4. What are the challenges of working the way that you do, and how do you navigate them?

WOOD: The relationships built between public scholar and community organization are founded on the intellectual and emotional characteristics of the faculty member, as well as the overarching goals, mission, and purpose of the institution (Colbeck and Wharton-Michael 2006). This synergy requires constantly negotiating interests, facilitating dialogue, asking difficult questions, and fostering continued participation on behalf of all players (Bridger and Alter 2006). Fundamentally, the work is about being in and apart from the group, focusing on the cultural norms and realities that comprise the interactions of people, place, and purpose.

KRYDER-REID: One of the challenges is the sheer complexity of working collaboratively, across institutional and disciplinary boundaries, and with creative and diverse people. I love the variety and serendipities that arise, but it also requires improvisation, flexibility, diplomacy, patience, and sometimes resignation to factors outside your control.

HOLZMAN: Sometimes I worry that in speaking with so many people I may end up in a conversation with no one. Instead of operating in a close-knit intellectual community, where my research partners and audience share my expertise in topics or methods, I am a connector. Few others work with precisely the set of overlapping issues, ideas, and practices that I do. To succeed I must become an educator and a translator, responsible for teaching collaborators (or evaluators) about other concepts that intersect with our work. This task is challenging. It requires an additional investment of time and energy from me and from those with whom I speak.

LABODE: We work on the edges of institutions and disciplines, where interesting, challenging, and fruitful situations exist. But we must also avoid being perceived as marginal, and having the academic institution marginalize our activities.

CUSACK-MCVEIGH: It can be challenging to convey the value of a community-based approach to those outside the anthropological discipline. Some people in academia don't recognize community-based work as scholarship. Our colleagues often come from areas where little or no community interaction is necessary in order to conduct research and advance in their chosen fields.

LABODE: Academic institutions are often deeply invested in hierarchies and boundaries. Negotiating these boundaries and assumptions, explaining and justifying one's work, is often wearying.

WOOD: My response as a researcher in community settings comes in multiple formats. As a proponent of action research and participatory research models, I work with staff to look for more intentional ways to investigate what works with their approaches, what doesn't and why, and how to build teaching strategies that can better achieve their anticipated outcomes.

LABODE: The material outcome of my public scholarship is often unclear (unlike when I set out to write an article) or out of my control. I struggle with how to salvage, revise, or understand projects that collapse or otherwise do not meet my expectations. Sometimes projects misfire due to my actions, while other times they fail due to political or economic circumstances beyond anyone's control. Although I certainly have learned from these experiences, I have had difficulty coming to terms with what feels like lost time and effort.

WOOD: The kind of problem solving that museum workers employ generally tends toward the technical—for example, prototyping exhibit components, marketing to school groups. The public scholar as problem solver can function as a conduit for new research avenues, relating local problems to similar situations elsewhere, or generating more resources that can contribute to successful implementation of ideas. These resources can address challenges that range from simple discussions on how to better generate parent-child interactions to determining the best way to teach archaeology to five-year-olds.

KRYDER-REID: Another challenge is that working locally brings constraints on publication. All kinds of scholars, like ethnographers and biographers, have to weigh the consequences of what appears in their published research. But with an engaged community practice that one hopes to sustain over decades, there is an ever-present self-censoring of research that, if fully explored, would betray positions of confidence and erode trusted working relationships. I have file boxes of material from local projects that beg for analysis and a wider audience, but are too sensitive to share. At least I haven't figured out how to do so.

WOOD: A final action of the public scholar might best be described as insurgence. This role is perhaps most connected to the idea of the "public intellectual," the scholar who writes and thinks about the social and cultural implications of various disciplinary ideas. In a museum context, the public scholar can stimulate a desire to change the presentations and push the envelope a bit further (or perhaps, provide rules for the (r)evolution [Wood 2009]), so an exhibit can create necessary dialogue among visitors.

KRYDER-REID: It's a vibrant, messy way to work.

 

Works Cited