1. What are you between?

LABODE: The nature of between-ness depends on perspective. From the perspective of my academic home, IUPUI, my appointment is between the history department and the Museum Studies Program, with an adjunct appointment in the Africana Studies Program. My public scholar designation is Public Scholar of African American History and Museums. This official title shapes the formal parameters of my academic position, including identifying the academic entities that are responsible for evaluating my performance, how my classes are named and listed, and where much of my academic service is oriented.

From the perspective of the academy, I am between many fields and methodologies, including: traditional "academic" history and "public history"; studies of regions in the United States (the West, the Midwest) and individual states or cities (Indianapolis, Denver); African American studies and African American history; museum studies and public history. That many of these fields are interdisciplinary adds further dimensions to my academic between-ness.

ZIMMERMAN: By training I'm an anthropologist with a specialty in the archaeology of the US Great Plains, but I'm really a generalist with an applied anthropology bent. My interests cover just about anything people have done, do now, or might do in the future! (And the applied part makes me think that my discipline earns its keep for the folks who pay the bills.)

KRYDER-REID: I'm between disciplines, and mostly happily so. Trained as an archaeologist, excavating and running the public program for an eighteenth-century garden lured me into the intoxicating intellectual labyrinth of public memory, material culture studies, semiotics, public history, critical theory, and museum studies. The tricky part is the voices—learning the dialects of different disciplines and subspecialties and then speaking with conviction in a way that translates across those linguistic boundaries.

CUSACK-MCVEIGH: As Public Scholar of Collections and Community Curation, I sometimes find myself between the anthropological discipline and the museum world. Anthropologists have worked in museum settings for many years, but we do not always share the same paradigms as those who enter the museum field from other disciplines. The American Anthropological Association's Council for Museum Anthropology helps address some of these tensions.

HOLZMAN: As IUPUI's Public Scholar of Curatorial Practices and Visual Art, I have a joint appointment between the Museum Studies Program in the liberal arts school and the Art History Program in the art and design school. I teach courses in each area and, in addition to training museum studies MA students, I work with graduate students pursuing visual art MFA degrees and undergraduate students pursuing BA or BFA degrees. Working across these programs entails navigating different professional expectations, administrative policies, cultures of learning, and even different unofficial dress codes.

WOOD: I am between practical and theoretical. I am between the inside and the outside. In my work as a public scholar, I've embraced the idea of civic engagement as something that puts me in the midst of the needs and concerns of community partners who might be, for example, staffs of small museum, families who visit museums, or communities who feel alienated by museums—thus between many different roles that come with privileges, opportunities, and drawbacks. The privileges include gaining trust and responsibility to honor the values and practices of those community members. The opportunities stem from being in the middle of interesting projects that are thick with valuable insights, perspectives, and information. The drawbacks of being in the in-betweens are that you do not always get to pick the topic, the process, or the end product. As a public scholar it is important that the work be driven by mutually identified needs and interests. My partners have equal say in the work that gets done, and my voice is part of a collaborative process.

KRYDER-REID: I'm also between theory and practice—constantly rubbing the two together in hopes that the friction makes each more vital. But it's a tricky line to walk: theory-infused practice can be insufferable and practice-laden theory boring beyond belief. I've strayed on both sides, and am still looking for the center. The best moments are when the intersection reaches out and smacks me in the face with a new connection.

HOLZMAN: At times I work across institutions. In my own research and service, as well as in the applied projects I facilitate for my students, I build connections with collaborators, mentors, and project supervisors outside of the university. In my capacity as a public scholar, I am a member of a local organization that facilitates conversations about creative, sustainable contemporary cities. When I work with the visiting artists we invite for month-long residencies, my projects may take the form of a book introduction or a curated exhibition. This is not a side job; it's an important part of my unified professional identity.

WOOD: Being a public scholar presents innumerable possibilities, all of which require reflection and restraint. Civic engagement and public action fall along a spectrum of activities ranging from the deliberative to problem solving to the insurgent (Boyte and Kari 1996). I find myself in all of these roles. The deliberative public scholar embeds herself alongside others in the ongoing practice and implementation of work. The problem-solving public scholar lends aid and knowledge (and free access to the University library). The insurgent public scholar rocks the boat and brings new perspectives to old systems and assumptions.

HOLZMAN: My background is in the already interdisciplinary field of visual studies. Developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a fusion of art history, film and media studies, and cultural studies, visual studies emerged as a platform for exploring the topics that spanned or got lost in the cracks between these interrelated fields. I wonder how much my experience differs from that of my colleagues (at IUPUI and elsewhere) because, in a way, I have been trained for hybrid work. Some of my earliest classroom discussions in graduate school explored how to describe scholarship that was grounded in an emergent field, how to speak with people who operated mainly in one of the several worlds that my work would straddle, and the challenge of demonstrating rigor when the work could be judged according to diverse standards.

LABODE: I define myself more simply as a historian. I am interested in questions about how we got here, and why we do the things we do, think the things we think, act the way we act.

HOLZMAN: I have discovered that my professional status is similar to my geographic location. Sure, the Midwest is between coasts, but it is also its own region, with a unique landscape, culture, and history. Professionally, I occupy a new category in which my between-ness becomes its own place, its own thing, and its own set of responsibilities.

KRYDER-REID: Finally, I'm between two visions of the academy. One is built on experts adding new knowledge through scholarship deemed worthy by narrow definitions of self-referential and increasingly isolationist disciplinary standards. The other seeks to expand the definitions of the value of one's work, to share authority and respect multiple ways of knowing, and to produce rigorous scholarship in ways that are relevant and accessible. The space between these notions of what is legitimate and worthy of reward is sometimes fraught, and the consequences of the divide are real. The fissure can be among faculty in a single department, between the rhetoric touted on institutional profiles and the realities of the tenure and promotion review committee trenches, or between one higher education leader's vision and his or her successor's entirely different vision of scholarly value. This is the hardest between space to navigate, and also the least productive as it both thwarts vital and innovative research and insatiably consumes energy spent explaining and justifying work that is not familiar or does not fit a medieval academy's notions of what good work looks like.

 

Works Cited