On my new plan for getting the word out about the book’s ideas.
As I’ve discussed
a good bit in this space, one of the most important yet at times more
frustratingly hard-to-control aspects of public scholarship is the need
to connect to audience. And not just an academic audience, of course—that isn’t
a given either, and I’m always hugely grateful for any academic response and
feedback on my work; but at the very least an academic book or article feels
like an overt way to add our voices to those conversations. But if I’m writing
public scholarship, I’m doing so because I feel that my focal points are
likewise and perhaps most fundamentally of interest and value to audiences
beyond academia—yet it can feel at best totally random, and at worst impossible,
for our work to find its way to such broader audiences.
There are various ways to push back on that feeling and try to connect to
audiences, and I’ve engaged in many for a good while now: blogging (duh),
writing op-eds (so far without publication success, but I’m not giving up!),
working with organizations both academic (NEASA)
and public (the American
Writers Museum). But with this current book, I’ve decided to focus on
another and even more direct method of connecting my voice and ideas to
audiences, and to do so far more aggressively than I would instinctively
prefer: I’ve been contacting numerous institutions and organizations and asking
if it would be possible for me to give a talk/presentation on aspects of the
book. I’ve already got about a dozen such talks preliminarily lined up for the
upcoming year, and have a lot more possibilities still in the mix.
None of the talks are quite finalized enough for me to mention them specifically
here (but watch this space for info down the road!), so I’ll just briefly highlight
two different categories and the different audiences to which I hope to connect
through them. Some talks will be at universities, both as guest lectures in
individual courses and as talks for groups of faculty and students; my primary
goal for them will be to give students a better understanding of our collective
past, and a secondary goal will be to share my take on public scholarship for
fellow AmericanStudiers. And some will be at libraries, historical societies,
museums, and other public institutions; my goal for them is more overtly
parallel to my goal for the book itself, to share the lessons of these histories
and stories with interested public American audiences. I’m excited to see what
responses I get, and will be sure to keep you posted!
Final reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. To continue the aggressiveness, do you have suggestions for places
(specific or general) where I could share these ideas? I’d love to hear ‘em!
PPS. Since I wrote this post, I've had the chance to give the first such talk, to a group of Chinese pre-graduate students at UMass Lowell. The experience was inspiring in many ways, and reinforced all of what I wrote in this post and am hoping to do with these talks.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, it convinced me even more fully of the need to bring these ideas to public audiences--as no one in this group of young Chinese students had heard of the Exclusion Act either. So there's work to be done!
Ben, are you a member of the National Council on Public History? NCPH.org might be a good resource for promoting your book. Also, the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco might be interested in a talk.
ReplyDeleteGreat ideas, Susan, thanks!
ReplyDelete