October 19-21, 2018

Public art and scholarship takes a variety of shapes, ranging from collaborative art projects, to community-driven research, to nurturing public platforms for generating and sharing expertise. While most public scholarship is united by common goals of reciprocity, civic responsibility, knowledge, and public knowledge, each project of this nature is based on unique personal connections, and challenged by naturally ever-changing dynamics within our communities. Assessing the many moving parts of public scholarship continues to challenge the field, and the Carleton Public Works community is working hard to learn how to employ best practices for practicing and evaluating public art and scholarship.

Public Works helped support three Carleton members as they attended Imagining America’s National Gathering in Chicago. This three-day conference was centered around public arts, scholarship, and assessing the work done in this field. Imagining America is a national consortium of educational organizations, cultural initiatives, and nonprofits that aim to strengthen the public roles of arts, humanities, and design fields through research and action initiatives, coalition building, and leadership development, and Carleton has been engaging with Imagining America for years.

Emily Oliver, with the Center for Community and Civic Engagement, Andrea Mazzariello, with the music department, and Briannon Carlsen, with the Public Works initiative, all participated in this Chicago-based conference, each contributing a different perspective to the event and bringing new information back to share with Carleton.

As the Associate Director of Academic Civic Engagement, Emily Oliver attended a day-long pre-conference gathering, where Imagining America’s Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship (APPS) research group presented their working paper, “Democratically Engaged Assessment: Reimagining the Purposes and Practices of Assessment in Community Engagement,” a lengthy white paper outlining recent developments in assessing works of community engagement.

During this pre-gathering, the APPS team offered conceptual framework, practical guidance for using this framework, dialogue with several bodies of related work, and stories of challenge and opportunity when community engagement is involved. As Carleton’s programming around community engagement and public scholarship continues to develop, the takeaways from this conference are especially pertinent.

While this particular session was certainly academic, the majority of events at Imagining America were complemented by performances, art, music, and presentations by community activists and nonprofit organizers, all centered around public scholarship. Audience members were invited to contribute creatively through a variety of mediums such as drawing, group discussions and skits, and song. For example, Professor Mazzariello attended sessions about musical collaboration between higher education and their neighboring communities, helping to inform his upcoming collaborations between his music class and the Northfield Union of Youth.

Throughout the three-day event, people were encouraged to open themselves up to the experience, and allow themselves to be vulnerable as they discuss this year’s theme: Decarceration and Liberatory Futures.

During the conference, attendees grappled with the standard questions of public scholarship:

  • Who has access to information?
  • Who is generating knowledge?
  • Who is benefiting from the scholarship?

These general questions were pushed further by applying them to real world situations associated with the theme of Decarceration and Liberatory Futures. For example, multiple conference sessions invited formerly incarcerated students to share their experiences working their way back into academia after complications with the criminal justice system. Other sessions examined the role of academia and public scholarship in sharing best practices and research with the public in a way that reaches the most vulnerable and impacted populations such as people in prisons or survivors of police brutality and trauma.

This conference circulated helpful resources for assessing community engagement and public scholarship, and it invited plenty of opportunity for reflection on individual perceptions of what it means to do publicly oriented work in an ethical, reciprocal way. However, it’s clear that there is plenty of work to be done, and with continued collaboration between Northfield organizations, Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement, the Public Works Initiative, the Humanities Center, Arts at Carleton, and the Broom Fellow for Public Scholarship, we are in a good position to make progress.