3. Why are you here?

ZIMMERMAN: The public scholar position I was hired for in 2004 seems to combine everything I had been doing with museums, higher education, community-based participatory research, and Indians. The only oddity is that Indiana is a state that even though named after Indians doesn't seem to want to recognize their presence. My job, as much as anything, has become getting Indiana's public to understand that Indians really are still here.

LABODE: I appreciate the resources and stability that an academic environment provides. Resources such as physical space, telephone, computer, and time to plan are often difficult to negotiate when working in non-profit sectors. The IUPUI library and its associated resources (databases, interlibrary loan, etc.) have been invaluable to my work. I am also aware of how unequally these information resources are distributed in society.

WOOD: I am here to create action and change. The finer points of action rely on an individual scholar's approach and orientation to their setting, and knowing the complexities and realities of the places in which they are working. For me, prior work and life experiences and grounding in museum culture were an important basis for my ability to enter the conversations and the flow of work as a public scholar. Knowing museum practice and seeing museum spaces as a laboratory for investigations contributed to seeing the ways that a public scholar could contribute to a broader mission. Working effectively in these complex settings requires different positions and approaches to meet the realities head on.

CUSACK-MCVEIGH: I am at IUPUI, in large part, because of the university's commitment to public scholarship and community engagement. The Museum Studies Program's core values of civic engagement, applied learning, integration, collaboration, inclusion, and leadership are a natural fit for the kind of work I have always done. This position allows me to further my research and, more importantly, to share my passions with the next generation of anthropology and museology scholars.

KRYDER-REID: I'm here because some very brave people took a chance on a relatively unproven person whose idea of working across all kinds of boundaries seemed a good fit. I've stayed here because I've found this to be an institution of "yes." Specifically, when proposing a new idea, I've never heard "no, we don't do it that way." There's almost never any money to put behind the initiative, but there's a general attitude of, "go for it." That willingness to try, to risk failure, creates an empowering and productive environment.

LABODE: Higher education is a site in which students, scholars, and the public can carry out work over a long period of time. I think that many collaborations require time to develop, and my position provides that time.

KRYDER-REID: I'm also here because this is a generous community. The institutions and organizations I have the privilege to collaborate with are unceasingly generous in sharing their expertise, spaces, problems, things, and opportunities. They have created such a fertile ground for teaching and learning and for trying out new ideas, that the metaphor of museum as learning lab is a reality. There are frictions and miscommunications, to be sure, but the fundamental posture of sharing keeps me here.

LABODE: I also have valued collaborations with community groups, government agencies, and other sectors, out of which the value of humanities scholarship and perspectives emerge.

HOLZMAN: I am in an early stage of my career, so it is particularly helpful to work among experienced colleagues who navigate the terrain of public scholarship with me as we collaborate with community partners, make curriculum decisions, and develop evaluation materials. It is a pursuit that I believe each of us would be motivated to follow on our own, but our work is that much richer because we learn from each other.

WOOD: The nature of the public scholar role represents Boyer's (1990) reconsideration of scholarship as an integrated and applied orientation across multiple avenues of teaching and research. This is not just some grand-scale idea of service. In fact, I positioned my tenure case on the basis that teaching is my chief work as a public scholar. Developing civic engagement and public scholarship research practices involves re-positioning and re-imagining the social interactions between "community" and "university" (Bridger and Alter 2006; Ellison and Eatman 2008; Ostrander 2004). The public scholar crosses into new territory in which to ask questions, seeking collective ownership of problem solving, and shifting the expectations around knowledge and power production (Giroux 1991).

 

Works Cited