Towards Transformative
and Community-Centered Graduate Study
counterpublics is the intellectual repository for The Public Humanities Lab, a collaborative project funded by the ACLS and Mellon Foundation’s Scholars and Society Grant. It is a space of experimentation and putting theory to practice. Most importantly, it is a gathering space for scholars who desire to move their theorizing to practice to enact social change. While theory, practice, and social change are interconnected, academic training often structures boundaries around these areas.
counterpublics explores what public scholarship is and can be when it is grounded in core values of community, justice, and societal transformation.
This project is done in community with graduate students and faculty in the Public Scholarship in Action Collective at Texas Christian University, who have come together around the critical question: What does anti-racist and justice-oriented graduate study look like today? To respond to this question we have curated the “Study and Struggle Series” that explores various topics in the growing field of Critical University Studies such as: ableism, cis-heteronormativity, settler colonialism, and more with respect to how they materialize in higher education. In addition to the group’s inquiry into graduate study, the Collective examines issues related to education and Higher Ed more broadly given that these issues are interconnected.
Our Collective
“Everything worthwhile is done with other people.”
Public Scholarship in Action
Learn more about the critical work and conversations on how to enact truly transformative graduate study. This space also features events in our Study and Struggle Series, key texts we are reading, as well as guest posts.
Community Resources
We have compiled resources that allow us to think and build together. These resources are not fully comprehensive and are expanding as we grow.
“Study and struggle for liberation requires that we unknow many falsehoods that are foundational to settler colonialism: categories of human and nonhuman, land as inert, health as a luxury for few, the pillaging of the planet and its darker peoples as the ‘natural’ order of things. . . . Institutions don’t define us, our relationships do.”
