As the faculty of the Museum Studies Program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), we are fortunate to be part of a small but vibrant intentional community formed around our shared dedication to civic engagement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public scholarship. The nature of our daily work is hybrid, and so are the routes that we've taken to arrive where we are today. This issue of Public provided a welcome opportunity for us to examine our different professional backgrounds. Although our varied experiences shape our teaching and research and come up in conversation when we make group decisions about our program, we do not usually have the luxury of reflecting on our intersecting career paths. Looking closely at the routes that lead to and through our hybrid careers reveals an intricate combination of personal commitments, professional identity, larger goals, and broader perspectives.

Of the six core Museum Studies faculty members, five of us hold positions with the explicit title, "Public Scholar." Many of us have dual appointments, which spread our teaching, research, and service responsibilities across departments, and, in some cases, across schools. Two of us are additionally linked by formal partnerships to local museums through which we support the museums' missions and receive in turn extensive access to facilities, staff, and collections for training our museum studies students. Our university facilitates our work by providing funding opportunities, staff support, and administrative encouragement because our activities further IUPUI's mission of civic engagement. Even so, some institutional structures, particularly those based on internal peer review, can make it challenging for us to demonstrate to our colleagues at the school or university level the diligence and significance of our practices.

To capture the uniqueness of each of our experiences while also retaining the collaborative spirit that guides our program, we posed four questions to ourselves that invited reflection on our work, our positionality, our goals, and the expectations that others have for us. After individually responding to those prompts, we synthesized our statements into an imagined dialogue that reflects our shared and contrasting perspectives. Below are those questions and an overview of the themes that arose in our statements. Click on the questions to read our merged responses.

Works Cited