Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy

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.

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).