What is the meaning and significance of community in the 21st century? How has community been conceptualized and created by different cultures throughout history? How are relationships between specific communities and the broader social milieu constructed and maintained? In today’s global society, what provides the impetus for a life of civic engagement, built upon democratic values, goals, and aspirations? Is the “network” the next form of community, now disconnected from the preconditions of shared physical or social space? These and other questions will be explored through the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s 2016-17 public events series Community Matters.

A primary focus of Community Matters will be the changing nature of a liberal education. Increasingly, higher education is emphasizing the cultivation of citizenship through field-based learning, collaborative community-based research and the co-creation of knowledge through community-university partnerships. Through such approaches, the goals of a liberal education are becoming refocused to align with the values of deliberative democracy, participatory citizenship and civic engagement through cooperative problem solving. Community Matters aims to stimulate reflection and transformation in this direction, inviting the campus and community to work together to develop humanities- and arts-based programs that cultivate essential skills of collaboration and that mutually engage the university and the local community through co-conceived learning opportunities and co-designed projects.

Community Matters | 2016-17

INAUGURAL LECTURE: George Lipsitz & Barbara Tomlinson: Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Why Civic Engagement Matters Now
George Lipsitz (Black Studies, UCSB)
Barbara Tomlinson (Feminist Studies, UCSB)
Thursday, October 13, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

What is a university and why does the work we do here matter? What is the relationship between what goes on in our classrooms, studios and laboratories and what transpires in the wider world around us? The arts, humanities and social sciences promise to cultivate the capacity to imagine and create a better world, to envision and enact a common creative existence. Yet in practice, higher education is structured in dominance and the skills it cultivates are used to hurt as well as to help, to dominate and subordinate as well as to liberate. At this moment in history, when the economy, the environment and the educational system are all perpetually in crisis, when wars without end rage around the world, and millions of people facing displacement, dispossession, and deportation find themselves consigned to unlivable destinies, it has never been more important, and never more difficult, to discern what the proper role of the university should be. We argue for an ethic of co-creation and accompaniment, for recognizing and recuperating the lost potential of civically- engaged scholarship and fusing it with the energy, imagination and artistry emanating from aggrieved communities. We contend that there is worthy work to be done, both at the scene of academic argument and at the scene of social justice struggles where imaginative projects of art-based community making are bringing forth new polities and new politics, new practices and new pedagogies.

George Lipsitz studies social movements, urban culture, and inequality. His books include Midnight at The BarrelHouse, Footsteps in The Dark, The Posessive Investment in Whiteness, and Time Passages. Lipsitz serves as chairman of the board of directors of the African American Policy Forum and is a member of the board of directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance. He received his Ph.D in history at the University of Wisconsin.

Barbara Tomlinson’s work on rhetoric and affect in feminist and antifeminist argument in sociolegal studies, feminist musicology, and feminist science studies has appeared in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Cultural Critique, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, Journal of American Studies, and Literatura e Estudos Culturais/ Literature and Cultural Studies. Other work, particularly on metaphor and composing processes, has appeared in Cultural Sociology, Written Communication, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, the Journal of College Reading and Learning and edited collections. She received her Ph.D from University of California Riverside.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Community Matters

INAUGURAL LECTURE: Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Why Civic Engagement Matters Now

TALK: Driving Richmond: From Pop-up Public Art Exhibition to University Class—and Transit Museum

Laura Browder (English, University of Richmond)
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In 2013, Laura Browder was commissioned by the city of Richmond to produce a piece for the RVA Street Art Festival, a four-day festival housed in the disused bus barns that were once the home of the Greater Richmond Transit Company. The resulting oral history/photography exhibition, Driving Richmond: Stories and Portraits of GRTC Bus Drivers, told a complex and dialogic story of Jim Crow, civil rights and the racial geography of Richmond through the eyes of the bus drivers.

Less than two years later, Browder was invited by the GRTC to memorialize the history of public transit in Richmond. In conjunction with GRTC bus driver Bruce Korusek and curator Alexandra Byrum, Browder and her University of Richmond students held history harvests at GRTC headquarters which attracted dozens of drivers and mechanics; conducted archival research at the Valentine Museum, and incorporated the portraits and text panels of Driving Richmond into RIDE: Public Transit in Richmond Since 1888, a permanent exhibition housed at the GRTC headquarters. This project provided a template for a series of projects Browder has completed since then, including museum exhibitions and documentary dramas, but also the pop-up archive project that she and her students are creating next spring in conjunction with faculty and students from Virginia Commonwealth University and Syracuse University, as well as a range of community partners.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Laura Browder: Driving Richmond: Pop-up Public Art Exhibition to University Class—& Transit Museum

PANEL: The Engaged Classroom: Learning at the Intersection of Campus and Community

UCSB students:
Zenzile Riddick
Katie Walker
Jonathan Gomez
Jasmine Kelekay

Moderators: Rick Benjamin (Associate Director for Community Engagement, IHC)
Margaret Klawunn (Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, UCSB)
Thursday, November 10, 2016  / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

How best might our academic experiences at UCSB be both guided and deepened by community engagement and practice? As the title suggests, this panel will be informed by an inquiry into opportunities students at UCSB have for engaging in building community in relationship with others. This includes, of course, outreach, but potentially also fostering communities on campus.

Zenzile Riddick is a second-year student majoring in Sociology and Black Studies, and is the Program Director of the Black Student Union. Katie Walker is a fourth-year student majoring in Anthropology and Theater with a community emphasis, and is the Artistic Director of City of Peace, a theater program for 13 – 19 year olds. Jonathan Gomez is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology with emphasis in Black Studies, and is a Co-facilitator of the Transformative Pedagogy Project. Jasmine Kelekay is a Doctoral Student in Sociology with an interest in race and racism, punishment and social control, critical criminology, policing, global African diaspora, Black Europe, among other things.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

PANEL: The Engaged Classroom: Learning at the Intersection of Campus and Community

TALK: Public Universities and the Future of Democracy
Harry Boyte (Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, Augsburg College)
Thursday, November 17, 2016 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

In the midst of enormous external pressures to narrow or eliminate the public purposes of higher education, how can educators become agents of constructive, democratizing change, not objects, spectators, and observers of change? How can students, including first generation college students and students from immigrant, ethnic, and other backgrounds who feel like strangers in institutions where pedagogies and assessments are structured around individualist, hyper-competitive achievement norms, move from survival and protest to leadership in making change? In this talk, Harry Boyte will argue that higher education is a crucial site for democratic change making. To develop its potential requires incorporating skills and lessons of civic agency and “a different kind of politics” from broad-based, cross-partisan community organizations and related movements like the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa into both curricular and co-curricular life. We also need a future oriented time horizon, adapting such skills and lessons to prepare students for careers as citizen professionals, leaders in the democratic transformation of institutions and professions, not cogs in impersonal bureaucracies and corporations driven only by narrow bottom lines. Boyte will sketch new intellectual and practical resources for this work in the transdisciplinary field of Civic Studies. Civic Studies conceives of citizens as co-creators of a democratic way of life and it advances an epistemology of civic agency, a lived way of seeing and knowing in the world which blends “head,” “heart,” and “hand,” empirical, cultural and normative disciplines with capacities for effective action. Civic Studies is becoming a prominent presence in Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, Augsburg College in Minneapolis, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. It holds annual Civic Studies Institutes in Boston and the Ukraine, and constitutes a growing network of practitioners and public intellectuals associated with The Good Society: A Journal of Civic Studies.

Harry Boyte is an architect of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship’s public work approach to civic engagement and democracy, and the creator of Public Achievement. Boyte has worked with a variety of foundations, and non-profit, educational, and citizen organizations in the United States and abroad concerned with community development, citizenship education, and civic renewal. Boyte served as a senior advisor to the National Commission on Civic Renewal and presented research findings at a Camp David seminar on the future of democracy. He is the author of nine books on citizenship, democracy, and community organizing, and his writings have appeared in more than 100 publications including the New York Times, Perspectives on Politics, Kettering Review, and the Wall Street Journal. In the 1960s, he worked for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a field secretary with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the Civil Rights Movement. Boyte teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on organizing theory and practice at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and is in demand as a keynote speaker with faculty, students, and professionals.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series, the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life and the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment.

Harry Boyte: Public Universities and the Future of Democracy

How does Shakespeare make different kinds of meaning in various local communities? And how can amateur theatre be a form of community engagement for drama and Shakespeare scholars? This talk will consider how community productions of Shakespeare produce indigenous forms of knowledge that should be of interest to academics and amateur theatre-makers alike. It further calls for academics who study Shakespeare to engage with their own community by not only attending local productions of Shakespeare, but also by making theatre alongside amateur actors and directors who are engaging in practice-based, collaborative research that shares knowledge and expertise and de-centers Shakespearean authority. Examples in the talk will be drawn from Brokaw’s own work acting, directing, and dramaturging with the amateur company Merced Shakespearefest in California’s Central Valley.

Katherine Steele Brokaw received her PhD in English from the University of Michigan in 2011. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval Early English Drama (Cornell University Press, 2016). She has also published articles and reviews in Shakespeare Bulletin, Comparative Drama, and Pedagogy, and has an essay in the forthcoming collection Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (Indiana University Press, 2017). She is currently working on articles about dice games in Tudor drama, and about contemporary performances of amateur drama.

Sponsored by the IHC series Community Matters.

Katherine Brokaw: Making Shakespeare: Theatre as Community Engagement

TALK: Remixing the Civic Imagination

Henry Jenkins (Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education, USC)
Thursday, February 2, 2017 / 4:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Henry Jenkins’s 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collides ended with the speculation that we were acquiring skills through play that would soon be used to change the world. Based on interviews with more than 200 young activists from diverse communities in the United States, Jenkins’s most recent book By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism explores this transition from participatory culture to participatory politics, considering a broad range of examples of political movements that have been effective at mobilizing American youth and their communication strategies. What emerges is not the usual picture of “slacktivists” or “Twitter Revolutions.” Young people conducting politics through a language that remixes elements from popular culture to inspire the civic imagination. The civic imagination refers to the various mechanisms by which groups and individuals conceptualize the process of political change and civic transformation, including how they model what a better future might look like and the process by which change might take place, how they conceptualize themselves as agents capable of changing the world and often how they imagine equality before they have directly experienced it, how they develop social links within a larger collective/community and how they develop empathy for people whose experiences and perspectives are different than their own. At different moments in different cultures, a range of rhetorical and storytelling practices emerge to inspire the civic imagination. Today more and more young people around the world are inspiring the civic imagination by creative appropriation and remixing of elements from popular culture. This talk will offer a wealth of examples of the ways fantastical figures – wizards and zombies and superheroes – have been tapped as expressive resources by groups that want to change the world.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Community Matters series.

Henry Jenkins: Remixing the Civic Imagination

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

Henry Jenkins: Remixing the Civic Imagination

IHC UCSB