Making and Breaking the Public: Global Urban Humanities in Uncertain Times

William Acree and Samuel Shearer

The project of the public humanities has transformed the humanities in many ways. However, there has been very little engagement or attempt to challenge traditional definitions of “the public.” The result has been a notion of a generic, homogeneous, and passive public that is “out there.” In this collaborative faculty grant, organized as a research working group, we will turn our attention to multiple, intersecting, and conflicting publics. We are interested in meanings of publics, specifically urban publics. How are publics made and unmade, and what meanings do different configurations of diverse publics hold for human hopes, despairs, interactions, and creativity? Our collaborative exploration of urban publics also seeks to model the urban humanities as a mode of public humanities work. Who makes up the publics in public humanities? Who are included in and excluded from the collectives with which we wish to engage? How are these publics formed? And what challenges are there for carrying out public urban humanities in an uncertain, but a decidedly urban age? In posing these questions across a number of disciplinary boundaries and public engagements, we will introduce a range of approaches to theorizing publics and the urban humanities while reaching a broad audience. The twelve participants include architects, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, literature and cultural studies scholars, and designers who examine how urban publics are made and unmade from various locations in the world. Together, and with local communities, we will explore the making of publics and the possibilities of open-forum, urban humanities.