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.

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.

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.

Since 2017, St. Catherine University has partnered with the Mapping Prejudice Project to build an interdisciplinary and community-engaged public humanities project that can serve as a model for other universities. The project, titled Welcoming the Dear Neighbor?, engages students, faculty, and staff across departments who work in collaboration with community partners to advance knowledge of systemic racism and its impact both historically and in present-day disparities. The result is mutually beneficial relationships that integrate high-impact practices for student success and retention and yield tangible resources for community groups in our city and surrounding suburbs. To date, more than 1,400 students have participated in the project. We report qualitative and quantitative evidence showing that the project enhanced students’ sense of place and enriched their learning. We describe challenges and lessons learned that will be of particular interest to universities interested in projects that undertake interdisciplinary, racial justice-focused public humanities work.