As part of our efforts to document the impact of public humanities initiatives across higher education, we partnered with the East Asia National Resource Center (EANRC) at The George Washington University (GW) to conduct a focus group with undergraduate students participating in its professional development program. Acting on its mandate as a Title VI Center to expand accessibility of East Asian Studies resources to wider audiences, the EANRC has partnered with Spelman College to offer the program to their students. Through the annual program, Spelman students participate in professional development and learning opportunities about East Asia in Washington, D.C. In a typical year, the program involves bringing Spelman undergraduate students and a faculty member to GW for onsite and offsite visits with East Asian studies experts, scholars, and policymakers. Last year, the program was held virtually and consisted of a series of online lectures, workshops, and events throughout fall 2020 and spring 2021.

In April 2020, the Humanities for All team partnered with the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) to conduct focus groups with students who had participated in publicly engaged projects funded by the CIC’s Humanities Research for the Public Good (HRPG) grants. We held five focus groups with 20 students from 15 institutions who generously shared their thoughts on what they learned and the skills they gained through publicly engaged humanities work. We present a summary of the focus group responses here, while individual posts written by four focus group participants are on the Humanities for All blog:

By Emily McDonald and Younger Oliver

Advocacy on behalf of our cultural institutions is as crucial now as ever. The COVID-19 crisis has cast a shadow of deep uncertainty on all areas of American life, and how far these social and economic impacts may reach is still very much unknown. Over the past six months, we have been working to better understand the challenges humanities organizations are facing and how they are serving their communities in the face of crisis. We’ve found our peers are not only providing informative programming, but also extending their missions to serve their communities in creative ways. To fully capture the impact of this work, we have been partnering with humanities organizations across the country, leveraging the data collection resources we’ve developed at NHA, to highlight how humanities organizations serve as anchors in their communities during times of crisis.

This summer, we launched the Humanities for All blog to showcase publicly engaged humanities initiatives in the words of the faculty, staff, students, and community partners directly involved in the projects. Our September 8 post by Lillian Wilson focuses on the Wayne State Humanities Clinic, an innovative graduate internship program at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three interns from the humanities and humanistic social sciences were matched with 25 non-profits and businesses that serve Detroit communities. In some cases, an interdisciplinary group or pair of interns worked with a single community partner.