Public humanities

Public humanities is the work of engaging diverse publics in reflecting on heritage, traditions, and history, and the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of civic and cultural life.^[1][2] Public humanities is often practiced within federal, state, nonprofit and community-based cultural organizations that engage people in conversations, facilitate and present lectures, exhibitions, performances and other programs for the general public on topics such as history, philosophy, popular culture and the arts.^[3][4] Public Humanities also exists within universities, as a collaborative enterprise between communities and faculty, staff, and students.^[5]

Public humanities projects include exhibitions and programming related to historic preservation, oral history, archives, material culture, public art, cultural heritage, and cultural policy.^[6][7][8] The National Endowment for the Humanities notes that public humanities projects it has supported in the past include "interpretation at historic sites, television and radio productions, museum exhibitions, podcasts, short videos, digital games, websites, mobile apps, and other digital media."^[9] Many practitioners of public humanities are invested in ensuring the accessibility and relevance of the humanities to the general public or community groups. ^[10]

The American Council of Learned Societies' National Task Force on Scholarship and the Public Humanities suggests that the nature of public humanities work is to teach the public the findings of academic scholarship: it sees "scholarship and the public humanities not as two distinct spheres but as parts of a single process, the process of taking private insight, testing it, and turning it into public knowledge."^[11] Others, such as former museum director Nina Simon and Harvard professor Doris Sommer, suggest a more balanced understanding of the ways in which history, heritage, and culture are shared between the academy and the public.^[12][13] These approaches draw on the notion of shared historical authority.^[14]

Subfields of the public humanities include public history, public sociology, public folklore, public anthropology, public philosophy, historic preservation, museum studies, museum education, cultural heritage management, community archaeology, public art, and public science.^[15]