- In order to have a conversation about what Public Scholarship is and why we’re doing it, we’ll have to dodge the elephant in the room – what’s scholarship? What are we talking about when we call ourselves scholars? What had to happen for this thing we call “scholarship” to come into existence? To indulge in these questions would very quickly drive us off course and perhaps cause us to forget about our ‘publics.’ So, instead, I’d like to offer some reductive statements to foreground our conversation. Much like the Handdara mystics in Ursula K Leguin’s Left Hand of Darkness, I believe we become scholars “‘mostly to learn what questions not to ask (…) to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.’”¹ Rather than seek out ‘right answers,’ ours is “a negative work (…) we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions” in anticipation of a generative task that has yet to begin (or is already, always, being undertaken).² To rephrase: we wish to install the scholarly work of criticism at the very heart of the knowledge-productive enterprise.
- In one sense, the phrase “Public Scholarship” implies the existence of two relatively isolated entities, a public and a scholar, which their conjunction attempts to unify. We might imagine a romantic narrative of the brave scholar with all the answers, and the public who refuses to listen. “How,” the scholar moans, “will I reach across this great divide and impart wisdom on the masses?” But this perspective would be far too naive for our purposes. Instead, I want to suggest that ‘public scholarship’ points to the ‘distribution’ and ‘consumption’ of knowledge – which have always been presupposed by, but generally segregated from, the ‘productive’ work of scholarship. I assume that if something is published, it is being read, even if by a very small audience of other scholars. Thus, every act of scholarship has its public. But to actively engage in ‘public scholarship’ would suggest an attempt to bring the effects of a text’s deployment back into the scope of the productive process. What is our work doing when it leaves our desks? Where does it go? Asking these questions needs to become a part of our scholarly work.
- But what does any of that mean in practice? In the situation of capitalism, the ongoing process of our scholarship is arrested in the form of knowledge-commodities. This can be a certain procedure, text, idea, and so on; whose existence is dependent on its ability to be expressed as the exchangeable unit of the commodity form. Even if this keeps food on the scholar’s table, we think that there has to be more to scholarship. We have certain ethical concerns, we want to keep making clarifications, to keep doing research, and most importantly, to affect the changes our work makes possible. So it’s only natural in my mind that a scholar would seek out so-called “public scholarship” as an avenue to more directly engage with and seek out new recipients for one’s work. More than just issue out knowledge-commodities, the scholar is capable of creating spaces, forging sustained conversations whose outcomes can’t be predicted in advance. This sustained conversation is a natural complement to the scholar’s own ongoing productive enterprise.
- This doesn’t mean that Public Scholarship is just another contrivance of the scholar to secure their authority in the face of a larger loss of social prestige. A public is its own site of knowledge-production, its own explanatory and interpretive narratives, and in that sense has no “need” of scholarship. But the scholar who attempts to engage with a public sees the opportunity for a fruitful collaboration. By forming a scholar-public assemblage, we serve as a certain type of organ for larger collective interests, helping to assess and refine a public’s own explanatory narratives. Accordingly, our own situated-ness as a scholar is displaced from the axiomatic constituting that public called the academy. Sometimes we suffer a great loss of prestige when we leave the academy for a public. But that departure presents the opportunity to construct a new type of knowledge, through a symbiotic relationship with our public of interest. To engage in public scholarship is to pull ourselves beyond those institutional limitations of the academy, to explore new sites of knowledge production, and to see what the scholar can really make possible outside their own domain.
¹ LeGuin, Ursula K. “The Left Hand of Darkness” 1969
² Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. edited by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Vintage Books, 2010.