Fall 2024 Highlights🍁: Events and Excursions ✨
Read about some of the exciting on-campus, off-campus, and virtual events this quarter!
As we head into winter break, it seems like a fitting time to reflect on some highlights from this quarter’s Public Humanities programming here at Northwestern’s Kaplan Humanities Institute.
We kicked off the new academic year with an opening reception that brought members of the Northwestern community together with folks from organizations such as Illinois Humanities, Museum of Photography, Full Spectrum Features, Shorefront Legacy Center, Black Metropolis Research Consortium. This event, hosted in collaboration with Northwestern’s Center for Civic Engagement, provided an opportunity for humanities practitioners to connect as a community over some food and drinks!
Our next gathering, a virtual public panel on the Ethics of Community-Engaged Humanities Work brought together a group of humanities practitioners, Asad Ali Jafri (Spaceshift Collective), AJ Christian (Northwestern University), and Rebecca Coffman (Chicago History Museum), for a wide-ranging discussion on the theory and practice of community-based work, moderated by our esteemed colleague Kelly Wisecup.
Our panelists shared many insights on what good, ethical community engagement looks like, but these were a few of our main takeaways:
Enter into community partnerships with an openness of learning and relearning, rather than assuming you understand their needs. Be open to their insight and wisdom.
Be conscientious of how your institutional context might impact your partners. It is important to be transparent about expectations and constraints, especially regarding practical issues like compensation.
Take a thoughtful approach to seeking consent. AJ provided an example of his Offerings for Consent; Asad encouraged attention to various positionalities in the communities we work amongst; and Rebecca highlighted the importance of being equal partners and interlocutors in community-oriented work.
Make space for healthy conflicts and disagreements with your community partners. As scholars and thinkers, we are equipped to intervene, analyze, and confront the faultlines at the heart of our communities.
Finally, as part of our Public Humanities Practicum, we facilitated an excursion to a poetry workshop led by poet and artist Ladan Osman at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. This event provided an excellent chance for creative expression, with writing exercises that engaged with the museum’s current exhibit, work by Eritrean-born artist Dawit L. Petros. As a bonus, we got to check out descriptive text for the exhibit that was drafted by Practicum alum Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen.
This will be the first of several excursions this year that enable our Practicum Fellows to get off campus and experience public humanities work happening around the city.
