Each year PAGE asks Fellows to submit a few readings that have informed the practical and theoretical aspects of their own engaged scholarship. Many of those readings – and others that the PAGE team has assembled – can be found in the resource archive list below.

Last year, PAGE Summit attendees will choose to participate in two of the five 45-minute breakout conversations being facilitated by the 2009 Returning PAGE Fellows. Descriptions of those sessions and readings that will ground the conversation can be found in the corresponding folders below.

Please help us build our resources by sending the books, articles, or media that is important to your work by sending them to Adam Bush at asbush@gmail.com.

2009 PAGE Summit Breakout Sessions

Introduction to Civic Engagement and Public Scholarship

Understanding, Initiating and Maintaining Successful Partnerships

Scholar-Activism and Activist-Scholars

Publicly Engaged Scholarship and the Arts

Archiving, Documenting, and Evaluating Civic Engagement

Breakout One
Introduction to Civic Engagement and Public Scholarship

This break out session is a perfect first stop for those new to Imagining America or just beginning to think of their projects in terms of engaged scholarship. Using the below readings as a foundation, we will try to define the terms like Public Scholarship, Arts, and Engagement and work to highlight contemporary debates about the meaning, purpose, and value of “public scholars” or “public intellectuals.” Talking through these terms in relationship to our individual projects as well as (briefly) the work of scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Paulo Freire, and John Dewey, we will touch upon major areas
of civic engagement for academics, including performance studies, public sociology, and urban studies, and how positioning our work through this lens of engagement in graduate school can help us successfully navigate these disciplines allow our projects to
flourish.

Questions to Consider:

What is civic engagement as it relates to higher education?
How is it different from other types of scholarship?
What do you need to know before you begin engaging with community
partners?
What are the implications of pursuing such work in regard to
writing a thesis or dissertation, to publishing, or to thinking about
career trajectories inside and outside of the academy?

This will be an open space for lots of questions and exploration.

Suggested Readings
Nancy Cantor and Steven Lavine, “Taking Public Scholarship
Seriously,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 June 2006.

David Scobey, “Putting the Academy in Its Place,” Place 14:2 (Spring
2002), pp. 50-55.

Dixon, Chris and Alexis Shotwell. “Leveraging the Academy:
Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad
School.” Online at Monthly Review:

George J. Sanchez, “Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity
and Democracy,” Forseeable Futures, working papers from Imagining
America (Fall 2005)

Breakout Two
Understanding, Initiating and Maintaining Successful Partnerships

How can graduate students work best with faculty and community partners in building community in the arts, humanities and design? This workshop is geared toward understanding best practices in developing and maintaining ongoing partnerships with community leaders and university constituents. Considering the unique shifting status of graduate students, this workshop will engage participants in honest discussion and probing activities that address how to create effective and transformative community-academy partnerships balanced by one’s own practical needs and degree requirements as a doctoral student. We will explore ways to navigate challenging power dynamics, partner accountability, and methods for fostering and maintaining supportive partnerships in publicly-engaged projects.

Suggested Readings

Avila, Maria. “Academic and Community Engagement at Occidental College: a model based on relationality and stakeholders’ ownership of, and participation in the implementation of the model.” Unpublished paper.

Ellison, Julie and Sarah Robbins. “Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement: Skills for Community-based Projects in the Arts, Humanities, and Design.” A report prepared for Imagining America.

Koch, Cynthia. “Making Value Visible: Excellence in Campus-Community Partnerships in the Arts, Humanities, and Design”. A report prepared for Imagining America, with a forward by Julie Ellison.

Community Tool Box, on Understanding Culture and Diversity in Building Communities (Feel free to browse this entire site – so much helpful information on community building.) http://ctb.ku.edu/tools/en/section_1168.htm

Breakout Three
Scholar-Activism and Activist-Scholars

At the center of deciding to invest in civic engagement is a desire to integrate our graduate work with our community commitments. In the hustle and bustle of organizing, writing papers, and developing projects there is rarely an opportunity to reflect on what we’re doing, why were doing it, and how others have done it before us. During this roundtable, we will discuss the meanings, implications, challenges, and opportunities involved in scholar-activism. Divided into two 45 minute sessions, the first section will focus on building theoretical tools and the second section will focus on application. We will ask, What are different ways of envisioning scholar activism? What impact do we carry with us as PhDs in off-campus community settings? And, how can we leverage university resources to benefit our community partners? As part of this conversation we will also talk about the implications of place, particularly the rise in civic engagement work in New Orleans, post-Katrina. The goal is to reflect on our own approaches, purpose, and priorities as civically engaged scholars and to develop tools for building integrated and sustainable participation inside and outside of the academy.

Suggested Readings
Pulido, Laura. “FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar Activist.” In Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Ed Charles R. Hale. University of California Press.

Massey, Doreen. When Theory Meets Politics. Antipode. Vol. 40 No. 3. P. 492-497. 2008

Mitchell, Don. Confessions of a Desk-Bound Radical. Antipode Vol. 40 No. 3. Pg. 448-454. 2008

Breakout Four
Publicly Engaged Scholarship and the Arts

As critics and theorists debate whether or not "community-based art" should be judged by its artistic and aesthetic merit or its efficacy as a social "service," how do we, as artists and scholars working collaboratively and with communities, evaluate the successes of our own projects? Should we be the ones to evaluate the work? Should it be left to the critics? Or should the voices and opinions of the community participants be most important? How do we evaluate arts/work, especially in the context of the academy, which has its own set of expectations?

In this session, we will discuss creative, personal, ethical, and political challenges in community-engaged scholarship in the arts. Through an interactive dialogue/workshop, session participants will discuss issues and challenges related to arts-based community scholarship and we will devise new strategies collaboratively.

This session will be facilitated by Returning PAGE Fellow, Dana Edell.

Suggested Readings:
“Criticism” from Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. Routledge: New Brunswick, 2005.

Sloan, David. "An Ethic of the End," www.communityarts.net 2008.

Amin, Takiyah Nur. “Developing Partners: Inside Three Arts Organizations,” www.communityarts.net 2004.

Breakout Five
Archiving, Documenting, and Evaluating Civic Engagement
As graduate students working to incorporate public scholarship and research as a central part of our graduate training, we may encounter challenges to how our projects are weighed against 'traditional’ scholarship, such as dissertation chapters, articles in peer reviewed journals, or archival research.

How can we use the archival skills of our discipline(s) to place our work in a position to be evaluated toward our degree progress (or is this necessary/important to you?)?

Other Questions to Consider: What does it mean to have a Qualifying Field in Civic Engagement? How can our civic engagement project be weighed on equal ground with the dissertation work necessary to

progress through graduate school? What work do we have to do with our committee members to allow this discussion of public scholarship or to bring additional experts to be able to evaluate our projects? What new technologies can we use to preserve our projects so that they can be properly incorporated into our graduate study?

Top of page

2008 PAGE Summit Reading List

Cantor, Nancy. Imagining America; Imagining Universities: Who and What? Welcome Address: Imagining America Annual Conference, Syracuse University. 7 September 2007.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan. “When the Gown Goes to Town: The Reciprocal Rewards of Fieldwork for Artists.” Theatre Topics. 11. 1 (March 2001): 55-62

Dixon, Chris and Shotwell, Alexis. “Leveraging the Academy: Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad School.”

Halttunen, Karen. ”Groundwork: American Studies in Place – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005.” American Quarterly - Volume 58.1 (March 2006): 1-15.

Jeffries, Lynn, Rauch, Bill, Valdez, Mark, & Atlas, Caron. “The Faith-Based Theatre Cycle Case Study: Cornerstone Theater Company.” Animating Democracy: Reading Room Case Studies.

Prince-Ramus, Joshua. “Talks Joshua Prince-Ramus: Designing the Seattle Central Library.”

Sanchez, George J. "Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy." Foreseeable Futures #4, Working Papers from Imagining America. (Fall 2005).

Smith, Andrea. "Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 23. 2 (2007): 140-144.

Stern, Lynn E. “Public Faces, Private Lives: Making Visible Silicon Valley's Hybrid Heritage.” Animating Democracy: Reading Room Case Studies.


about PAGE consortium convenings resources
Each year PAGE asks Fellows to submit a few readings that have informed the practical and theoretical aspects of their own engaged scholarship. Many of those readings – and others that the PAGE team has assembled – can be found in the resource archive list below. Last year, PAGE Summit attendees will choose to participate in two of the five 45-minute breakout conversations being facilitated by the 2009 Returning PAGE Fellows. Descriptions of those sessions and readings that will ground the conversation can be found in the corresponding folders below. Please help us build our resources by sending the books, articles, or media that is important to your work by sending them to Adam Bush at asbush@gmail.com. 2009 PAGE Summit Breakout Sessions Introduction to Civic Engagement and Public Scholarship *Understanding, Initiating and Maintaining Successful Partnerships* *Scholar-Activism and Activist-Scholars* *Publicly Engaged Scholarship and the Arts* *Archiving, Documenting, and Evaluating Civic Engagement* Breakout One Introduction to Civic Engagement and Public Scholarship This break out session is a perfect first stop for those new to Imagining America or just beginning to think of their projects in terms of engaged scholarship. Using the below readings as a foundation, we will try to define the terms like Public Scholarship, Arts, and Engagement and work to highlight contemporary debates about the meaning, purpose, and value of “public scholars” or “public intellectuals.” Talking through these terms in relationship to our individual projects as well as (briefly) the work of scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Paulo Freire, and John Dewey, we will touch upon major areas of civic engagement for academics, including performance studies, public sociology, and urban studies, and how positioning our work through this lens of engagement in graduate school can help us successfully navigate these disciplines allow our projects to flourish. Questions to Consider: What is civic engagement as it relates to higher education? How is it different from other types of scholarship? What do you need to know before you begin engaging with community partners? What are the implications of pursuing such work in regard to writing a thesis or dissertation, to publishing, or to thinking about career trajectories inside and outside of the academy? This will be an open space for lots of questions and exploration. Suggested Readings Nancy Cantor and Steven Lavine, “Taking Public Scholarship Seriously,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 June 2006. David Scobey, “Putting the Academy in Its Place,” Place 14:2 (Spring 2002), pp. 50-55. Dixon, Chris and Alexis Shotwell. “Leveraging the Academy: Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad School.” Online at Monthly Review: George J. Sanchez, “Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy,” Forseeable Futures, working papers from Imagining America (Fall 2005) Breakout Two Understanding, Initiating and Maintaining Successful Partnerships How can graduate students work best with faculty and community partners in building community in the arts, humanities and design? This workshop is geared toward understanding best practices in developing and maintaining ongoing partnerships with community leaders and university constituents. Considering the unique shifting status of graduate students, this workshop will engage participants in honest discussion and probing activities that address how to create effective and transformative community-academy partnerships balanced by one’s own practical needs and degree requirements as a doctoral student. We will explore ways to navigate challenging power dynamics, partner accountability, and methods for fostering and maintaining supportive partnerships in publicly-engaged projects. Suggested Readings Avila, Maria. “Academic and Community Engagement at Occidental College: a model based on relationality and stakeholders’ ownership of, and participation in the implementation of the model.” Unpublished paper. Ellison, Julie and Sarah Robbins. “Specifying the Scholarship of Engagement: Skills for Community-based Projects in the Arts, Humanities, and Design.” A report prepared for Imagining America. Koch, Cynthia. “Making Value Visible: Excellence in Campus-Community Partnerships in the Arts, Humanities, and Design”. A report prepared for Imagining America, with a forward by Julie Ellison. Community Tool Box, on Understanding Culture and Diversity in Building Communities (Feel free to browse this entire site – so much helpful information on community building.) http://ctb.ku.edu/tools/en/section_1168.htm Breakout Three Scholar-Activism and Activist-Scholars At the center of deciding to invest in civic engagement is a desire to integrate our graduate work with our community commitments. In the hustle and bustle of organizing, writing papers, and developing projects there is rarely an opportunity to reflect on what we’re doing, why were doing it, and how others have done it before us. During this roundtable, we will discuss the meanings, implications, challenges, and opportunities involved in scholar-activism. Divided into two 45 minute sessions, the first section will focus on building theoretical tools and the second section will focus on application. We will ask, What are different ways of envisioning scholar activism? What impact do we carry with us as PhDs in off-campus community settings? And, how can we leverage university resources to benefit our community partners? As part of this conversation we will also talk about the implications of place, particularly the rise in civic engagement work in New Orleans, post-Katrina. The goal is to reflect on our own approaches, purpose, and priorities as civically engaged scholars and to develop tools for building integrated and sustainable participation inside and outside of the academy. Suggested Readings Pulido, Laura. “FAQs: Frequently (Un)Asked Questions about Being a Scholar Activist.” In Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Ed Charles R. Hale. University of California Press. Massey, Doreen. When Theory Meets Politics. Antipode. Vol. 40 No. 3. P. 492-497. 2008 Mitchell, Don. Confessions of a Desk-Bound Radical. Antipode Vol. 40 No. 3. Pg. 448-454. 2008 Breakout Four Publicly Engaged Scholarship and the Arts As critics and theorists debate whether or not "community-based art" should be judged by its artistic and aesthetic merit or its efficacy as a social "service," how do we, as artists and scholars working collaboratively and with communities, evaluate the successes of our own projects? Should we be the ones to evaluate the work? Should it be left to the critics? Or should the voices and opinions of the community participants be most important? How do we evaluate arts/work, especially in the context of the academy, which has its own set of expectations? In this session, we will discuss creative, personal, ethical, and political challenges in community-engaged scholarship in the arts. Through an interactive dialogue/workshop, session participants will discuss issues and challenges related to arts-based community scholarship and we will devise new strategies collaboratively. This session will be facilitated by Returning PAGE Fellow, Dana Edell. Suggested Readings: “Criticism” from Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. Routledge: New Brunswick, 2005. Sloan, David. "An Ethic of the End," www.communityarts.net 2008. Amin, Takiyah Nur. “Developing Partners: Inside Three Arts Organizations,” www.communityarts.net 2004. Breakout Five Archiving, Documenting, and Evaluating Civic Engagement As graduate students working to incorporate public scholarship and research as a central part of our graduate training, we may encounter challenges to how our projects are weighed against 'traditional’ scholarship, such as dissertation chapters, articles in peer reviewed journals, or archival research. How can we use the archival skills of our discipline(s) to place our work in a position to be evaluated toward our degree progress (or is this necessary/important to you?)? Other Questions to Consider: What does it mean to have a Qualifying Field in Civic Engagement? How can our civic engagement project be weighed on equal ground with the dissertation work necessary to progress through graduate school? What work do we have to do with our committee members to allow this discussion of public scholarship or to bring additional experts to be able to evaluate our projects? What new technologies can we use to preserve our projects so that they can be properly incorporated into our graduate study? Top of page Archive: 2008 PAGE Summit Reading List Cantor, Nancy. Imagining America; Imagining Universities: Who and What? Welcome Address: Imagining America Annual Conference, Syracuse University. 7 September 2007. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. “When the Gown Goes to Town: The Reciprocal Rewards of Fieldwork for Artists.” Theatre Topics. 11. 1 (March 2001): 55-62 Dixon, Chris and Shotwell, Alexis. “Leveraging the Academy: Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad School.” Halttunen, Karen. ”Groundwork: American Studies in Place – Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 4, 2005.” American Quarterly - Volume 58.1 (March 2006): 1-15. Jeffries, Lynn, Rauch, Bill, Valdez, Mark, & Atlas, Caron. “The Faith-Based Theatre Cycle Case Study: Cornerstone Theater Company.” Animating Democracy: Reading Room Case Studies. Prince-Ramus, Joshua. “Talks Joshua Prince-Ramus: Designing the Seattle Central Library.” Sanchez, George J. "Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy." Foreseeable Futures #4, Working Papers from Imagining America. (Fall 2005). Smith, Andrea. "Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex." Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 23. 2 (2007): 140-144. Stern, Lynn E. “Public Faces, Private Lives: Making Visible Silicon Valley's Hybrid Heritage.” Animating Democracy: Reading Room Case Studies.

2009 PAGE Summit Breakout Sessions

Archive:

2008 PAGE Summit Reading List