What is Public Scholarship?

My irreverent answer: work done by nerdy, bookish, abstruse (yes, abstruse), people with way too much formal education who can get over themselves enough to care about the ‘real’ world, what’s going on in it, what they might have to offer it on a more practical level, and what they can learn from that big, scary ‘real world.’

Here is one of the more reverent official answers:

The photo above is of me looking very happy yesterday at the University of Washington Odegaard Library (first floor) in front of my public scholarship multimedia exhibition Soul Stories: Homeless Journeys Told Through Feet.
This is a collection of poetry, prose, photographs, and digital storytelling videos about my work as a nurse providing health care to people marginalized by poverty and homelessness. I understand homelessness at a visceral level, having lived through it myself as a young adult. I also readily acknowledge that just because I ‘made it out of homelessness’ doesn’t mean everyone can, nor that it is an easy thing to do, especially within our society.

The Soul Stories exhibition will be at Odegaard Library (opposite Suzzallo Library on ‘Red Square’) through March 20, 2015. Odegaard Library is open to the public during regular library hours. Many thanks to the wonderful librarians at Odegaard who opened this space for me, and thanks to 4Culture for helping to fund part of this project. I was looking happy in this photograph because this has been the most challenging, fun, and soul-satisfying scholarly project so far in my career.

Public or community-engaged scholarship has never been valued by ‘high brow’ university types, especially not at research-intensive universities. It generally doesn’t ‘count’ as a valid activity for those pursuing graduate degrees. It generally doesn’t get you tenure. But that all seems to be changing, albeit at the achingly slow speed of any change within higher education. The catalyst for this change seems to be less from sudden altruistic enlightenment on the part of the academy, and more from public pressure for universities to show tangible positive impact at the local, national, and international levels. Within medical science scholarship, you can see this outside pressure manifested in the embrace of ‘translational research.’ Research within the realm of public scholarship doesn’t need to be translated.

Within the area of health-related public scholarship, a terrific resource I have used throughout my career is the Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH).  Check out the free, no membership required resources on their website, especially CES4Health, for peer-reviewed products of community-engaged scholarship.