Practising Public Scholarship - Experiences And Possibilities Beyond The Academy

A cross-disciplinary collection of 20 essays describing the journey to public scholarship, exploring the pleasures and perils associated with breaching the town-gown divide.

• Includes contributions from departments of geography, comparative literature, sociology, communications, history, English, public health, and biology
• Discusses their efforts to reach beyond the academy and to make their ideas and research broadly accessible to a wider audience
• Opens the way for a new kind of democratic politics—one based on grounded concepts and meaningful social participation
• Includes deeply personal accounts about the journey to becoming a public scholar and to intervening politically in the world, while remaining within a university system
• Provides a broad prescription for social change, both within and outside the university

Katharyne Mitchell is Professor of Geography and the Simpson Professor in the Public Humanities at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on urban development, education, and migration. From 2004 to 2007 she was the founding director of Reclaiming Childhood, an interdisciplinary and community oriented collaboration examining the changing nature of American childhood under neoliberalism. See http://www.reclaimingchildhood.org. Recent books include Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis (2004) and, with Sallie Marston and Cindi Katz, Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (Blackwell, 2004).

Introduction: Becoming Political (Katharyne Mitchell).

1. Comrades and Colons (Terry Eagleton).

2. Tales of Western Adventure (Patricia Limerick).

3. Open Letter to C. Wright Mills (Michael Burawoy).

4. Craven Emotional Warriors (Melissa W. Wright).

5. Population, Environment, War, and Racism: Adventures of a Public Scholar (Paul R. Ehrlich).

6. The Something We Can Do (David Domke).

7. Philadelphia Dreaming: Discovering Citizenship between the University and the Schools (Julia Reinhard Lupton).

8. Beyond Positivism: Public Scholarship in Support of Health (Dennis Raphael).

9. Weaving Solidarity from Oneonta to Oxchuc (Katherine O’Donnell).

10. Demand the Possible: Journeys in Changing Our World as a Public Activist-Scholar (Paul Chatterton).

11. Becoming a Scholar-Advocate: Participatory Research with Children (Meghan Cope).

12. Why am I Engaged? (Walden Bello).

13. Drugs, Data, Race and Reaction: A Field Report (Katherine Beckett).

14. Confessions of a Desk-Bound Radical (Don Mitchell).

15. Becoming a Public Scholar to Improve the Health of the US Population (Stephen Bezruchka).

16. The Humanities and the Public Soul (Julie Ellison).

17. This Fist Called My Heart: Public Pedagogy in the Belly of the Beast (Peter McLaren).

18. The Surprising Sense of Hope (Jenny Pickerill).

19. The Making of a Public Intellectual (Howard Zinn).

20. When Theory Meets Politics (Doreen Massey).

Index.