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.

May 5th, 2021: Unbecoming Me: Models of Transgressive Black Girlhood

This spring, we open our Building Public Series with Margaret Banks and her project Unbecoming Me: Models of Transgressive Black Girlhood, a summer camp devised with high school students to (re)imagine constructions of Black Girlhood through creative practice and literary study. With guests Jydin Harwell (Frederick Douglass Academy and Double Discovery Center) and a response by Ruth Nicole Brown (Michigan State University).