The Inclusuem is a collaborative project established in 2012 with international reach and global impact. The three co-directors, Aletheia Whitman, Dr. Rose Paquet, and Dr. Porchia Moore share a mission to “advance new ways of being a museum through dialogue, community building, and collaborative practice related to inclusive practice in museums.” We have provided a platform for over a decade which prompts arts and cultural heritage professionals to push the bounds of museum work to be as expansive and inclusive as possible while enacting structural change. In this piece, we focus on museums as sites where the humanities are made public. Our manifesto proposes a vision for the public humanities in a changing political landscape and will introduce new perspectives for both an emerging museum and an emergent new understanding for the public humanities within museums faced with an antagonistic intellectual and cultural ecosystem.

This essay examines the integration of accompaniment methodology with public humanities and policy work through case studies from activist research in New Orleans. The concept of accompaniment involves providing active, supportive engagement alongside marginalized communities to address systemic barriers and foster mutual understandings. This essay highlights how accompaniment can provide support in navigating bureaucratic challenges and inform immigration policy. It also explores how accompaniment can inform public humanities work, like the development of a digital timeline and physical exhibition documenting Black labor history in New Orleans. This approach underscores the transformative potential of combining accompaniment with public humanities to enhance community empowerment, inform policy, and challenge systemic inequities. By engaging with community experiences and integrating insights from both historical and contemporary struggles, this essay chronicles the development of accompaniment methodology and shows how this approach can enrich public humanities scholarship and policy work, creating more inclusive and responsive solutions to social challenges. Accompaniment serves as a vital tool for bridging academic inquiry with social justice, making public humanities research more relevant, ethical, equitable, and impactful.

Should it feel good to get an award for scholar activism? As well-intentioned the recognition of my activism is, it misses the point of what activism is by singling out one person, especially a scholar. The danger with claiming scholar activism as heroic is twofold. First, it makes activists exceptional, implying that society may rely on exceptional individuals instead of valuing the collective work. Second, it glorifies the activism of scholars, as if it were more valuable than that of others while ignoring the hierarchies that empower and protect academia. Instead, we must normalize scholar activism, sharing the load and using our bodies as shields. We’ll join the work of activism in constellation and value the power of emotions, embodying our ideas as we grow into activist scholars.

Stuart Hall stated “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing.” When it comes to the historical study of sexual abuse in Canadian sport, until very recently, it has been very much the latter. Nothing. As part of a larger project on studies of sexual abuse in sport, we reviewed articles across the four leading sport history journals – Sport History Review, Sport in History, Journal of Sport History, and International Journal of the History of Sport – to consider what methods, sports, and demographics received the most analysis. Such an effort proved impossible. There was scholarly silence on the matter. But this raised another question. So what? Would publishing in pay-walled academic journals about so pressing a societal issue make any difference at all? Furthermore, can a PhD-touting academic – including the lead author of this paper – ever enact change via the field of history if their sole purpose is to churn out studies for the ivory tower? We think not. It requires boots on the ground. Engagement and collaboration with those Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals,” so we can tend the flames of knowledge and fuel a movement. History can be the tool one wields. Public, digital history.

This article argues that the number of tenure-line academic positions has been shrinking for decades, and that non-tenure track workers are being asked to do more un- and under-compensated publishing, editing, and peer review labour this labour. This is all having a detrimental impact on larger, public humanities based projects. Often, non-tenure track faculty are paid for their hard earned expertise in a currency of hope, or in the implicit promise of future opportunities. Large public humanities programs, should resist the temptation to use hope labour and gig workers.

This essay considers how the nineteenth-century idea of the university as a refuge, constructed by thinkers like John Henry Newman, continues to shape contemporary universities and the field of public humanities. This vision of the university has lasting appeal for obvious reasons. In a culture predicated on speed, slowness is a political act. In a culture of hot takes, cold reasoning often provides necessary context, a wider view. And yet, as W. E. B. Du Bois warns, the “tenacious legend” of the Victorian university is dangerous because it separates the university from mass culture. Building on Du Bois’s thinking, the essay concludes that instead of seeking protection, enclosure, or recognition within university institutions, public humanities practitioners should seek refuge in the relationships of mutual responsibility they foster.

Humanities research is underfunded, and the institutional sources and intellectual effects of this underfunding are insufficiently appreciated. The paper gives an example of the negative effects of a humanities discipline’s lack of research infrastructure on scholarly work. Section 2 describes the main categories through which research funds arrive on U.S. campuses. Section 3 describes the disproportions between Science & Engineering (S&E or “STEM”) funding and funding for social and cultural disciplines. Section 4 discussions the “institutional funds” that universities use to cover research costs from their own pockets. Section 5 shows that universities do not use their institutional funds to compensate for inequities in humanities funding but to perpetuate them. Section 6 claims that the current state of humanities funding abridges academic freedom and calls on humanities administrative personnel to lead a national campaign to rectify the current situation. Misconceptions about humanities research and its funding must be openly acknowledged and addressed so that it can come to have public effects that reflect its actual intellectual achievements.

With recent leaps in large language model technology, conversational AI offer increasingly sophisticated interactions. But is it fair to say that they can offer authentic relationships, perhaps even assuage the loneliness epidemic? In answering this question, this essay traces the history of AI authenticity, historically shaped by cultural imaginations of intelligent machines and human communication. The illusion of human-like interaction with AI has existed since at least the 1960s, when the term “Eliza effect’ was named after the first chatbot Eliza. Termed a “crisis of authenticity” by sociologist Sherry Turkle, the Eliza effect has stood for fears that AI interactions can undermine real human connections and leave users vulnerable to manipulation. More recently, however, researchers have begun investigating less anthropomorphic definitions of authenticity. The expectation - and perhaps fantasy - of authenticity stems, in turn, from a much longer history of technologically mediated communications, dating back to the invention of the telegraph in the nineteenth century. Read through this history, the essay concludes that AI relationships might not mimic human interactions but must instead acknowledge the artifice of AI, offering a new form of companionship in our mediated, often lonely, times.

The Being Human Festival, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024, is the UK’s national humanities research festival, held every November to engage local communities with creative and participatory events that are free to attend. Over its first decade, Being Human has helped transform UK public engagement practices in the humanities, strengthened community ties, and inspired academic and public participants alike. Looking back on 10 years of Being Human, the director of the festival takes readers behind-the-scenes to see who makes it happen, how, and why. Looking forward, the festival aims to further transform public engagement infrastructure, support vernacular knowledge, and expand globally, advocating for the humanities’ indispensability in a democratic society.

This article highlights the importance of European scientists, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, in shaping global research policies through active advocacy in science policy. The European Union (EU) is a significant transnational research funder, largely through its multiannual Framework Programmes, such as Horizon Europe (2020–2027), which support collaboration between researchers worldwide. This funding drives innovation and societal benefit, influencing global standards on topics like sustainability, cultural heritage, and data protection. The EU’s openness to consultation makes it unique compared to countries like the United States and China, where funding decisions are decided top-down by governments and policymakers. Thus, European humanities and social science researchers have a unique opportunity to shape the political research agenda. To strengthen this advocacy, three practical steps await researchers: (1) understand national research narratives, (2) ensure research impacts policymaking, and (3) support international research organisations.

Henry David Thoreau and Frances E. W. Harper offer a historical model for the public humanities grounded in racial justice and moral education. For both Thoreau and Harper, the “public practice of humanity” that Thoreau identifies in “A Plea for Captain John Brown” inescapably means taking the side of justice, creating a “liberation humanities” that is analogous to the “preferential option for the poor” in twentieth-century theologies of liberation. Both authors use a mix of theologically informed moral reasoning and wit and irony to further the cause of justice, and both are concerned with the ways in which literary form and public advocacy can coalesce.

This article makes the case for unearthing a long history of public humanities. The story begins with the very emergence of universities in the United States and continues through key moments where people of color and Indigenous people have shaped the history of public humanities. Risam makes the case against allowing the novelty of the term “public humanities” to erase this history and for resisting cooptation of public humanities by the neoliberal university.

The public history movement in North America that was born amid the academic job crisis of the late 1970s aspired to a radical reformation of professional history’s audience from an inward focused conversation among professionals to one working with government and corporate institutions and in dialogue with the public. This essay focuses on the institutional evolution of the National Council on Public History (NCPH) to illustrate the unexpected, but not entirely unpropitious outcome that flowed from the failure of the organization’s original goals. How that movement failed and what it succeeded in creating may hold useful lessons for the contemporary public humanities campaign. In the late twentieth century, the public history movement failed to bring about a major reorientation of professional and academic history. In the attempt, however, it created an off shot of public history as one of a number of new but distinctly separate fields of academic historical practice. Unexpectedly, public history became a new academic specialty alongside other new fields from that era: native American history, environmental history, and gender history.

Museums and news organizations make up major parts of the structure that maintains an informed community essential to democracy. As resources for both of these institutions dwindle, it’s more important than ever for these sectors to work together toward their common goals – not only with each other, but with their respective communities in ways that are collaborative and egalitarian. The following outlines Civil Wrongs, a program started at the University of Memphis Department of Journalism and Strategic Media in 2022, as an emerging example of how these institutions can work together and learn from each other for the sake of a more informed community. Civil Wrongs is both a journalistic project of the nonprofit Institute for Public Service Reporting, and an academic class for junior and senior college students from multiple disciplines, including journalism, history, and political science. Through narrative podcasting, the program aims to examine past cases of racial terror in the Mid-South and analyze their connection to present-day injustices. It is a break from the traditional journalistic model that focuses solely on the present with little historical context and therefore naturally creates a bridge to museums that are grounded in history education.

We present two examples of how the environmental humanities have built bridges with governments and made effective policy interventions. Lessons can be drawn about how public humanities can help develop social and cultural understanding and societal resilience.

Our contemporary understanding of political corruption draws from two different sources, a modern view that corruption occurs where officials follow improper procedures and a more ancient view of corruption as a systemic failure to live up to political ideals. The ability to shift between these views makes it easy for political partisans to locate corruption where it suits their political interests. Since accusations of corruption easily become challenges to the legitimacy of officeholders and institutions, there is danger in carelessness with the language of corruption. Awareness of these circumstances should lead us to be cautious with the language of corruption and to resist its slide toward becoming a mere means of political struggle.

This essay delves into a pivotal incident where Edward Said’s Palestinian identity collided with entrenched conservative American values, revealing the dichotomy of his dual role as a Columbia University professor and outspoken advocate for Palestinian statehood. The catalyst was a provocative article, “Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon,” from the Columbia Daily Spectator. Said, renowned for his incisive critique of Western depictions of the East and the global dissemination of “orientalism,” brazenly condemned American foreign policy, particularly its support for Israel’s colonial expansion. I examine the episode’s portrayal in the New York Times and Columbia Daily Spectator, highlighting Edward Said’s seemingly conflicting intellectual legacy. Drawing from his essays like “On Nelson Mandela, and Others” (1994), “Homage to a Belly Dancer” (1990), and the memoir “Out of Place” (1999), I explore Said’s views on the public intellectual’s role in America. This investigation probes whether Said’s public identity aligns with his academic persona, and how visibility shapes his concept of the “public.” It questions if public intellectuals can maintain autonomy within academia or if they inevitably conform to university norms.

Inspired in large part by the author’s residence on the grounds of a former plantation in Stafford County, Virginia, Sparking Freedom highlights local stories of enslaved resistance. The program incorporates stops at multiple National Park Service sites, as well as several other historic locations and the Fredericksburg Area Museum. Combining historical documentation and archival research, the tour features accounts of enslaved resistance including an uprising of enslaved men at Chatham Plantation in the winter of 1805, the story of Anthony Burns, an enslaved man who escaped to Boston in 1853 but was later apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and enslaved individuals like Bethany Veney who resisted sales and auctions. Sparking Freedom is a highly personal example of innovative and engaging public history work honoring enslaved communities.

Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

The future of public humanities will be determined by the infrastructural investments that support its continued development. These include, in the context of the United States, increased federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities; a serious re-engagement in the material support of new humanities scholarly production by private foundations; and a focused effort by humanities organizations to cultivate philanthropic donors. This manifesto argues that the humanities are the rightful inheritance of every person, regardless of background or position. If we are to take seriously both the resource needs of humanities research—which demand that funds be allocated for highly trained scholars to read, interpret, authenticate, preserve, and circulate primary source material—and the idea that no one has a higher claim than anyone else to these sources and processes and the insights they yield—which demands that individuals outside of the academy explicitly experience them selves as equal participants in the humanities—then our approach to both research infrastructure and public engagement must radically shift to emphasize repair. Repair, here, is the interpersonal, intellectual, strategic, repetitious, time-intensive work of ensuring that every individual can claim this rightful cultural inheritance. It is the work of creating the conditions for encounters between individuals and the vastness of history, culture, and difference. The future of public humanities must be in the creation of replicable models for these encounters, in the knowledge that in every instance, the work of the humanities is and must be unreproducible.