Supporting Public Humanities at the Critical Intersections: An Imagining America Manifesto

Abstract Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.