Categories
Higher Ed Talks and Events

The problem with prestige

I recently had the honor of speaking alongside brilliant public scholars Jessie Daniels and Alex Gil at an NYC event hosted by the University of Edinburgh. The event, which was organized by (also brilliant!) Karen Gregory, Melissa Terras, Sian Bayne, and their Edinburgh colleagues, carried a daunting title: What is the future of the University? Teaching, learning, and research in a time of crisis. Karen asked each of us to prepare a brief “provocation.” I spoke about the problem with prestige, and about the challenge of moving from a competitive, prestige-oriented model of higher education to one that builds from (and creates) abundance, joy, and a sense of possibility. This was a very quick talk, and one intended to spark questions rather than provide answers. I’m sharing here an edited version of my remarks, as this is a topic I would like to continue exploring in my work—in my writing and speaking, and in my capacity as an administrator.

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(#Alt-)Academia Higher Ed

Speaking with power – as a public good

Next week, GC Director of Media Relations Tanya Domi will join the Futures Initiative for a discussion and hands-on workshop on translating research for broader audiences—and getting it published. (Join us!) One of the major stumbling blocks for academics looking to break into this kind of writing, I think, is feeling confident enough to pitch an idea and strong enough to absorb many potential rejections before something lands. As we prepare for the event I’ve been reflecting on an activity that I led recently for our graduate fellows that had a similar aim of developing confidence in one’s voice.

The activity was part of a professional development session for FI Graduate Fellows. To start it off, I borrowed an exercise from the Op-Ed Project on establishing credibility. I had each person introduce themselves using the template, “Hello, my name is [x] and I am an expert in [y].”

This is a miserable exercise. When I first encountered it as a participant, my heart was pounding as my turn approached, and I felt ill as I began to speak, willing myself to swallow the usual caveats and hedges that I use to undercut myself. When I led the fellows in doing the same, using my own intro as an example, I stumbled even more, feeling deeply uncomfortable to perform in this way among people who know me well (even if they know me *as an expert*).

In both cases, nearly everyone shared my discomfort, even as they spoke beautifully about all that they know and do.

For many of us, it can feel deeply wrong to say that we excel at something. It creates physical discomfort and mental anguish. And yet, this discomfort is precisely what makes the exercise so effective. The degree of discomfort is, in large part, inversely proportional to how much authority participants are accustomed to having when they speak. In many cases women, people of color, and others who are generally not assumed to be experts may be conditioned to position themselves in a way that is more palatable and less threatening. Women know well that asserting authority can be perceived negatively; to avoid that negative perception, we often smooth things over, soften the edges, and defer to others even when we are the expert in the room.

And yet, undercutting one’s own expertise can prevent others from hearing important perspectives and challenging truths that are so needed in public discourse.

The major paradigm shift that I think is important is moving from imposter syndrome—which is always focused on the self, and how one may or may not measure up to others—to a sense of how our knowledge or expertise might benefit some broader public.

This is such an important transition. I hope that the Futures Initiative’s upcoming workshop offers some concrete strategies to help move in that direction. Everyone has something powerful to share; it is the perfect time to make our voices heard.

Categories
(#Alt-)Academia Higher Ed Writing

Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work

I’m excited to announce that Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work: Theory, Practice, and Models for Thriving Beyond the Classroom is in contract with Duke University Press. The book is a project that I have been working on in one way or another ever since working with the Scholarly Communication Institute and the Scholars’ Lab at UVa. The book will be a solid discussion of career pathways for humanities Ph.D.’s, from nuts and bolts to why it matters. In the coming months, I hope to blog about the project, especially some of the more complex questions I’m wrestling with. Feedback is most welcome.

For now, here’s the working abstract:

Intended for graduate students in the humanities and for the faculty members who guide them, this book grounds practical career advice in a nuanced consideration of the current landscape of the academic workforce and an emphasis on reaffirming humanities education as a public good. It explores how rhetoric and practices related to career preparation are evolving, and how those changes intersect with admissions practices, scholarly reward structures, and academic labor practices—especially the increasing reliance on contingent labor. The book also examines the ways that current practices perpetuate systems of inequality that result in the continued underrepresentation of women and minorities in the academy. Rather than indulge the narrative of crisis, this book invites readers to consider ways that graduate training can open unexpected doors that lead to meaningful careers with significant public impact. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and personal experience, the book provides graduate students with context and analysis to inform the ways they discern opportunities for their own potential career paths, while taking an activist perspective that moves not only toward individual success but also systemic change. For those in positions to make decisions in humanities departments or programs, the book offers insight into the circumstances and pressures that students are facing and examples of programmatic reform that address career matters in structural ways. Throughout, the book highlights the important possibility that different kinds of careers offer engaging, fulfilling, and even unexpected pathways for students who seek them out.

Categories
Higher Ed Personal

New Beginnings

After my daughter was born in 2014, I couldn’t believe how hard it was to avoid clichés when everything was so startlingly new to me. She was growing so fast, I felt so much joy and so much exhaustion, I worried about diaper rash and breastfeeding and the state of the world. Thoughts of health and growth and happiness and safety—just like every new parent, ever. So many things I had never felt before, but that had been felt and expressed by countless parents across time and space. Words failed me.

I had my second child, a baby boy, this past July. Having watched myself transform into a parent when my daughter came into the world, I feel (somewhat) less stunned by the simultaneous wonder and triviality this time around. Becoming a parent feels miraculous and utterly mundane, a tension that recurs every day through brand-new smiles and endless repetitive tasks, through deep hope and moments of frustration.

So now, with the paradoxes of life with a new human very much on my mind, it’s time for me to return to work and think once more about the ground that we as educators prepare for the generations to come, while building on the work and wisdom of many who have come before. I am at once not ready to be back, and happy to be returning.

I am grateful for the unfailing support of my colleagues, who made it possible for me to be completely focused on my family and my health during these past three months. And I’m full of admiration for the hard work it took our union, PSC-CUNY, to obtain paid parental leave not only for me, a birth mother, but for any new parent in a full-time position. This kind of support, both institutional and personal, is too rare in workplaces in the U.S. and I do not take it for granted.

In the weeks and months ahead, I will be blogging about my book project, Putting the Humanities Ph.D. to Work; our work at the Futures Initiative; and issues around higher education more broadly. And I’ll be trying to bring more of my whole self into these posts than I sometimes do, which may mean reflections on parenthood (especially motherhood) in an academic workplace—especially given that my breast pump often provides my writing soundtrack these days.

So with deep thanks again to all who support me, I’m happy to be embracing the new beginning in my personal life and bringing a fresh perspective to my work.

Categories
(#Alt-)Academia Personal

Neither here nor there

I couldn’t attend this year’s HASTAC Conference, because I’m not quite ready for work travel after baby S was born in July. But I’m still tuning in. During the opening plenary, which was a fantastic panel discussion featuring Tressie McMillan Cottom, Purdom Lindblad, T-Kay Sangwand, and Anastasia Salter, I tweeted this:

I posted it as a small gesture toward the ways that bodies and caregiving can complicate work, a nod at why attention to accessibility (like livestreaming) matters, and also a consideration of the ways that I try to remain in community even when I can’t physically be somewhere. But I’ve been thinking more about it, and I realized there’s something else behind it, too—something that makes me a little sad.

Watching a livestream while pumping breastmilk is not just an indication of where I am, but where I’m not. I’m not at the conference; that’s why I’m watching the livestream. But I’m also not with my baby; that’s why I’m pumping. The tweet was meant to show that I was embodying two identities at once, but it also means I’m not in either space fully.

The transition back to work has been more challenging for me this time around despite an incredibly supportive boss, coworkers, and institutional structure, and I think this tweet captures a big part of why. I want so much to be more fully present in both parts of my identity, and at this particular moment, I feel distanced from both. And that is not an easy place to be.

Categories
Higher Ed

Pausing to Reflect

This has been… a big year. While the Futures Initiative team and I formally reflect on the past year through the exercise of writing and designing our annual report, and while we plan for an unusual year ahead, I’d like to take a moment and offer a more personal reflection as well.

In working on our annual report, I and others on our team have been struck by how much the Futures Initiative has accomplished this year, and how far we have come in just three years since our founding in Fall 2014. From the collaborative writing and publishing experience of Structuring Equality, to our growing collaborations across the GC and CUNY, to the way our ongoing programs like team-taught courses and peer mentoring are thriving, it has been a banner year for the program. I look forward to sharing sharing that document when we wrap it up.

And yet, this has also felt like a particularly difficult year, one laden with anger at unjust systems and the persistence of white supremacy, with sorrow at lives wrongly taken, with uncertainty as the political climate threatens to wreak havoc with higher education and the lives of CUNY students.

The particular day that I’m writing this has started with sorrowful news that is at once uniquely terrible and also broadly emblematic of the year we have come through. This morning, before the day had even begun, I read in the news about too many lives taken:

  • Charleena Lyles, a mother of four and pregnant with her fifth child, was shot and killed by police after calling to report a suspected break-in in her home in Seattle. Lyles reportedly had a history of mental health issues. This morning, she becomes yet another example of police violence against black people in a year filled with names of those wrongly killed. The news feels unbearable and unsurprising at once.
  • Nabra Hassanen, a seventeen-year-old Muslim girl, was killed after leaving a mosque in Virginia following Ramadan prayers. The incident is not even being investigated as a hate crime, which seems utterly inexplicable.
  • One person was killed and eight were injured when someone drove a van into a pedestrian zone near a mosque in London. All those injured and killed were Muslim, and the driver reportedly targeted the Muslim community intentionally.

This is just today. Attacks like these have been far too common all year, and while incidents like these against women, against Black people, against Muslims, against people with disabilities are not new, the pace at which they are happening and continuing to happen despite more extensive reporting feels dizzying in the worst way.

It is against this backdrop that the Futures Initiative does our work. We continue to work across CUNY and the HASTAC network in support of innovative approaches to move toward greater equity in higher education. Our work feels more urgent than ever, though it also feels like we have so very far to go.

Beyond all this, it has been a big year for me personally as well. I’m expecting baby #2, a boy, later this summer, and my pregnancy has been very much present in my work—in an embodied way, as fatigue and headaches and other discomforts have distracted me in ways I’m not accustomed to, and in an emotional way, as I think about the world this baby boy will grow into.

I started a post early in my pregnancy that I never developed. Its working title is “Rage” and it is just four sentences:

I learned I was pregnant a few days before the presidential election. Trying to nourish a pregnancy and raise a small child in this nightmare of a political scenario has been incredibly difficult. I recently found out that the child I’m expecting will be a boy. While the dominant model of masculinity in the U.S. is nothing short of horrifying, you better believe my spouse and I are going to do everything in our power to raise both our kids to be strong, caring, feminist, questioning adults.

Those early days of assimilating the knowledge of a new life with that of our country’s new political realities were rough. I’m thankful to work in an environment where the emotions around identity, family, and politics can inform the work we do. The shock of new pregnancy has worn off, as has the shock of this new presidency. As a team, we are planning for my absence, preparing for the year ahead, recalibrating our goals and expectations to engage with the current political climate without being consumed by it.

We have great plans in store for next year. As we work toward building stronger connections across our faculty fellows, graduate fellows, and others in the FI orbit, we’ll be launching a new series called “Thursday Dialogues.” These graduate-student led discussions will focus on research, public projects, themes in this year’s team-taught courses, matters of professionalization, and more. We will continue our University Worth Fighting For series, with a theme of “Transforming Learning” and event topics focusing on pedagogy for LGBTQ educators; community college teaching; and Cathy Davidson’s forthcoming book, The New Education. Our undergraduate Peer Mentoring program will shift slightly as we run our first Undergraduate Leadership Institute. We’ll forge deeper integrations with the Humanities Alliance as it enters its second year. Through it all, our graduate fellows will be taking on more leadership roles than ever before, and I’m both sad to miss it and excited to see where they take our programming.

I’ll close this post with deep gratitude to my team members at the Futures Initiative and HASTAC, from whom I am constantly learning. I look forward to all that is yet to come.

Categories
(#Alt-)Academia Higher Ed

The Urgency of Public Engagement

Higher education is again under attack, raising the stakes of public engagement for scholars higher than ever. The disdain for truth, research, and critique is palpable: Within days of the inauguration, we have seen the White House impose stop-work orders and media blackouts on federal scientific agencies like the EPA and USDA. We have seen proposals threatening to eliminate the NEH and the NEA. And we have seen the administration nominate an unqualified Secretary of Education, all while spinning official narratives that willfully oppose evidence (think “alternative facts” or the “Bowling Green Massacre”).

In this environment, scholarly work that looks only inward is doomed not only to irrelevance, but elimination. We as scholars must ensure our work can reach broad audiences in a powerful way. Institutions may not recognize that work, but especially in the current political climate, when our research and writing has the potential to influence policy, public opinion, and more, there is much more at stake than simply tenure.

Plus, public interest in the humanities is growing. Orwell’s 1984 has seen an enormous rise in sales since the election; there is a thirst to understand Islamic history and culture (see this interview in Business Insider with Graduate Center President Chase Robinson, a historian of Islam); and many are turning to the writings of Hannah Arendt and others to understand the rise of fascism in the early 20th century. Humanities-related work is also being incorporated into non-specialist publications; for instance, The Vault, by historian Rebecca Onion, is a regular feature of Slate, and BuzzFeed recruits humanities scholars like Anne Helen Petersen as analytical writers. But if such work is not respected by universities, then it remains an extracurricular pursuit or a plan B for emerging scholars.

With this in mind, I believe critical reflection about what constitutes academic success is crucial to deepening public engagement in the humanities today. Such reflection must include not only changing modes of scholarly communication, but also career paths, with the goal of improving the health and inclusivity of the humanities for the public good.

One often-overlooked element in discussing new modes of scholarly discourse is the relationship between innovation, equity, and public engagement—all of which contribute to an understanding of higher education as a public good. Though innovation is frequently considered something for elite, well-funded institutions, through my work with the Futures Initiative and the international scholarly network HASTAC I have witnessed countless ways that innovative solutions can be developed organically to solve real needs and connect communities.

If equity and innovation are linked, then it follows that recognizing more varied scholarly work enables a broader range of scholars to break new ground. This was apparent in a 2014 event at CUNY called “What Is A Dissertation,” in which graduate students shared projects that didn’t resemble the protomonograph of most dissertations. Their work included the use of Tumblr and other social media to share and discuss historical photographs of black women; ethnographic work on contemporary youth created using video and the multimodal platform Scalar; the ecology of proprietary data, explored and shared using mapping visualization tools; and a dissertation on comics in comic form.

Living in an increasingly interconnected world—under an administration hostile to knowledge—means we need the humanities more than ever. Recognizing the expansive social value of humanistic knowledge and methods means understanding the myriad ways scholars can make a significant impact beyond academe. Even as the specific types of work are constantly evolving, we have an opportunity to adjust graduate program structures to better equip students to take on a wide range of roles where they can apply their training.

Our country needs more, not fewer, scholars trained to understand and contextualize the cultural, historical, and linguistic valences of contemporary geopolitics. We need more scholars who can read, critique, and synthesize complex arguments. We need more scholars who know the national and global histories of systemic racism and institutionalized bias and who are equipped to speak out against ongoing inequalities. We need them in the classroom—but not only there. The impact of humanities training could be far greater if we trained students not only to teach, but also enabled them to pursue careers that carried them beyond the university.

Rigorous, deeply creative work makes research and scholarship more accessible to broader audiences than ever before. When the academy embraces a wider range of outcomes as signs of scholarly success and merit, I believe the result will be a deeper connection with local communities and more powerful exchange of knowledge among them. In moments of great uncertainty, scholars can do their best and most important work by applying their expertise in ways that engage broader publics.

This piece is adapted in part from a book project on career paths, academic labor, public engagement, and diversity. It was originally published on Media Commons on February 22, 2017, in response to the following Field Guide question: “How might digital and media scholars and educators engage with the commons, both physically and online? What roles should we assume in such spaces or within such communities?”

Categories
Higher Ed

Practicing what we preach?

Today, our Futures Initiative team—graduate students, postdoc, and staff—will be taking a step back to consider how we are doing relative to our stated programmatic goals. The two things that I find most important about this temperature check are (1) that the suggestion came from within the group, not from administration; and (2) that we’ll be pausing to evaluate not only our public-facing work, but also the quieter, less visible side of what we do: our individual work, our group dynamic, and the day-to-day ways that we may or may not be inching towards a more equitable system of higher education. Through the discussion, we’ll be looking for ways that we can bring our individual and collective goals into closer alignment, and ways we can improve our own practices.

I direct our group of fellows, and one of my major goals as the program enters its third year has been to cultivate trust, openness, and leadership among our team—and the fact that this discussion is happening is an encouraging sign that we are moving in that direction. The Futures Initiative is unusual in the degree of ownership that graduate students take in shaping and running the program. Each fellow has a specific domain in which they take the lead, such as web development, social media, research, communications, and even directing sub-programs like HASTAC Scholars or our peer mentoring program. We continually refine the structures that govern our time and energy, not only for efficacy, but to foster reflection about the connections between our programmatic goals, our individual hopes and challenges, and each fellow’s ongoing scholarly development.

Our team’s weekly meeting structure has been one of the key elements in working toward the kind of dynamic that will not only help our program to succeed, but more importantly, will create unique opportunities for connection, collaboration, and growth. As many teams do, we gather weekly to report on our individual projects and progress. The fellows take turns leading these meetings, giving them the chance to lead their peers while also establishing structures that will ensure all voices are heard. The meetings are not long, but recently, we have been making it a point to spend time on personal updates—giving us all a moment to talk about achievements, challenges, self-care, and more. In the unreal political climate that we’re currently facing, these moments of connection and vulnerability have been incredibly valuable.

The ways we structure our group’s work reflects our aim of developing integrative structures in higher education—systems that emphasize meta-cognition as we reflect together on what we are doing, how we’re doing it, and where there might be points of connection that we hadn’t anticipated. The fellows are all gaining crucial professional skills, too—everything from event planning to communications to leadership and collaboration more broadly. As I have written elsewhere, learning these kinds of skills—especially in the service of projects that students find meaningful—is incredibly beneficial to students’ likelihood of success in any career, whether in the classroom or in any number of professional contexts.

For the Futures Initiative, these skills are not ends in themselves, but tools to empower the next generation of leaders to continue building systems that work toward equity and public reinvestment in higher education. As a program, we are constantly working toward institutional change—not only through the content of our public programming, but through our work structures and our shared values.

We have a long way to go. While I strive to make decisions that reflect a commitment to our values of equity, social justice, and student-centered learning, sometimes I act out of expediency instead. We are working to see our own blind spots, to engage voices that challenge our own perspectives, and to consider ways that we can be more deeply collaborative—all of which can be difficult and uncomfortable. We will likely uncover tensions and challenges in today’s conversation. By creating the space for these tensions to come to light, we can collectively transform them into opportunities to grow.

Categories
Higher Ed

What is the Futures Initiative? Defining and Redefining our Goals

The Futures Initiative can be difficult to describe. We work at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, professional development, and public engagement, all in support of fostering a more equitable higher education system for all. We’re trying to find better and clearer ways of saying that, not only through our mission statement, but through all that we do—from programming to written materials to the architecture and design of our website.

We’re in a sweet spot of the academic calendar from a program development perspective—far enough into the summer to feel rested from the slower pace, but close enough to the upcoming semester to be gearing up and getting excited. Yesterday, the Futures Initiative staff and graduate fellows held a mini-retreat to think not only about the activities and programming we plan to host in the year ahead (we’re working on some pretty fantastic events—more on that soon!), but also to take a step back and think about our program’s mission and goals and how we articulate them.

Here’s one of the ideas that emerged from yesterday’s brainstorming session:

Sketch of three interlocking circles labeled Pedagogy, Technology, and Professional Development

I love this simple sketch. To me, the large circle underscores our main goal—equity in higher education—while the three interlocking circles of pedagogy, technology, and professional development clarify our approach to creating institutional change to support that underlying goal. It’s not at all polished, but already it is helping us to think in clearer ways about what we want to undertake in the year ahead, and why.

This process of reflecting on who we are and what we do has been iterative in the best way. We hit the ground running in our first year and made things up as we went, jumping into opportunities that presented themselves and meeting and listening to people with far more depth of experience at CUNY than our little team of three had. When that year ended, we took a breath, reflected on what we had done and what seemed to resonate with the community, and then together with our graduate fellows developed a new mission statement and plan for the year ahead. We can only do this collaboratively, as we think together about what we are proud of, where we can do better, and what our highest aspirations are.

That first reflective process brought about the University Worth Fighting For, a powerful series of events and workshops that addressed equity and social justice through the lens of engaged pedagogy and non-hierarchical learning structures.

With the current political and cultural climate, the aim of fostering structures of equality within and around the university seems more important and urgent than ever. The nuts-and-bolts planning is still to come, so I don’t know yet exactly where we’ll take the program in the year ahead—but I can’t help but think we’re onto something big.

Categories
Higher Ed Talks and Events

CGS Position Paper – Opportunities Created by Emerging Technologies

The following is a position paper for an upcoming workshop on the dissertation convened by the Council of Graduate Schools (January 27-29, 2016). I’ll be speaking on a panel focusing on what new technologies enable us to do with this critical milestone in graduate study. My main argument is that while the affordances of specific technologies can be exciting, more important is the shift toward collaborative, creative, and public-facing scholarly work that today’s digital platforms allow. 

UPDATE:

The full agenda and all participants’ position papers are available at http://cgsnet.org/cgs-future-dissertation-workshop.


As the capstone of doctoral training, the dissertation is the pivotal moment when graduate students synthesize and articulate their research, marking the transition from apprentice to scholar. It also serves an important professionalization and normative function: graduate students learn what is accepted as scholarly work based on the submission requirements for their dissertation and the values of their committee. If digital projects are to remain an important avenue for the articulation and public sharing of scholarly work, that work must be professionally viable for people from the outset their careers. By rethinking dissertation requirements, graduate students learn that exploratory, cutting-edge work is encouraged from day one, not something that must wait until after securing tenure. This means more than simply allowing different file formats to be submitted, however. The conversation must go beyond specific technologies to focus on the values we embrace, the methods we consider crucial, and the potential for impact that we can imagine in the dissertation process (where “we” includes all those involved in shaping the structures of graduate education).

These issues are not unique to the dissertation as a work of research. The same questions of values, methods, and impact are at the heart of the changing landscape of scholarly publishing systems, and new developments in one domain will undoubtedly affect norms and expectations in the other. With that in mind, a discussion about new opportunities for the dissertation must also touch on ways that innovative scholarship is received and recognized at later stages of a scholar’s career, including expectations set out in the tenure and promotion process. I would argue that placing greater emphasis on public engagement, collaborative work, and creativity in both dissertations and other scholarly work, while also maintaining an open stance toward technological innovation, will result in meaningful research whose reach extends far beyond the academy.

Publishing is about making knowledge public. As tautological as that statement is, the central value of making research public is sometimes lost in discussions about scholarly communication. At the heart of research and publication is the goal of bringing new insight into the body of human knowledge. This happens in different ways—sometimes the best audience to reach is small and specialized while other times it is more powerful to reach a broad, interested public. Digital tools allow us new ways of doing each. Because working in digital environments and using new tools and platforms can involve a wide range of different skill sets, such projects often involve multiple people with varied and overlapping expertise. The collaborative process of working in digital environments is not merely expedient, however; it can also have a deep influence on the nature of the work itself, resulting in a project that may be more sophisticated and complex than a series of individual projects by the same people would be. Further, digital environments allow for expansive thinking and creative ways of articulating an idea thanks to the multimodal and multimedia capabilities of current web design.

The value systems that define dissertation requirements are shaped by what we consider the values and purpose of higher education to be. This is another reason why it matters greatly that robust digital projects have the potential for meaningful impact beyond the academy. Public engagement is an essential part of understanding higher education as a public good, and as such is critical to the mission of the Futures Initiative, a program I co-direct with Cathy Davidson. Based within the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Futures Initiative is part of the largest public urban university system in the United States. CUNY educates an incredibly diverse student body comprising 500,000 students across New York City’s five boroughs. Understanding education as a public good, especially in the context of a huge public university system in the heart of a thriving city that is also home to massive income inequality, means that engaging with a broader community is critical to its success.

As part of the Futures Initiative’s work, we connect not only with colleges across the CUNY system, but also with a global (though predominantly North American) community called HASTAC: the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Though innovation is often thought of as something for elite and well-funded institutions, the Futures Initiative and HASTAC both see innovation happening out of necessity. Teams across the CUNY campuses have developed incredible projects (like Commons in a Box, OpenLab at City Tech, Vocat, Science Forward, and more) in part to stitch together such a diverse and geographically dispersed group of working commuter students, faculty, and staff. At the Futures Initiative, we place a strong emphasis on pedagogy, labor issues, and public engagement. Making effective use of digital tools allows us to do our best work in each of these domains and have a greater impact than we otherwise might. Understanding equity and innovation as two facets advancing a single goal allows the Futures Initiative greater clarity of purpose and approach.

Further, if we see equity and innovation as linked, rather than opposed, then it follows that recognizing a broader range of scholarly products makes it possible for scholars with varied backgrounds and skillsets to break new ground—it opens up new avenues so that scholars, departments, or institutions do not maintain the status quo, gatekeeping in ways that allow only certain kinds of people and ideas to advance. This kind of work also makes research and scholarship more accessible to different kinds of publics as people’s work is shared through different channels and platforms. Both HASTAC and the Futures Initiative sites are public, so anyone—regardless of whether or not they are affiliated with a university or any other institution—can read, contribute, and become a part of the network.

In addition to networks like these that foster communication in new ways, scholarly work itself is also changing. There is an increasing prevalence of born-digital work that pushes at the limits of traditional forms, and some of the most creative work is being done by emerging scholars on dissertations.

One of the Futures Initiative’s kick-off events in fall 2014 was a panel called What Is A Dissertation (better known on Twitter as #remixthediss), in which graduate students and recent graduates shared projects that don’t resemble the proto-monograph of most dissertations. The work by these remarkable students and recent PhDs includes the use of Tumblr and other social media to share and discuss historical photographs of black women; ethnographic work on contemporary youth created using video and the multimodal platform Scalar; the ecology of proprietary data, explored and shared using mapping visualization tools; a dissertation on comics in comic form; and more.

These students and recent graduates are doing top-notch research and sharing it in ways that make it compelling to a wide audience. Still, many of them noted that they faced resistance to their projects at some stage of the process, and found that they needed to carefully articulate the value of their projects to ensure the scholarly merit was recognized. As they found, scholars often must provide traditional materials as an additional component to their groundbreaking work, translating their projects into more familiar media. This puts an added burden on emerging scholars and acts as a disincentive from pursuing creative projects in the first place. Nevertheless, sharing work publicly and collaboratively not only benefits the public, but can also serve the individual scholars by making their work accessible.

Despite lingering fears that sharing work online will make formal publication less likely, some publishers see online engagement as an advantage and are thrilled when a work already has an audience ready and waiting. For instance, Nick Sousanis, Post-Doctoral Scholar at the University of Calgary and one of the #remixthediss panelists, had a book contract with Harvard University Press in hand before even finishing his dissertation. He was able to achieve this not only because his graphic novel Unflattening is brilliant and beautiful and innovative, but also because he had built a strong audience by sharing his work-in-progress online, thus demonstrating to the publisher that the book was marketable in a way that not all academic works are.

Other scholars have had similar experiences. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association, shared her book Planned Obsolescence—an exploration of technology, publishing, and the academy—online for public comment. In effect she created an experimental publishing environment for her inquiry into academic publishing. The work received hundreds of thoughtful comments in a medium that allowed much more dialogue than traditional double-blind peer review. The open environment gave Fitzpatrick an opportunity to polish her work in conversation with peers, leading to a stronger final work, a positive collaborative experience, and an audience that was eager to see the final product. This deep level of interaction was possible in part because Fitzpatrick had already built an online community through countless interactions with peers. This is important to note because networks online work the same way they do in person—they must be built over time.

These are merely two examples of online engagement and the publishing of works-in-progress that led to traditional book publications. But what about more innovative, born-digital publications? New platforms like Scalar, developed at the University of Southern California under the direction of Tara McPherson, allow scholars to present research in creative, dynamic, multimodal ways that allow for incredible nuance, insight, and beauty. As one example, artist and educator Evan Bissell created a multimodal project called The Knotted Line to examine the history of incarceration, education, and labor. The exceptionally interactive result is something completely different than a traditional article on the same topic would be, even if the research were the same.

Purdue Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Specialist Amanda Visconti’s digital dissertation, Infinite Ulysses, is another compelling example of the power of born-digital work. Combining deep literary insight with interface design, web development, community building, and best practices in user testing and analytics, Visconti has created a space for collaborative interpretation of a text. Since its launch, hundreds of readers have annotated James Joyce’s text. Further, Visconti has provided an invaluable service to the community by blogging every stage of her research, development, and defense, helping to make transparent the hurdles that other emerging scholars might anticipate when working on digital projects.

If programs begin to welcome new kinds of dissertations, they will also need to work backwards and reformulate the kinds of training that their graduate programs offer. Research methods and courses might be paired with professional development opportunities to learn skills that will allow graduate students to create the best kind of project to suit their research. They might encourage more interdisciplinary work as well as increased collaboration. Most creative projects are not the work of only one person, but incorporate the expertise of many—someone (or some team) who develops an extensible tool, a developer who customizes it for a new purpose, a designer who determines the best way to present information to a particular audience. If each of these collaborators has deep grounding in humanities methods and values, the entire project can cohere in a powerful way. To enable programs to move in that direction, there needs to be a conscious decision to start valuing collaborative, interdisciplinary work from students in the early stages of the program.

Celebrating the scholarly merit of differently-inflected, public-facing dissertation projects also means that students will be primed to succeed in more varied career paths. The skills they gain will help them to become excellent faculty members, too, who can work to further innovate the higher education landscape. Innovative projects may require specific skills—like video editing, web development, or database design—and they will undoubtedly require more generalized skills such as project management, navigating institutional hurdles, and public engagement. Fostering innovative scholarly work is a key aspect of helping students to be better prepared for multiple career possibilities. In other words, changing what constitutes a successful dissertation has the potential to change a great deal about graduate programs, from start to finish in a student’s tenure: what programs look for in prospective students, how they structure coursework and exam requirements, and what kinds of careers graduates pursue.

Importantly, expanding our interpretation of success and rigor to include a broader range of projects that lead to more and varied career opportunities also has the potential to expand access to and equity within higher education. Access to higher education (and to good quality K-12) remains highly unequal across the country, with test scores mapping not to true achievement or potential but to school district and family income level. If we continue to look for the same types of outcomes in terms of scholarly work and career paths, we are likely to perpetuate the existing system. If, instead, we celebrate different kinds of successes, we are likely to attract a greater diversity of students who want to pursue a graduate degree for more varied reasons.

Our vision for the dissertation is expanding, but much work remains. Collaborative dissertations remain rare, even though deeply creative projects may require many hands. If we want to tackle the most complex questions, we might productively think of each student’s dissertation as one aspect of a larger project, as Todd Presner describes in his notion of the “20-year dissertation“. Technologies will change, so while issues related to building new skills as well as technical affordances and limitations may seem most pressing, questions centering on the purpose and values of higher education, and for the dissertation as the capstone of a doctoral degree, are far more important. If we care about higher education as a public good, we must find ways to foster graduate students’ most creative, innovative, and engaging work.

Works Cited

Bissell, Evan et al. “The Knotted Line.” Updated 19 Aug. 2014. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. <http://knottedline.com>

Davidson, Cathy N. et al. “What Is a Dissertation? New Models, Methods, Media.” #alt-academy: Alternative Academic Careers. 30 Dec. 2014. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. <http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/pieces/what-dissertation-new-models-methods-media>

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press, 2011.

Presner, Todd. “Welcome to the 20-Year Dissertation.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://chronicle.com/article/Welcome-to-the-20-Year/143223/>

Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Visconti, Amanda. “Infinite Ulysses.” 2015. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. <http://www.infiniteulysses.com/>