobial pollution caused by human activity are placing pressure on global microbiota. However, microbial protection remains mostly absent from international law and global governance frameworks. This policy brief highlights the chronic marginalisation of microbes in international health, environmental, and human rights law, as well as in governance frameworks addressing antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Drawing on recent genomics and humanities research, it argues that policymakers need to abandon interventions designed to control or combat individual microbes in favour of microbiota-oriented governance. This brief discusses three major areas (pollution thresholds, microbial conservation, and the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment) where change is already occurring.

This article reflects on the emergence of volumetric capture as a means to render human experience in three dimensions and how its applications in medicine, performance, and digital archiving are reshaping our relationship to documentation and embodiment. From 360-degree imagery to the advanced rendering techniques of Gaussian Splatting, these tools raise questions about the ethics of visualisation and the power to represent. This article draws on the work of scholars such as Taylor, Schneider, Kenderdine, Holling, and DeNora to challenge the notion of archives as neutral or static repositories and asks: in an age where our movements can be stored and repurposed, how do we navigate the tension between visibility and consent, between preservation and autonomy?

This article details the efforts made to map a project that commemorates the network of women and their collaborators who played a major role in shaping the post-war designed landscapes of the British Welfare State. It argues that despite the value attached to some parks and green spaces created in the twentieth century, many more have been overlooked and remain “unseen,” regardless of what we now know about their health and well-being benefits following the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, the role of an online open-access archive is explored as an innovative tool of public inquiry, in which the complexity of both archives and the passage of time are explored. The Women of the Welfare Landscape Historypin site was not solely focused on landscape architects and landscape architecture but also sought to communicate the perspectives of the communities that inhabit, work in, or recreate in landscapes that these pioneers developed. Through a contextualisation of the role of digital open-access mapping and archiving, along with local and social history, the project demonstrates the utility and opportunity of using an online and publicly accessible archive to show the humanities at work in public life.

This article explores the concept of transfer as it emerges in German-speaking academic discourse and considers its broader implications for the Global Public Literary Humanities. While transfer has become an established term in university policy, especially in Germany, its potential for literary studies remains under-examined. Building on both German and Francophone models, this article offers a nuanced framework that distinguishes between transfer and its synonyms—such as application, practice, communication, cooperation, and mediation—and proposes the concept of transferability as a means to sharpen theoretical and practical awareness regarding the conditions for successful transfer. This article presents a model that identifies both enabling conditions (such as relevance and resonance) and practical forms of transfer, arguing that transferability is shaped by ethical, esthetic, and anthropological considerations. Drawing on examples from current German debates (e.g., #RelevanteLiteraturwissenschaft, collaborative literary festivals, and citizen science projects), the analysis demonstrates that successful literary transfer is always co-creative and dialogical. Ultimately, this article calls for more institutional and structural efforts to enable transferability within literary studies and suggests that increased awareness of its prerequisites and possibilities for implementation can make academic work more responsive, inclusive, and socially engaged. This essay also advocates for extending the debate by incorporating concepts and practices from other linguistic and cultural traditions, thereby advancing the vision of Global Public Literary Humanities as a truly interconnected, dynamic, and transformative field. In doing so, this article hopes to encourage further critical reflection, experimentation, and the opening of new perspectives in research, teaching, and public engagement.

One of the daunting issues in Indian democracy is the complex relationship between the state and tribes. The relationship is known for its integration policy and affirmative action, which is the largest in the world; on the other hand, it is marred by dispossession, contravention of tribal rights, and sometimes state-sponsored violence. Tribes have diverse experiences of the Indian state, which significantly reflect their histories and traditions. To begin with, the founders of the Indian Constitution held backwardness and isolation from mainstream society as characteristics of tribes. However, those communities designated as Scheduled Tribes by the Constitution included communities that once were what anthropologists call a state society. The idea of a tribe in the post-independence period has become more complex as some ethnic communities associated with dynasties and states in the past are demanding tribal status. This development in the present has come at the cost of ethnic conflicts, intractable identity politics, and overstretched affirmative action policies. This article delves into the contestation of tribality in India, examining the relationship between tribe and state.

This article examines the paradox of the humanities: they are simultaneously denigrated while non-humanities disciplines utilize (and champion) the very skills that are considered uniquely cultivated by a humanities education. My examination reveals that with the fissure between the humanities and other disciplines, knowledge about what the humanities do—and thus contribute to education in other fields—continues to diminish, furthering the cycle of marginalizing the humanities while also benefitting from them without attribution. I consider a time when a humanities education explicitly played a crucial role in the development of leaders, especially in business, because of the role the humanities played in the cultivation of analytical skills and the development of good judgement. I use this examination to consider what this lost connection means not only for the development of leaders but also for realizing the significant role that the humanities play across the professions and in our universities. The pedagogical role of the humanities in its development of analytical ability and judgment is crucial to public life from the flourishing of the business world to the lives we lead living with each other as fellow citizens.

This article examines the role solidarity magazines played for the first generation of global Palestine activists. Through an analysis of Scandinavian magazines of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and microhistories of the first generation of solidarity activists in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden based on interviews, memoirs, novels, and letters, this article examines how the first Palestine committees and the foundational notions of the Palestinian cause were formed. This article argues that the solidarity magazine became a central forum for the co-creation of Palestine solidarity between Palestinians and their sympathizers. Viewing solidarity as a result of joint political and intellectual labor gives agency to solidarity as a third space between national solidarity movements and Third World liberation movements. By taking this approach, this article reads magazines as an aperture into the first iteration of Palestine as a global cause.

Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand, is a cultural institution located in Aotearoa New Zealand. The museum’s foundational principle of biculturalism appears increasingly inadequate for addressing the fundamental injustices associated with settler/invader colonialism and can be seen as a barrier to achieving a “collective future.” This article argues that Te Papa must discard biculturalism insofar as it does not provide for tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) or mana motuhake (Indigenous sovereignty). Currently, Te Papa promotes Indigenous cultural inclusion and the celebration of Te Ao Māori (The Māori World) within a settler/invader-defined national identity and cultural memory. In the future, a decolonial and tikanga-based (Māori legal and customary practices and system) approach should be implemented at Te Papa.

The phrase “much ado about nothing” in popular discourse attempts to dispel suspicion, including in response to high-profile sexual assault allegations such as those against Harvey Weinstein. This article explores how Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing speaks to this trend. In the play, Claudio falsely accuses Hero of infidelity, abandoning her at the altar. For this play to be a comedy with a “happy” ending, Claudio must admit that he was mistaken. He discovers that consent (or, in the play’s vocabulary, “good will”) is a relational agreement between two equals, not a mediated exchange of property. Claudio’s mistake, the subject of Beatrice and Benedick’s teasing, is inherent to Weinstein’s defense arguments and other usages. Much Ado About Nothing provides a model for reforming our cultural concept of consent.

The performing arts are, by definition, a public enterprise. Public Humanities are invested in sharing information publicly, reliably, and making it easy to find. Music, dance, theatre, and live art each have their own disciplinary methods and theories that do not necessarily align with those in the humanities. This essay explores how public works and public history projects can intersect with the performing arts. I posit that principles from the performing arts can be applied to public-facing work in the humanities and other disciplines. I detail seven key components of performing arts research and art-making and demonstrate how they can apply to Public Humanities.

Drawing on examples and lessons learned from an array of the author’s collaborative exhibit projects, this essay offers a model for making exhibits that a novice can adopt and adapt in a variety of contexts.

I’ve long reflected on how our work in the Blue Humanities (an interdisciplinary water-centric approach) can reach broader audiences, so it becomes meaningful and impactful, rather than buried in academic silos. Water, after all, is universally captivating. It resonates across age groups, cultures, professions, and disciplines. This article examines how the Blue Humanities can advance the Global Public Literary Humanities by engaging broader audiences in urgent conversations about climate change. At a time when the climate crisis demands cross-disciplinary and public engagement, the Blue Humanities offers a unique framework that bridges two persistent gaps: the divide between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and the disconnect between expert science and public understanding. At its core, the climate crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of imagination and communication between the humanities and sciences, as well as between science and the public. Drawing on my experience of teaching the Blue Humanities and using Twitter/X as a platform for public engagement, I explore how narrative tools—such as short fiction, film adaptation, video games, and social media—serve as effective Public Humanities media. These platforms evoke affect, ethical reflection, ecological awareness, and action by translating specialized climate knowledge into shared cultural narratives. They make the invisible climate change visible. By synthesizing blue, public, global, and literary humanities, I argue that narrative forms—whether textual, visual, or digital—can help build a civically engaged, media-diverse literary public capable of confronting the planetary challenges of our oceanic and climate futures.

Welcome to our ship—a vessel for flow as methodology. While flowing, we think; while thinking, we flow. With the sea as our center, this method expands other-than-human voices in public humanities. Our ship has technology aboard, yet the navigation of tides, currents, and saltwater is guided by ancestral wayfaring methods. Flow (2019–) is a method for fostering collaboration among elders, cultural bearers, children, and more to nurture Indigenous oceanic stories. We decolonize stories by actively restoring “Restorying” oral traditions from the islands we reside on. Embracing the 黒潮 (Japanese: Kuroshio; Chinese: Heichao) Current as our guiding teacher, this article challenges land-centric perspectives by embracing the fluidity of cultural exchanges in Austronesian communities. We navigate toward “Going back into a future of Simplicity” by relying upon strong waves of the past alive in the complexity of the present. We turn (return) to the flow of currents as a mode of connecting with knowledge rooted in native senses of the ocean as “an extension of the land”. Flow shares lessons on how Indigenous practices can facilitate interspecies community empathy and care for public humanities scholars in diverse fields.

It has long been acknowledged that the past can be a weapon. In Palestine, reports of the targeting of archaeological sites, museums, archives, and other locations of cultural heritage by Tel Aviv have been increasing drastically since 7 October 2023 (although they took place before). This article seeks to contextualise these destructions of heritage within a larger project of controlling history and understands this project to be a cornerstone of European colonialism, comparing it with Britain’s colonial control over how ancient sites are interpreted in what is now Zimbabwe. It asks what the role of the historian is in a time of genocide and revisits what it means to do “decolonial” work while history is being weaponised for colonial occupation. And it requires those of us who are interested in the past (and especially the ancient past) to reckon with our position in the belly of the beast.

This essay makes a case for the crucial role of performance in higher education as a way to help students become more responsible world citizens. It asserts that a culture of problem-solving rooted purely in metrics is not sufficient to tackle the complex global challenges that we face moving forward. Instead, we need methods for collaboratively assigning value and making decisions that are not beholden to ones and zeros or the market logic of capitalism. Theater—the applied craft of making a world (big or small), an experience (long or short) that’s livable and sharable—offers one place where we can develop these aptitudes.

The Shona people of Zimbabwe hold rich social histories that should be approached as public humanities. This article explores the oral traditions, pre-colonial sociopolitical systems, and the profound impacts of colonial and post-colonial developments on cultural identity to understand the cohesion of the Shona people. The Shona people’s rich culture of myths, folktales, and storytelling serves as a repository of collective memory that preserves the values, beliefs, and cosmologies underpinning their society. In examining pre-colonial Shona governance, this article highlights the decentralised political systems rooted in chieftaincy, kinship networks, and communal land tenure still in practice today. Using a hybrid methodological approach that integrates ethnographic insights, historical analysis, and theoretical frameworks, such as Santos’ (2018) epistemologies of the South, this study positions Shona public humanities within broader debates on African Indigenous knowledge systems and post-colonial identity reconstruction. The analysis extends to the economic practices of agrarian subsistence and long-distance trade, underscoring the sophisticated socio-economic frameworks of Shona society. Despite the challenges posed by industrial encroachment and cultural commodification, a resilient Shona heritage upholds adaptive strategies. A Shona situated approach contributes to broader debates on decolonisation for the preservation of Indigenous knowledge in a rapidly globalising world.