Public History for a Post-Truth Era
Fighting Denial through Memory Movements
July 2022
Public History for a Post-Truth Era explores how to combat historical denial when faith in facts is at an all-time low. Moving beyond memorial museums or documentaries, the book shares on-the-ground stories of participatory public memory movements that brought people together to grapple with the deep roots and current truths of human rights abuses. It gives an inside look at "Sites of Conscience" around the world, and the memory activists unearthing their hidden histories, from the Soviet Gulag to the slave trade in Senegal. It then follows hundreds of people joining forces across dozens of US cities to fight denial of Guantánamo, mass incarceration, and climate change.
As reparations proposals proliferate in the US, the book is a resource for anyone seeking to confront historical injustices and redress their harms. Written in accessible, non-academic language, it will appeal to students, educators, or supportive citizens interested in public history, museums, or movement organizing.
The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship
May 2024
Across humanities disciplines, public scholarship brings academics and community members and organizations together in mutually-beneficial partnership for research, teaching, and programming. While the field of publicly engaged humanities scholarship has been growing for some time, there are few volumes that have attempted to define and represent its scope. The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship brings together wide-ranging case studies sharing perspectives on this work, grounded in its practice in the United States. The collection begins with chapters reflecting on theories and practices of public humanities scholarship. The case studies that follow are organized around six areas of particular impact in public humanities scholarship: Informing contemporary debates; amplifying community voices and histories; helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences; preserving culture in times of crisis and change; expanding educational access; and building and supporting public scholarship. The Companion concludes with a glossary, introducing select concepts. Taken together, these resources offer an overview for students and practitioners of public humanities scholarship, creating an accessible vocabulary rooted in the practices that have so advanced academic and community life. Although drawing on case studies from within the US, these examples offer perspectives and insights relevant to public humanities around the world. This book will be of interest to anyone working within the public humanities or wanting to make their work public and engage with wider communities.
Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice
Edited by Elizabeth Kyrder-Reid and Sarah May
July 2023
Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.
The City is an Ecosystem: Sustainable Education, Policy, and Practice
August 2022
The City is an Ecosystem maps an interdisciplinary, community-engaged response to the great ecological crises of our time—climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality—which pose particular challenges for cities, where more than half the world’s population currently live.
Gathering multiple interdisciplinary and community-engaged perspectives on these environmental crises, with contemporary and historical case study discussions, this timely volume cuts across the humanities and social and health sciences, and will be of interest to policymakers, urban ecologists, activists, built environment professionals, educators, and advanced students concerned with the future of our cities.
See chapter 17, An Environmental Justice Lens on Indianapolis’ Urban Ecosystem: Collaborative Community Curation.
Museums & Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse
May 2017
In 2011, Museums & Social Issues dedicated an entire issue to prisons and individuals who were incarcerated. This issue of Museums & Social Issues revisits the contemporary issues of mass incarceration and the role that museums and public history play in working alongside and with different communities to promote greater public awareness. All authors featured in this issue participated in the 2015 project with the Humanities Action Lab to create the States of Incarceration traveling exhibition. This exhibition was a coalition of 20 universities who focused on the past, present, and future of incarceration. The authors in this issue reflect on their experiences in creating the States of Incarceration exhibition and examine how their experience relates to the wider work of museum professionals.
