Introductory Episode with Dr. Wendy Wall

Welcome to “ Confluence: Humanities in the Public Sphere”, an IASH sponsored podcast on public humanities. For our introductory episode today, we are joined by Dr. Wendy Wall, Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Director of the Institute for advance Studies in the Humanities or IASH. Professor Wall discusses what the public humanities are, the context for the emergence of public humanities and shares with us some astounding examples of public humanities projects on the Binghamton University campus as well as elsewhere. 

Transcript

Shruti: Welcome to Confluence humanities in the public sphere, an IASH sponsored podcast that discusses various public humanities projects on the Binghamton University campus, as well as outside. Thank you for listening to our podcast. I'm your host Shruti Jain. For our introductory episode today, we are joined by Dr. Wendy Hall, an associate professor in history, and the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the humanities, or AI ash. Thank you, Professor, all for joining us on the first episode of our podcast, I want to begin by asking you- what are the public humanities?

Dr. Wendy Wall: So I think at the most basic level, the public humanities, is the idea that humanities scholars should engage in a conversation about their research with the general public. If we think about it, in one sense, that's not really new. Academics have a long history of giving public lectures and writing op-eds and other ways of getting their knowledge out into the public sphere. But I think this idea of public humanities has really taken off in the last few decades. And I do think there are a couple of things that distinguish the way people use that term today or what they mean by it. I think one thing that is actually different is there's a new sense of urgency, the 1990s was a decade of, of culture wars. There was also some really big controversies that erupted over things like museum exhibits, over what should be taught in school curriculum, the so called History standards and a bunch of other things. And one result of that was that scholars and politicians and others on both the right and the left worry that there was an increasing disengagement between academics and members of the public. And then more recently, we've seen an explosion of crises of different kinds. The climate crisis, the crises involving incarceration and racial justice, global health with a COVID epidemic disinformation, radicalization, the state of democracy around the globe, and I think the public has tended to look to STEM fields for answers to some of those questions like the climate crisis, and to political scientists and others for for some of the others. I think there's a growing realization that philosophers and historians and art historians and literary scholars and others in the humanities have a lot to contribute to those conversations. The second difference I see is really one of approach. Traditionally, the conversation that scholars had with the public tended to be a one way street, you know, a scholar might get up and give a public lecture about his or her latest book and answer some audience questions. But there was always the sense that the PhD was the expert. In recent decades, I think that's given way to something that is sometimes called shared authority to use a less academic term you might think of as reciprocity. It's an awareness that scholars might have a deep interest in and deep knowledge about a particular academic subject. But when it comes to any particular problem, we are not always the experts by any means. Community members, activists, workers, and lots of others also have a great deal to offer. And they can often see things or know things that an outsider with an advanced degree might overlook. So in that sense, I think the process of research itself becomes a kind of public endeavor.

Shruti: Can you give us some examples of such public humanities projects on our university campus?

Dr. Wendy Wall: For sure. I think one good example of that is a project that was led a few years back by Jennifer Stover in the English Department. I think she was working, at least for part of it with her colleague Monty from the Colombian cinema. Professor Stover works in the field of sound studies. And her research highlights the way that oral perceptions of our surroundings are shaped by things like class and race and age and differing regional experiences. And so she wanted to develop a community based project that would expose her students to that idea while also giving back to the community. And she worked with students over a period of about four years to develop something called the Binghamton historical Soundwalk. students went out, met with community groups and others and gathered all kinds of Binghamton sounds and also oral memories of the past, if you will, from members of the public. This was everything from the sound of rain that has caused a lot of floods, of the sound of the Susquehanna River. Cracking candy bags, the sound of public dances. After they did that kind of sound collection, if you will, in 2018. They created a walking tour downtown that went past a series of sound installations and allowed people to experience some of those historic sounds. 

Jennifer Stover: I'm Jennifer Stover in the English department here at Binghamton. The project that I will talk with you talking with you today about is the Binghamton historical sound walk project, which was a multi year civic engagement project that culminated in a downtown sound walk on first Friday in May 2018. We didn't actually design the sample project, we asked students to come like to compete in a friendly competition. And their job was to design a project that either intervenes in a conflict over noise in Binghamton. Or to use this the theories that they were learning in class about sound as a way to mediate a conflict in Binghamton. So it was wonderful to send, you know, all these students out into the community, connect them with people and develop together a project idea.

Dr. Wendy Wall: Another project, which is, has been funded, in part by ash, the Ladino collaboratory, which is run by Brian Kirshen, who's a professor of Spanish and linguistics and Dina Danon, who is a historian in the Judaic Studies Department. Ladino is Judaic Spanish. It's it's a language that was developed first in Spain. But then, after sort of the expulsion of Jews from Spain, it was spoken by Sephardic Jews around the globe. And it's a language that is now very much under stress. So the Ladino collaboratory, pairs student apprentices who want to learn it with native or near native speakers around the globe, people all across the United States. And I think in one case, even in Turkey, and these language pairs meet regularly, and they often develop, I think, really deep cross generational relationships. So there's, there's kind of a value beyond the value of simply preserving Ladino. I also think a great example would be the podcast that you started with with one of your fellow graduate students. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? 

Shruti: Sure. Our podcast is called immigrants wake America. And we conceived of this podcast as a response to the increase in hate crimes and violence against immigrants, and in particular, immigrant women, as in the case of the Atlanta shootings, the US Mexico border crisis, and so on. We believe that, our podcast, by inviting storytellers to share their stories about the centrality of women in their histories or their families, histories of migration can act as an intervention in the way that immigrant people's stories are consumed in the way that immigrant people are demonized in popular discourse.

Dr. Wendy Wall: So I think that's a really great example of both the idea of reciprocity and also the way that public humanities projects can intervene in contemporary civic issues. There's another example like that that was launched by another of Ayesha's public humanities doctoral fellows, Colleen Watson. And I should say that you and Le Li were both public humanities doctoral fellows when you started this project, although you're not continuing on your own. Coleen is a philosopher. And she launched a podcast this fall, called The Wisdom of the people. And it's essentially an effort to explore the philosophical underpinnings of democratic governance. So she holds podcast discussions with other philosophers, here at Binghamton or elsewhere. And then she's pairing it with a series of public discussions that she's holding at the Broome County Library. And the idea is to get citizens of diverse backgrounds and beliefs, talking about things like democracies goals and values, the rights and limits of free speech, the place of pluralism and tolerance and democracy, what kinds of institutions a democracy should have. And I think she's hoping that this was going to both promote rigorous civic discourse, and also show Americans that they might share more common ground than they sometimes realize, at the very least, about our structures and values and institutions, if not always our specific policies.

Shruti: It seems to me like a lot of the public humanities projects that you have described, can be useful in recognizing and responding to a lot of contemporary issues, such as the global rising polarization.

Dr. Wendy Wall: I think that's I think that's absolutely true. There is a wonderful project that that I think is is useful in that vein, it's not actually going on here at Binghamton, although it is something that I've started to try and bring to the Binghamton campus. And that's something called the mapping prejudice project. It's based in in Minneapolis and many polis has long prided itself on being a super liberal city. But it's also a city that has some of the highest racial disparities in the country. That's something a lot of people don't realize. Anyway, in 2016, a small group of researchers wondered whether they could prompt people to grapple with that by tracing the spread of risk of racial covenants racially restrictive covenants in the city. And I should pause and explain racial covenants are basically language in a deed that prevents people of a particular racial, religious or ethnic background from occupying or buying the property. Most of these restrictive covenants ban non whites or non Caucasians or they use other kinds of language as well. But you will also find some that target foreigners are aliens. Occasionally, you'll see references to specific groups like Italians and Jews. In any case, the the mapping prejudice group discovered that all the property deeds in Hennepin County, which is where Minneapolis is located, had been digitized. And so they were then able to write a computer program that flagged deeds that contained potentially racist language. And then they took this project to the public. They went out to all kinds of community groups, they went to rotary clubs to churches to PTAs. I think they even visited the witches coven. And they asked people to read the flag deeds, and to confirm whether they actually contained a racial covenant. I mean, basically, what it is, is if the computer set noted that, uh, that a deed contain the word white, it could be because the buyer or the seller of the property was a Mr. White. But it could also be because the property had the deed had language in it that restricted that sale to anyone who wasn't white. So essentially, you need human eyes on the project to see if to check the computer and in most cases, check a couple of times. So this crowdsourcing proved to be a really, really powerful tool in a couple of different ways. First, it got a lot of manpower on the project. As you can imagine, if you have 1000 Different people reading deeds, you can get through a million deeds a whole lot more quickly than if you have five people working in the basement of the university library. But the project also had a really electrifying effect on community members. As time went on the project organizers were able to develop a time lapse visualization that showed the spread of restrictive covenants across the city. And so they took this to community groups and people who had never heard of restrictive covenants, sort of watched in horror as they saw the map spreading into their neighborhoods and their streets. And then they went online and looked at deeds themselves. And it's one thing again, to hear about this very abstractly. It's something very different to see it. Or even to find that language yourself. By inviting the public in the mapping prejudiced people really got a lot of the community to see structural racism for the first time. And that structural racism is really important. It's one of those one of the things that has contributed to depressing the sort of the family wealth of African Americans and many other people of color in particular in this country, because obviously, the purchase and ownership of homes, particularly homes in good neighborhoods, and I say good in quotes, but in in more prestigious neighborhoods, is a has historically been a way of building family wealth. When other groups looked at the map, they also saw all kinds of other correlations. So for instance, arborist looked at the map. And they saw that areas that were covered with racial covenants were also the places where trees have been planted in the city. So they tended to be cooler on hot summer days, so health professionals looked at the map. And they saw correlations between racial covenants, and are the areas that that didn't have racial covenants, and low birth rates. And eventually, this project wound up capturing the imagination of people, not only in the city, but but across the state. And leading to the first efforts to try and redress some of those issues. I guess I said at the beginning that I'd like to try and bring this kind of project to Binghamton. Last spring, I was teaching a course on on public history, and I talked about this project. And I've taught this course every two years for, I guess, at least six years. And every time I have I've looked to see if Binghamton's deeds have been digitized. And they never have. But this time, I discovered that they had been digitized back to 1946. And so I set my class looking at deeds, and there were 14 people in the class in about an hour and a half. We found more than a dozen deeds and then as people worked on it, we were unable to look at D books from May to August of 1946. But in that period, we found something like 60 racial covenants. And some of those racial covenants covered whole subdivisions. So for instance, in Vestal, there was a subdivision of homes that were built for returning GIs, and all 48 homes had racial covenants in them. We also found some that that quite a few actually the targeted aliens or foreigners, a few that targeted Italians, or Jews specifically. And again, in this this project, I just did it in my class, but it had a really kind of electrifying effect on my students, even students who've been sort of drifting off before this kind of snapped to attention and got really into the project. And I think it helped them just as it had the people in Minneapolis see structural racism in a way that they never had before. I think the next step, and something that I would eventually like to do is to build out this project and to go out to the community with it, because I think it could be very useful and sparking some really interesting community conversations.

Shruti: I think it's incredibly exciting to see the ways in which public humanities projects can be used in classrooms as teaching tools as a part of your lesson plans and so on. I think that is really inspiring. Can you talk to us about the ways in which IASH support these public humanities projects on campus?

Dr. Wendy Wall: Sure, I think there so far, there really have been three ways. The first is that we have some grants that we give to faculty members, often people who are in a couple of different departments coming together to work on a public humanities project. We also have for at least the last five or six years, had public humanities fellows doctoral fellows. Again, your project was one of those, or began as one of those calling Watson's podcast is an example of that. We work with humanities, New York, and humanities councils across the state to select graduate students or doctoral students who have really good ideas and then give them funding to develop their projects. And then the third way is this podcast. I mean, this podcast is not going to be limited solely to people who have gotten funding from IASH. Rather, what we're trying to do here is to call attention to the the wealth of public humanities projects going on across this campus. 

ShrutiThank you so much. Thank you so much for this.

Dr. Wendy Wall: No problem. I think this was an amazing conversation we had. It was really helpful and hopefully our listeners will also find it inspiring, hopefully. So thank you.