Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy

by Katharyne Mitchell (Editor)

Overview

This innovative book provides a collection of 20 chapters describing the journey to public scholarship. It is a cross-disciplinary exploration of the pleasures and perils associated with breaching the town-gown divide. The contributors come from a variety of departments including geography, comparative literature, sociology, communications, history, and biology and are involved in widely disparate ventures outside of the universities. What unites this incongruent crew is their effort to reach beyond the academy and to make their ideas and research broadly accessible.

Pulling in those people and concepts often ignored in normative academic settings, this book opens the way for a new kind of democratic politics—one based on grounded concepts and meaningful social participation. The chapters are personal biographies which, taken together, provide a broad prescription for social change, both within and outside the university.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781444355567
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	07/26/2011
Series:	Antipode Book Series , #40
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	409 KB

About the Author

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).

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Table of Contents

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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The role of the scholar/activist has never been more important than it is now. Practising Public Scholarship is one of the best books on what it really means to be a public intellectual to be published in years. It deserves a very wide readership."
–Michael W. Apple, John Bascom Professor of Curruculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison

"At a time of collapsing visions and privatized politics, academics who connect their scholarly work with social issues and work to translate personal concerns into public considerations, not only contribute to a society that at the very least should be capable of questioning itself, but also provide an instance of politics in which matters of knowledge, justice, and democracy become mutually determining. Practising Public Scholarship is an extraordinary testimony not only to the courage of engaged intellectuals, but also the importance of education as a crucial democratic public sphere. Everyone should read this book in order to get a glimpse of the promise of not only public scholarship and civic courage, but of democracy itself."
–Henry A. Giroux, Global Television Network Chair, McMaster University

Editorial Reviews

‘Practicing Public Scholarship' provides a useful resource for those thinking how to push forward the public dimensions of their work." (The Sociological Imagination, June 2010)

“Highly recommended for faculty, this book raises some uncomfortable questions that "activist" scholars must confront.” (International Journal of Social Welfare , July 2009)

From the Publisher