The Building Publics Spring Graduate Series showcases how our Public Humanities Graduate Fellows bridge humanistic thinking with civic engagement; social justice with scholarly research; and public building with communication, in order to unleash new, more critical modes of scholarly imagination. Each year highlights a new, pressing theme.

This year Building Publics will convene under the heading Humanities Speak of Race. While it was particularly challenging to develop academic work through public ties in the context of lockdown, our fellows actively engaged in debates about privilege and race that are animating academia generally and the public humanities in particular. Over the weeks of the Building Publics series, we will learn about different ways organizations and fellows are attempting to together address and better understand these relations. Each workshop is curated by a graduate fellow or graduate collective, and will feature conversations with some of the community members and civic partners with whom they have worked in conceiving and implementing the projects.

This series is co-funded through the Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Higher Education initiative of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.

June 9th, 2021: Pedagogy in the Carceral State

This session of the Building Public Series assembles a panel of speakers with extensive experience and expertise in the practice of teaching and learning in the carceral context. Rebecca Ginsburg, co-founder and Director of the Education Justice Project at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, museum educator Laura Betancur, JIE alum Lisette Oblitas, and Columbia teachers Mia Ruyter and Ivan Calaff will consider the stakes of teaching in prisons in our political and technological present. Moderated by Nick Croggon (Art X Social Justice, Department of Art History, Columbia University)