The goal of this initiative is to create a place at Duke University where scholars and various publics – local, national, and global – can interact and intersect in order to create greater exchange between the university and the broader world. At the center of this project will be the Crossroads Series, which will involve events both at Duke University and the Durham community, audio podcasts and videos, and writings that will offer a broad range of forms of knowledge and analysis to diverse publics. This series will be organized and hosted in a newly renovated space on Duke’s West Campus, but will also involve events throughout the Durham community. Most events will be live-streamed and open to questions and comments via social media, and will also be rapidly transformed into podcasts and videos that will be made available on our website. These events will also often be organized in collaboration both with Duke’s Office of News and Communication and with local media. The goal will be to create a place where faculty and students on campus, as well as invited guests, are invited to explore new ways of sharing and disseminating their work, creating research projects that engage and involve local and global communities more directly, and through this process to demonstrate and advocate for the role of knowledge in society.
Connected to this series will be a network of working groups and classes that will allow students and faculty to debate, practice, and critique various forms of public scholarship and engagement, to get to know other people doing parallel work, and to find ways to innovate and develop new mechanisms for communication and exchange. As part of these projects, we will have short-term residency programs for artists, journalists, filmmakers, scholars, activists, aid workers, curators, and others who can contribute to our various projects. Ultimately, our broad goal will be to create a generative space on Duke’s campus that can provide a leading example of new ways to connect scholars and publics locally and globally.
As the first part of a broader Trinity College of Arts & Sciences initiative on Scholars & Publics, we are pleased to announce plans for a 2012-13 workshop open to faculty, graduate students, librarians and staff which will explore the intersections between the university and broader regional, national, and global publics. This will be an opportunity for our community to reflect on the changing place of the university in society, and to collectively envision ways of expanding and transforming Duke's role in the public sphere.
In planning for the workshop, faculty members are engaging in discussion on the following topics:
- What type of “publics” are we as a group engaged with? What are the challenges involved in engaging with the public beyond the walls of Duke, for instance in Durham, and the already diverse public at Duke itself?
- What different media have we as a group used in our efforts at communication with broader publics? What are the advantages of disadvantages of different media?
- What is or should be the relationship between activism and public scholarship?
- What forms should scholarly engagement take?
- What is a public intellectual?
Participant Bios
Meg Brown
As exhibits coordinator for the Duke University Libraries, Meg Brown works to use physical and virtual spaces to educate, inform and share the resources of the library, the faculty and the students of Duke University with a broad audience. Physical spaces within the libraries offer the opportunity of serendipity for the Duke community to learn about itself. Virtual spaces offer the ability to reach a larger audience and advertise visual sound bytes to bring the outside community in-- to learn more about Duke and the research and activities of our faculty and students. The current exhibit spaces invite faculty and students to curate, and future renovations will allow even more opportunities for interdisciplinary exhibitions and events. The “student wall” is a space designed specifically for short term exhibitions of student work: http://library.duke.edu/exhibits/studentwall/index.html
More information about the exhibit program and links to past, present and future exhibitions is located here: http://library.duke.edu/exhibits/
Mandy Dailey
Mandy Dailey is Director of Administration for the international virtual network HASTAC (nearly 9,500 members dedicated to the future of learning in and out of the academy; Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory; http://www.hastac.org) and the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation/Gates Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition—which to date has awarded $10 million to 89 projects that use digital media and technology to advance learning—both formal education and informal learning from preschool to lifelong—in institutions and communities in over 20 countries around the world. She is responsible for developing, directing, and implementing new HASTAC initiatives and all Digital Media and Learning Competition programming, as well as managing HASTAC and Digital Media and Learning Competition public relations through community outreach, marketing, social media, and public relations strategies that garner national attention and grow the field within the academy and beyond. Prior to her role at HASTAC, she was Advertising and Publicity Coordinator in the journals division at Duke University Press, one of the nation's most innovative online and traditional journals publishing enterprises, where she routinely translated the work of leading academics to a larger public.
Both HASTAC and the DML Competition have a strong history of crossing and disrupting divides between the academy and local and global communities and are committed to building mutually beneficial interactions between them. HASTAC Scholars--an innovative, interdisciplinary student community working at the intersection of technology and the arts, humanities and sciences--are tasked with sharing the research happening at their institutions with the broader community and have tackled this topic in a forum entitled “Democratizing Knowledge.” Nearly all DML Competition winners are academy-community partnerships. For example, past winner Participatory Chinatown partnered Emerson College New Media faculty with local Boston planning organizations and community groups to transform the planning practices shaping Boston's Chinatown from disjointed transactions between developers and communities to a persistent conversation shaped by participatory learning. Another, Vóces Moviles (VozMob) is a university-community partnership between the University of Southern California and IDEPSCA (Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California) that connects low-wage immigrant day laborers in Los Angeles with popular communication practitioners, university researchers, and open source software developers.
Websites:
HASTAC
http://hastac.org
http://twitter.com/hastac
https://www.facebook.com/HASTAC.org
DML Competition
http://dmlcompetition.net
http://twitter.com/dmlComp
https://www.facebook.com/DMLcomp
Cathy Davidson
Cathy Davidson teaches at Duke University, where she co-directs the Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge and holds two distinguished chairs (Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies). She served as Duke’s first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and helped to create the Program in Information Science + Information Studies and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She is a co-founder of the global learning network HASTAC, which administers the annual $2 million HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, and she was recently appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities. Her more than twenty books include Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, Revolution and the Word, and The Future of Thinking (with HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg). Her latest book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011) was named a "top 10 science book" of the year by Publisher's Weekly and has been the occasion for over sixty invited lectures and book events in the U.S. and internationally, including in Canada, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, and Thailand. A frequent speaker and consultant on institutional change at universities, corporations, and non-profits around the world, she writes for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company ("Changing Higher Ed to Change the World" series), The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, Times Higher Ed, and many other publications in the U.S. and abroad. In June 2012 she was the first educator to become a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, and in October 2012 was awarded the prestigious World Technology Award for Visionary Contribution to Science and Technology in Education.
Maha Houssami
After graduating with an MA in Education from the American University of Beirut, I taught Arabic, English and French for a number of years in different universities in Beirut where I was also involved in educational projects beyond the classroom: continuing education for in-service teachers from disadvantaged schools, teaching drug awareness to teenagers in public schools, and engaging Lebanese judges and law enforcement officers in dialogue about the rights of drug addicts in custody. I have been teaching Arabic at Duke since October 2011. In Durham, I am amazed by the diversity of communities that live in this area and discovered that many Iraqi families had recently moved to Durham. Being a strong believer in the benefit of community service in students’ learning, I initiated in the Fall of 2012 a community service project called “Dardasha” (the Arabic word for chat or informal conversation) with the support of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department, the Duke service learning program, and the cooperation of Church World services (CWS). CWS is serving as an intermediary between eight of these Iraqi families and my Arabic 305 and 407 students. The Iraqi families have not yet completely assimilated into the community. Many of them have young children who do not speak much English or who missed the deadline for Kindergarten, so this is a chance for the students to teach them some English. In turn, the Iraqis will speak to the students in formal and colloquial Arabic. This cross-cultural English/Arabic “Dardasha” will not only help as a language exchange but will also help the refugees become more familiar with Duke and the greater Durham community. “Dardasha” will stretch throughout the Fall of 2012 semester and will hopefully continue in the Spring.
Please find below an article that was written about the kick-off event for the community service/language exchange Dardasha project.
http://today.duke.edu/2012/09/arabiyat
Paolo Mangiafico
Paolo Mangiafico serves as Coordinator of Scholarly Communication Technologies for Duke University Libraries.
In a former role as Director of Digital Information Strategy in the Office of the Provost at Duke, he co-chaired the Provost-appointed Digital Futures Task Force, which developed an open access policy for Duke faculty scholarship (adopted by the Duke Academic Council in 2010) and a set of recommendations for developing better infrastructure and support for management, publication, and archiving of research data. He is now working with librarians, technologists, and faculty to implement these, and serves on both management and implementation teams of the Library’s open access and digital repository projects and the University’s VIVO-based faculty data system.
Paolo has been a fellow in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke, led an early digital library project called The Digital Scriptorium, and served as a consultant for university presses, government agencies, and other universities, as well as a lecturer in information science. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Durham County Library system.
His current work focuses on how new technologies can be adapted to further the knowledge-sharing mission of research universities, and on how these can be made sustainable.
Related links:
http://opensource.com/education/10/5/defaulting-open-open-access-duke-paolo-mangiafico
http://library.duke.edu/openaccess/
Craig McClain
Craig McClain is the Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, created to facilitate broadly synthetic research to address fundamental questions in evolutionary science. He has conducted marine biological research for 15 years and published over 30 papers in the area. He has participated in dozens of expeditions taking him to the Antarctic and the most remote regions of the Pacific and Atlantic. Craig’s research focuses on the ecological and evolutionary drivers of marine invertebrate biodiversity and body size. He focuses primarily on deep-sea systems often looking at the consequences of food limitation and climate change on biological systems.
He is the author and chief editor of Deep-Sea News considered the most popular marine blog on the web (rated by Nature Blog Network) and since August 2004 with over 100,000 visitors a month. Deep-Sea News has won multiple awards (EcoDardevil, Thinking Blogger Award, OpenLab 2007-2011/Best of Science Writing on the Web) for the website and enjoyed collaborating with Seed Media, Science, Nature, and National Geographic on web initiatives. Deep-Sea News was featured content on the Discovery Channel (6/08-12/08) and Scienceblogs (1/06-6/08). Deep-Sea News continues to be highlighted. ”Deep Sea News casts back to the best traditions of popular science, sparking curiosity and bewonderment, explaining the phenomena in comprehensible language. It’s all about communication between the expert and an interested reader, a transfer of knowledge and ideas, sharing the passion. Deep Sea News is a solid blog with wide appeal. Recommended.“-Blog Critics Magazine. DSN is highlighted in the Charlotte Observer by Scott Huler: Online Science Conference Draws 250, in the NewsObserver, Columbian Journalism Review, and NPR’s Where We Live: Explorers. In addition, my popular writing has been featured in American Scientist, Pacific Standard, Mental Floss, io9, and Wired. He was also senior author on Digital Environmentalism: Tools and strategies for the evolving online ecosystem.
For more information visit his home page at craigmcclain.com or find him on Twitter at DrCraigMc.
Jakob Norberg
I am an Assistant Professor in German Studies with a research focus on the concept of the public sphere. My first book (under contract) deals with the multiple uses of the concept of sociability in Germany after the Second World War. Recent articles of mine treat the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Carl Schmitt.
Duke profile.
Sharon D. Raynor
Sharon D. Raynor is an Adjunct Instructor in the Center for Documentary Studies and Continuing Education at Duke University. Her critical and community scholarship focuses on the discourse of trauma and silence in war narratives, documenting trauma through writing and the intersection of trauma, silence and identity in women's literary narratives. Since 1999 she has worked extensively with Vietnam War Veterans in rural Eastern North Carolina. She has written and directed two oral history projects with combat veterans, “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans” and “Soldier-to-Soldier: Men and Women Share Their Legacy of War" with the North Carolina Humanities Council. Her work bridges the gap between combat veterans and their communities with the academy through storytelling sessions, community forums and audio/visual and documentary presentations in high schools, local libraries and churches, civic organizations and universities. She recently worked as an oral history consultant with the City of Fayetteville, the Office of the Mayor and the Fayetteville/Cumberland County Arts Council on the 2011 Heroes Homecoming Celebration commemorating the service of Vietnam Veterans.
Websites and links:
- www.thesilenceofwar.com
- http://www.nchumanities.org/sites/default/files/documents/Summer%202002.pdf
- http://humanitieswritlarge.duke.edu/about/blog/2012/03/15/veterans-at-duke
- http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-postwar/7.0
- http://www.longwood.edu/dospassosreview/dpr1_1/frbrodber.html.
She is also an Associate Professor of English and the Mott University Distinguished Professor at Johnson C. Smith University (2010-2012), a 2012 Humanities Writ Large Faculty Fellow at Duke University and a 2011-2012 recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship with the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is a North Carolina native, a graduate of East Carolina University (BA ’94, MA ‘96) and holds a PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of PA (‘03).
Sam Stephenson
Sam Stephenson is the Lehman-Brady Joint Visiting Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill. For twelve years he directed The Jazz Loft Project at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies. The project resulted in a commercial book published by Alfred A. Knopf, a 10-part NPR radio series produced with WNYC: New York Public Radio, a traveling exhibition that opened at the New York Public Library, a website, and an archive in Duke's Special Collection. The long-unknown archival materials of the Jazz Loft Project were kept at the University of Arizona since the 1970s. Stephenson also collaborated with Aaron Greenwald of Duke Performances on several projects related to these archives, including concerts at NYC's Town Hall commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of a historic concert by Thelonious Monk.
Websites:
http://www.samstephenson.org
http://www.jazzloftproject.org/
John Taormina
John Taormina has been head of the Digital Media Center at Duke University
since arriving in December 2000; the DMC presently holds over 163,000 digital images of art and architecture. During his 30-year career in image collection management, he has directed the visual resources collections at the University of Michigan (1999-2000), The Ohio State University (1986-99), Oberlin College (1985-86), and the George Washington University (1982-85). From 1996-2005 Taormina served as the editor of the VRA Bulletin, the journal of the Visual Resources Association (VRA), the international organization of image media curators and librarians, and was a member of the VRA Executive Board for seven years. From 2002-2004 he co-chaired the Art Libraries Society of North America/Visual Resources Association Joint Education Task Force, which developed the Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (SEI). The first two offerings of the SEI were held at Duke University in 2004 and 2005; the SEI celebrates its tenth year next summer. Taormina recently initiated a new special interest group on Digital Humanities in ARLIS/NA and is currently co-editing a multi-authored book on Topics in Digital Image Management and Digital Curation. At Duke, Taormina has been involved in the 5-year Mellon-funded Visual Studies Initiative. He has participated in university-wide collaborations on digital content delivery, served on humanities and digital collections library committees, been a member of A&S image database steering committees, served on the Duke strategic plan working group for technology in the arts and humanities, participated in a multi-year FHI working group on digital technologies and the visual arts, organized and taught graduate workshops on digital asset discovery and management, and consulted on faculty projects to develop digital research archives and publications. Taormina is now heading the pilot for Scholars@Duke in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies as the test case for Trinity College A&S this academic year. Scholars@Duke is being developed by the university as a replacement for the Faculty Database System (FDS) but with expanded, broader capabilities. Since the information gathered by and residing in Scholars@Duke will provide the institutional interface to faculty scholarly activity at Duke to both the academic community and the general public, Taormina’s participation in the Scholars and Publics Workshop should be mutually beneficial as the Scholars@Duke pilot proceeds at the same time that the Scholars and Publics Workshop seeks to “explore the intersections between the university and broader regional, national, and global publics.
