On Being in Public
by Stacie McCormick
counterpublics is an archive of conversations on the meaning of public scholarship today. It is also a space for imagining otherwise; or what theories of justice look like in practice. It is both a site of self-reflection for scholars wanting to do more public scholarship as well as an interrogation (as a practice of freedom) of systems in the academy that have caused harm to those who have been historically excluded and underrepresented as a result.
We also know that graduate education needs to change to support students who desire career versatility as well as those who want to do more justice-oriented work beyond the borders of the academy. The uncertainties of the academic job market persist and students who seek advanced degrees need spaces to collectively contemplate the various ways they can do the work for which they entered graduate school.
on being in community
As more and more scholars enter the field of Public Humanities, it is also important to be mindful of the histories of harm that academic researchers have caused to vulnerable communities (through extractive engagements; exploitative medical research; uncompensated or under-compensated labor; and more). We have to keep this history in mind so as not to reproduce harm.
Mariame Kaba is instructive on this when she says:
If we could see it [our work for justice - in this case #MeToo] as a way to understand how deeply enmeshed we are in the very systems that we’re organizing to transform, then I feel like it’s a movement that will allow us to move a step toward transformation and more justice.
One way into this work is to ask the question: How do various forms of structural oppression shape our lives?
This blog is a critical exploration on all the ways we can do our work so that it doesn’t affirm the status quo, but rather disrupts it and works toward the project of social transformation. We don’t want to reproduce the same systems from which we are trying to break free.
This work also conscious of Leigh Patel’s important observation:
In many academic meetings, collaborations with ‘the community’ are discussed according to a notion that there is a singular community outside the university or – perhaps an even more dangerous notion – that the academy itself is composed of a singular group of people similar in their shared ways of being, knowing, and doing, also known as culture.
It is imperative that we as scholars approach public engagement beyond our institutions in egalitarian and non-extractive ways. Thus, the counterpublics project is grounded in principles of community accountable scholarship and research justice. There are a host of experts outside of the academy who have as much to teach us as we can teach them.
on interdependence as a tool of liberation
Community-engaged research should not be forms of cultural tourism or mission-based work designed to save people who often have not asked to be saved. Instead, we have to be wholly invested in the lives and well-beings of those with which we engage in a spirit of interdependence, to call up Audre Lorde who writes:
Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
This project is an attempt to think through what is possible when we practice a collaboration across communities grounded in our interdependence and in the service of liberation. It is also an effort to upend capitalist logics of academic production as being done in specific ways and for narrow, individualistic ends. How can we leave more than we take?
