We were delighted to participate in the first annual Cleveland Humanities Festival, in partnership with the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. Supported by Ohio Humanities, the Festival hosted speakers and events around the city over a two-week period in early April. Linked by the theme “Remembering War,” the Festival sought to “engage the public in addressing some of society’s most challenging issues and pressing concerns” in partnership with the region’s major museums, educational institutions, and arts organizations. For us, the Festival provided an opportunity to bring Books@Work beyond the workplace, and use diverse narrative representations of life experience to challenge assumptions and appreciate the memories, stories, and courage of others.
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Man is a storytelling animal—we tell stories to preserve our past, record our legacy, and to teach our children. And we have done so in writing at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC). By using high quality stories about the human condition, Books@Work gives our participants a lens through which to examine the whole of human behavior, in ways that provide for rich and relevant conversations. We know that when we read narrative literature, we identify with characters and reflect on their relationships. We see ourselves in the stories of others and we share our stories.
This is why we don’t read business or self-help books: they tell people how to behave rather than provide an opportunity to explore and learn about themselves and each other.
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We were honored to be featured in The Huffington Post last week by Kimberly Rae Connor, blogger and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of San Francisco’s Department of Public and Nonprofit Administrations–and we are more pleased to republish the article here. As Kimberly writes: “While opinion writers across the media have begun supporting and expanding humanities offerings as preparation for work and life, most have neglected to consider those who seldom get past the academic threshold in the first place but whose journeys have taken them to the workplace. Books@Work corrects that oversight. They recognize that 60% of workers in the U.S. do not have access to higher education. Many front line, blue collar and even middle management workers lack structured opportunities to engage in intellectual adventures by way of formal education and to benefit from the kinds of skill, knowledge, confidence, and empathy building experiences that can be elicited from reading and discussing literature.”
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How can you read a place? What is the value in reading for dystopic places– “communities and territories that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated?” And what does a western American town have in common with a Soviet prison city? Kate Brown bridges the gaps between peoples and cultures by reading for commonality in the unlikeliest places.
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Thinking carefully about public humanities work, as this special issue does, is necessary to conscientiously promoting it from within the academy. But as many of its contributors emphasize, there is a very clear next step–conversation with and beyond the academy.
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The public humanities are not a top-down approach to culture, wherein, professor-experts are required to offer the public their knowledge. Instead, the humanities are practiced, publicly, when we use the skills we learn from the humanities in public. This special issue, like the MLA panel it developed from, is aimed at humanities professors, and as such it thinks much and specifically about how faculty engage with public humanities projects. The essays offer food for thought for nonprofits and people – PhDs or otherwise – engaging in public humanities work, especially as we foster partnerships with academics and academic institutions. Here are 5 big takeaways from them.
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In which we welcome our new Communications and Marketing Director, Cecily Hill, to The Notebook and the Books@Work team. As Cecily writes: “Books@Work is a natural extension of the work I undertook while pursuing my PhD: exploring the impact books and narrative have on life-long opportunities and our interactions with others.” Please help us welcome her to the fold.
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News came last week that the famed literary editor Leon Wieseltier was joining the Brookings Institution, the venerable Washington, DC think tank as the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy. The announcement shows that policy work isn’t just the domain of social scientists. Whether they involve parsing texts or reflecting on the historical significance of cultural trends, the methodologies employed by humanities scholars such as Wieseltier are rigorous and important and offer a new way of understanding current problems.
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The Heart of the Matter, published last year by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, makes the case that the humanities and social sciences are essential for civic society, innovation, and life in a globalized world. The humanities and social sciences are, in the report’s own words, “the keeper of the republic.” At Books@Work we are bringing these ideas to life everyday.
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