I have been invited to participate in a panel today on the public humanities and that always gives me pause. I don’t always consider myself a particularly good humanist and I sometimes wonder whether what we do in the humanities has only the most tenuous connections to things outside of academia. In other words, are the public humanities really a thing or is it merely a marketing ploy designed to imply a broad audience for an otherwise limited-use tool. 

That said, when invited to participate in conversations, I tend to show up.

As I’ve mulled over the invitation, I think that I can contribute three things that I’ve tried to do as someone committed to public humanities.

1. Listen. One of the main things that I’ve learned from my interest in the public humanities is to listen more carefully to people when they talk about what they love, value, read, write, and do. When I first started thinking about public humanities, I focused too much on telling people what I do and what I think and trying to write in such a way that other people will read it. Of course, there is a time and a place for this, but over the years, I’ve found there are far more opportunities to listen than to speak. 

This helped me understand that public humanities isn’t so much about bringing what we do in the academic humanities to a public audience, but a matter of recognizing how the wider community “does the humanities” beyond the walls of academia. It is true that I don’t always love the humanities that the public “does,” but that’s fair enough, I don’t always appreciate the work of my fellow academic humanists either. The point of listening is that by recognizing how other people think about issues central to the humanities — values, art, literature, and so on — we broaden the conversation rather than just growing the audience.

2. Media is the Message. There was a time when I would argue (or perhaps only assert) that the humanities primarily deal with texts. I might begrudgingly admit that films qualified as “texts” of a sort. Then, maybe, TV shows (but only quality TV shows). Over time, I accepted that video games have a place within the big tent of the humanities. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by music. Podcasts are so textual that you almost need to turn a page while listening to them. TikTok, The Insta, Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Los Elefantes, and other places seem also to qualify.

Part of what’s exciting about the public humanities is that proliferates across media. It is a transmedia phenomenon. I’ll be quick to admit that my commitment to the public humanities is limited. I don’t enjoy podcasts (other than the one boxing podcast that I listen to from time to time), I don’t watch many movies (unless on a long flight), and it is apparently illegal to access the TikToks in North Dakota. I do what I can, however, to help people develop certain kinds of media skills. For example, in my Practicum in Writing, Editing, and Publishing I work with students to understand the editing and production process. While many of them aspire to careers in publishing, I try to remind them that they could be publishers without working in the “industry.” In fact, being students at a university give them access to all of the tools necessary to be a publisher and to explore print as a medium for their vision. Of course, their phones, laptops, and tablets provide most of the tools necessary to explore video, podcasts, and social media as ways to talking to and with a wider audience.

3. Creating a Platform. Finally, I like to think that my best work in the public humanities involves creating a platform for various voices. I try to do this with my press with varying levels of success. Some of the books we publish are intended for a broad audience, although most of the authors we feature are academic authors. North Dakota Quarterly, on the other hand, does more to platform public humanists who are not academic, who are academic, and who move between the categories.

Of course, as readers of this blog know, NDQ has struggled a bit to remain solvent and relevant within a very unstable, crowded, and difficult (perhaps even unsustainable) segment of the media world. That said, we (myself and my collaborators) continue to work to create space where academic and public humanities can intermingle in meaningful ways. It seems to me that the key to cultivating the public humanities is not just making what we do in the academic humanities available to a wider audience, but acknowledging that the public humanities exist, and we as academic humanists can do more to promote this work.