Public humanities of the future: Museums, archives, universities and beyond

Kylie Message, Frank Bongiorno and Robert Wellington

Contributors to this volume explore some of the purposes, responsibilities and joys of the humanities in 2024 and beyond. They consider what the humanities of the future might hold and examine collateral questions about how public institutions and academic disciplines may engage ethically and meaningfully with challenges. Whether undertaken in collections or galleries, or in libraries, archives and museums or elsewhere, the humanities are critically important to our individual lives and communities. Humanities research confronts global challenges from environmental sustainability to human health, wellbeing and social justice, to the very survival of the planet.

The discussions and projects represented in this volume are, at their heart, public humanities projects. They address public institutions and experiences as a gateway for humans—as individuals, collectives and larger publics—to reflect on the places they occupy in the world, and to describe the difficult processes of navigating institutional cultures and conventions. Contributors engage with museums and universities as subjects of analysis as much as sites of research. Rejecting the mischaracterisation of humanities research as detached from everyday experience and lacking practical application, contributors address diverse and, in some cases, new paradigms and understandings about the social contracts that exist between people and institutions. In doing these things, the case studies and analyses represented in this volume confirm the findings of the 2023 World Humanities Report, which says:

The humanities are essential to understanding and society. They reveal who we are, who we have been, what we have thought, and how we think. They are the archive of human accomplishment and failure, of human imagination and aspiration. They are a resource for individuals seeking to know their thoughts and beliefs and for communities and society in constant search of greater good.¹

‘Public humanities’ is a term that describes research that seeks to address the kinds of questions that people in the ‘real’ world ask.² It aims to benefit the universe of scholarly knowledge within and about the public sphere by promoting research practices undertaken in and with civic spaces and everyday cultures. It is an approach that seeks to promote the public good through methods and outcomes, and by directing the resources of the academic humanities to grapple with society’s most pressing challenges. More important than defining what public humanities is understanding why it is important, and why we do it:

[We seek] not merely to get the work of the university and museum out into the world (though it is partly that, too), but to build new archives, create new paradigms, recover buried histories, and weave new narratives of the sort that can only be produced when guild members cease to speak amongst themselves exclusively.³

Ultimately, public humanities endeavours to speak to many and different audiences and to show others how to do this also. At a fundamental level, this means finding ways to talk to people who hold different views of the world. That work involves creating safe spaces for listening, empathy and education. It incorporates interdisciplinary practices for representing hidden or untold experiences that have grown from anthropology, from ‘history from below’, from Indigenous studies, and from the development of postwar fields such as cultural studies and subaltern studies. But public humanities also requires scholars to speak across—often with the intention to disrupt—homogeneous, faceless institutions and infrastructures of culturally and historically embedded ideologies. Instead of just being an outcome, public humanities work is process- and methodology-focused, tied to the practice of extending the range of options available to engage with the world around us.

A key role of public humanities is to disturb, repair, re-author and democratise social and political structures. It also draws attention to the risk of causing harm, and the trauma that affects participants—both researchers and interviewees—involved in public humanities work.⁴ It recognises that the ways we imagine the past and the future are often constrained by present conditions, norms and experiences, alongside institutional and disciplinary structures. It aims to critique institutions of power, encouraging individuals to take account of their own roles and even complicity in maintaining a status quo. It is informed by practices of self-reflection and institutional analysis within academic disciplines such as organisational ethnography and critique.

Our broad understanding of public humanities is consistent with the definition and findings from the Humanities for All initiative developed by the National Humanities Alliance Foundation, which collated information, including descriptions, on 2,000 public humanities projects undertaken over the past decade in the United States.⁵ Its analysis of data from the projects presents the following five goals as being typical of public humanities research: informing contemporary debates, amplifying community voices and histories, helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences, expanding educational access and preserving culture in times of crisis and change. Humanities for All argues that humanities-based content and methodologies can ‘productively reorient current conversations by contextualizing concerns, encouraging participants to question previous assumptions, and enrich both disciplinary and public knowledge through discussion’.⁶

This publication marks several historic moments, including the relaunch of Humanities Research in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at The Australian National University (ANU). The topic for this volume came from an amalgam of the HRC’s recent annual themes of ‘Hope’ (2021), ‘Mobilities’ (2022) and ‘Repair’ (2023). Although we did not ask authors to address these themes explicitly, they are nevertheless prevalent in the articles that follow, which add to Yuliya Komska’s moving reflections on her father’s stained-glass creations in Lviv, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Komska says:

In war, mourning the loss of art, be it actual or anticipated, is not separate from mourning for the senseless disruption and destruction of human life. To live is to build, to repair, to illuminate, to leave traces in the fabric of time and space.⁷

The illumination and ethical obligations of human life across time and space shine through the pages that follow.

We wanted to dedicate this relaunch issue to public humanities because the HRC’s core aim is to advance the production, dissemination and public translation of outstanding and innovative, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship in the humanities across ANU, nationally and globally. Since 1972, the centre has been committed to supporting research that models both scholarly excellence and public engagement. Even 50 years after we were created, our focus firmly remains on the question of what it means to be human—a question that is, as Komska illustrates—even more urgent today than it has been in the past. The HRC remains committed to the belief that an expanded knowledge of human cultures improves our understanding of what binds us together and what differentiates us from one another as individuals and as members of diverse communities.

As volume editors, we have tried to shape these ideas into what we hope is an open and generous rather than singular focus for this special issue of Humanities Research.⁸ Inspired by Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s idea of ‘generous thinking’, which offers a conceptual framework for how to remake the intellectual foundation of the humanities, we asked contributors to engage critically with the proposition that ways of knowing associated with the humanities are a prerequisite for ensuring an improved global future fashioned from more ethical approaches to decision-making everywhere, especially in the institutions of the public and ‘publicity’ named in our title—museums, archives, universities and more.

The volume that follows has two sections. The first section is constituted by full-length fully refereed pieces spanning many forms and institutions of public culture in Australia and beyond. The second section includes shorter articles, interviews, reviews, reflections and comment pieces on contemporary cultural issues pertinent to the public sphere of universities, museums and spaces of community meetings. A story about alternative pedagogies can be woven throughout this section. It poses questions about agency and authorship, listening and learning, and sitting with knowledge in situations that may be unfamiliar or even discomforting.

Section 1 starts with an article by Jilda A. Andrews that explores the extensive collections of cultural material made by Indigenous Australians in many of the world’s museums. The article considers museum collections as containing forms of historic cultural diplomacy enacted by Indigenous people themselves—as expressive of their desire to extend and deepen knowledges of culture and experience across cultural worlds. If we are prepared to recognise this as a legitimate form of agency, we can reframe the world’s museums, from sites of ongoing colonisation and dispossession to sites of cultural strength with the potential to shape and inform stronger, intercultural futures. This article is based on a lecture given by Jilda in honour of the late Yolngu leader W. Wanambi in conjunction with the exhibition Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala. This very significant exhibition was organised by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia in partnership with the Buku-Larrηgay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala. It opened at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, in September 2022 and is currently touring the United States.

Two authors tackled head-on the question of what the museum of the future might be like. Mike Jones explores the ethical possibilities of the museum to explore what he calls ‘relational’ forms of practice that move beyond ideas of ‘consultation’ to elevate partnership, collaboration and participation. The trend that he observes having developed since the 1970s—and the goal of the future museum—is a more inclusive, fluid and democratic institution based on caring, empathy and justice, rather than the quest for a corporate-style institutional stability and authority. Alex Burchmore also considers how the COVID-19 pandemic generated a sense of new ethical and intellectual possibilities that were confounded by the powerful impulse to return to the ‘normal’. He argues that this dialectic has opened alternative visions of what a ‘post-normal museum’ might achieve as a site of responsibility, empathy and creativity in a world that increasingly threatens chaos and disorder.

Jennifer Coombes and Penelope Grist take us into the nitty-gritty of curatorial practice and the diverse potentialities for shaping different kinds of knowledge in their comparison of three exhibitions in Canberra over about two decades on Australian filmmaking. They show that the nature of collections, institutional contexts and purposes, a sense of the target audience, and the particular agendas and choices pursued by curators, can all play a part in shaping public knowledge of filmmaking through museums. They also found a discontinuity, in which later exhibitions were developed with scant awareness of earlier, overlapping efforts, limiting the extent to which institutional and curatorial learning has been built through such work. There are distinctions to be made between academically based knowledge and this form of public humanities, as well as opportunities for a more ‘reflexive’ approach in curatorship.

Daniel Casey and Joshua Black turn our attention away from museums to explore one of the central enabling institutions of the public humanities (and social sciences) in this country, the National Archives of Australia. Their article reveals how haphazard practice, poor law enforcement and impulses towards secrecy have resulted in the loss or inaccessibility of key records—an essential part of the national estate. They argue that restrictions on record access have the effect of ‘privatising’ what should be public, undermining democracy and imposing intellectual boundaries that push researchers towards the less expansive understanding of historical agency implied by ‘great man’ approaches.

The role of civic spaces in memorialisation and collective healing is an oft-repeated motif in this issue. Marivic Wyndham and Peter Read’s article reflects upon the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, as a site of national trauma for survivors of atrocities committed during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in that space. Their article analyses changes from the initial accounts written for public display by survivors of the torture and humiliation carried out in the stadium in 2016, to the modified, and somewhat sanitised, versions provided by a new generation of curators just two years later. Wyndham and Read propose that this reworking of memorial texts at the site of national trauma represents the softening of the rhetoric of memorialisation as an act of healing and reconciliation.

Although their focus is again on the world of museums, Anna Lawrenson and Chiara O’Reilly similarly argue that Australian regional galleries are civic institutions that play a role in processing our collective experiences. They present a case study of Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in Nowra, New South Wales, which responded to the Black Summer bushfires (2019–20) through exhibitions, commissioned artistic responses and participatory events for the community. Lawrenson and O’Reilly argue that the regional gallery’s responsiveness to issues that directly affect the local public are ‘radical acts of care’, proving the value of these cultural institutions in enhancing the wellbeing of Australians living outside city centres.

Regional museums are also the focus of the article by Manuel Burón, Irina Podgorny and Nathalie Richard, who pose the question ‘¿Para qué un museo?’ (Why a museum?) in their history of museum impermanence in Mexico and Argentina. Dispelling the assumption that museums are stable, permanent sites, Burón, Podgorny and Richard look at the precarious lives of museums in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present day. They show how institutional historiographies can give a false idea of stability and continuity for those museums that have responded to existential crises due to political and economic turmoil by re-founding, reorientation and renaming. In doing so, they show that museums are living and responsive institutions that reflect the polities that they represent.

Reflections upon academic experience in the neoliberal university sector is another key theme targeted by contributors to this volume. As lecturers in professional and creative writing, respectively, Ariella Van Luyn and Beck Wise employ ‘tactical storytelling’ in their article, using the practice of writing as an act of critique and resistance to academic structures that impede them. Their work is a form of practice-led research that blurs the boundaries between lived experience, academic research and the role of the university in the public sphere. They pose the question: ‘how might writing disciplines resist neoliberal tertiary institutions’ normalising tendencies and reconceptualise pedagogy and research practices in public writing for the future?’ Ultimately, they find that writing is a critical and reflective practice that allows us to test new ideas and think beyond the restrictive norms of academic work: storytelling humanises the humanities.

The next article, by James L. Flexner and Catherine J. Frieman, also critiques the neoliberal academy. They argue that interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars in humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) disciplines, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), provides a flexible and supportive foundation to the mutual benefit of all. As archaeologists, Flexner and Frieman offer their discipline—with its grounding in both scientific and humanities methodologies—as a paradigmatic case study for fruitful collaboration between HASS and STEM. They seek to resist the neoliberal move towards support for applied research and the instrumentalisation of academic work to benefit the economy, arguing that pure research is often mischaracterised in the right-wing media as aloof and disconnected from everyday concerns. Flexner and Friemen offer lessons learned in archaeology to buttress the humanities against such criticism by its willingness to transgress disciplinary boundaries, seek support from industry, work in consensus-based teams and privilege collaboration over the authority of individual scholars.

Moving back to the museum sector, Katrina Grant and Sean Minney report on two surveys of the experience of digital transformation on staff working in the cultural sector in Australia: one done in 2019 before COVID and the second done in 2022. The two surveys offer a unique opportunity to compare the before and after-effects of COVID, and to understand the opportunities and challenges faced within these workplaces where a range of staff with diverse skills and backgrounds are at the forefront of navigating the digital transformation challenges being faced by the sector. The 2019 survey found that most staff had been involved in digital work in some capacity and felt that it was under-resourced and that there were mixed levels of support for collaboration and understanding across different teams. The 2022 survey asked many of the same questions and sought to discover the impacts of COVID. Both surveys demonstrated that work with digital tools was pervasive but still not always well supported or conceptualised. The information about demographics and educational backgrounds of staff who work in galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) indicates that this sector can make a unique contribution to the use of digital technologies. The data also indicate the rising importance of communities of practice and creative approaches to innovation in the use of digital technology.

The next article, by Stephen Valambras Graham, brings the discussion of museums and universities together to consider the significant art collections held by Australian universities. He argues that, while cultural assets may be showcased on university websites, artworks remain, for the most part, invisible online. Graham identifies how much content is digitised in his case study universities—the 21 member universities of University Art Museums Australia (UAMA)—to explore the online visibility and discoverability of objects within their art collections. His research shows that only one-third of university art museums have comprehensive and searchable online collections, while two-thirds offer, at most, partially digitised collections. There are very little available data that monitor usage of digitised collections and research reveals an emphasis on audience engagement through exhibitions and public programming rather than through digitisation projects. When it comes to enhancing discoverability, thematic structuring of online collections is mostly adopted. University art museums also look to value-add to these collections by deploying contextual or interpretive information, expanding metadata to increase search capability, and integrating object-based learning as a model for increasing educational value of the collection.

The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (BSL&SR) installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies representing British and colonial fatalities of World War I is the focus of the next article, by Megan Gooch and Eleanor O’Keeffe. They describe how BSL&SR became the iconic centrepiece of the centenary program in the UK, attracting millions of visitors onsite and online and achieving media adulation for Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that devised the installation in partnership with artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper. Their article evaluates whether the embedded research employed in BSL&SR provides a useful model for the future of the humanities. They propose lessons that may guide organisations, and researchers developing similar research initiatives, especially as such projects seem likely to become more prevalent in humanities research.

Articles in this volume also address the ways that humanities research has been at the forefront of political debates in the public sphere. Rob Cover’s polemical contribution positions the contestation over gender identity and transgender and non-binary rights as an act of violence ‘to the [social] ecology that prompts the emergence of alternative knowledge frameworks’. Taking stock of the state of discourse on this topic in 2023, Cover’s account provides a rebuke to the normative claims made by those who seek to oppose the use of inclusive language and to provide space for diverse identities in public education and other civic institutions. Ultimately, he argues that the suppression of diverse gender identification aims to forcibly limit the social forces from which new forms of culture and diversity emerge. This is the heartland of public humanities research: by providing historical and theoretical context for one of the most divisive political issues of our time, humanities research can guide our political and moral decisions in democratic societies.

Section 2 of the volume starts with Daniel Stoljar’s reflections on universities from an epistemological point of view. Stoljar asks: ‘what is the nature and social function of universities?’ He considers the well-known Humboldtian answer to this question with a view not just to its inherent plausibility but also to how it has changed over time. Paying particular attention to how different versions of the Humboldtian answer make different epistemological assumptions, he concludes with a suggestion about how best to develop that answer in the future.

Continuing with the institutional analysis of universities, Julia Horne turns to Australia to consider the implications for the arts degree of the 2020 Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) package. She argues that the effective withdrawal of government funding for undergraduate arts and social science programs in Australian universities created a significant privately funded cluster within public universities. Yet, many arts and social science undergraduates come from disadvantaged backgrounds. In implementing the JRG package, the then Coalition government ignored the significant value of arts and social science graduates to the Australian workforce. The release of the Australian Universities Accord Interim Report in July 2023—under a new government—offers hope for reconsidering the place of the JRG package in Australia’s higher education sector.

Jan Láníček’s article takes us further within the university to consider its practices, specifically the challenges that Holocaust educators face in Australia. Láníček reflects on the pedagogical approach he has developed in teaching the history of the Holocaust at University of New South Wales, Sydney. Challenges include, first of all, that we are approaching the post-witness era when we will no longer be able to rely on Holocaust survivors to discuss their experiences with students. Second, the Holocaust is one of the most documented events in human history, and popular culture keeps producing literary and cinematic representations that often distort the history of World War II. Finally, he writes, the Holocaust is considered a European event, without any historical relevance for Australia. After identifying these challenges, the article offers three possible approaches to the teaching of the Holocaust in the future: hands-on, an integrated history of the Holocaust; unlearning; and connecting the Holocaust to local contexts.

Still based within the frame of a university case study, the next article, by Kylie Message, presents a moment in time description of cultural shock and change at a university campus. Message argues that, while universities and workplaces everywhere suffered from the disruptions of COVID-19 throughout 2020–21, ANU was unusual within an Australian context because the pandemic was just one of multiple crises that caused staff and students to experience consecutive waves of displacement over a five-year period. Her article explores the challenge of rebuilding social contracts at ANU in the post-COVID period and shows how significant the humanities are in these reconstruction efforts.

Message’s focus on cultural practices and how we build these though collective actions and sharing narratives is extended in the next article by Kim Huynh, which moves outside the university and into the community sector. Huynh’s article follows a migrant organisation’s first efforts to adapt Indigenous yarning to tell truths, share experiences and heal wounds. The Vietnamese Australian Forum (VAF) is a group of activists, artists, community organisers, politicians and lawyers that organises mostly online and open conversations about politics, culture and other issues of interest to its members. In 2023 it held an online forum entitled ‘Losing: The Legacy of 30 April’ that explored the ongoing and intergenerational impact of the Vietnam War and its aftermath on the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia. The pain and sensitivities around this event were addressed, in part, through Indigenous yarning practices that included deep listening, gathering round, speaking from the heart and sharing stories. While VAF has only begun to incorporate yarning, it offers valuable lessons in how yarning can promote belonging, solidarity and healing for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike.

The role of community-based knowledge is key to the next article, contributed by Jade Croft, a student of the National Museum of Australia–ANU Summer Scholar program in 2023. This article explores the complex and changing relationship between climate, Torres Strait Islanders and culture through a contemporary cultural material and artwork. A mask made by Badu (Mulgrave Island) artist Alick Tipoti, Maza Mawa (sorcerer of the reef), is used to exemplify how adaptation of the use of materials is deeply relevant to discussions around the adaptation of Islanders’ lives and culture in the face of climate change. By weaving together the understanding of totems, marine life and Islanders’ lives, Croft emphasises the adaptation and resilience of Torres Strait Islanders and their culture.

Croft’s article takes us to back to the world of museums, which is home to the volume’s final two contributions. Eleanor Foster’s interview with Dr Lonnie Bunch, the fourteenth secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, explores the responsibilities and future challenges facing museums in the twenty-first century. As one of the world’s leading cultural professionals, Bunch reflects on his role in the development of museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and considers the way such institutions can advance social justice issues and facilitate conversations about difficult histories. Conducted in January 2021, this discussion delves into the political choices such institutions make and the responsibility they have to inspire communities to engage ethically and meaningfully with the challenges of contemporary life. Bunch sheds light on his own approach to the practice of public history and offers advice to those pursuing a future in humanities research.

The final piece, by Meredith Martin and Elisa Cazzato, takes us back in time to 1739, when a group of French aristocrats staged a ballet pantomime known as the Ballet des Porcelaines. It tells the story of an Asian sorcerer who rules an island and transforms trespassers into porcelain until a prince and princess steal his magic and break the spell. On the one hand a standard Orientalist fairytale, the ballet can also be read as an allegory for the European desire to know and possess the secrets of making Asian porcelain. Although it had not been performed for nearly three centuries, beginning in 2020 art historian Meredith Martin teamed up with choreographer Phil Chan to revive this lost gem and update it for contemporary audiences. By reimagining the work with artists of mostly Asian descent, they aimed to consider the significance of historical dance for the present and to communicate the sense of mystery and desire that porcelain held in the past. This essay discusses their experiences in presenting the ballet at venues throughout the US and Europe, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Waddesdon Manor, UK. Elisa Cazzato, a specialist in eighteenth-century theatre who served as costume manager for the production, discusses its reception in Italy.

We—the editors and contributing authors—present this thematically diverse set of international offerings as an intervention in continuing debates about the place of the humanities in contemporary societies. We hope that, in exploring humanities practice in a wide range of settings and for diverse audiences and purposes, we have captured something of the creativity of recent and present practice, as well as provoking ideas for future projects. The Humanities Research journal will be open to making the results of such work accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

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1. 1 Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centers, ‘World Humanities Report’, June 2023, worldhumanitiesreport.org.

2. 2 In addition, ‘regardless of how a member of the public might pour meaning into the term when they hear the word humanities, they are likely to engage with some humanities content and humanistic practices on a regular basis’. Robert B. Townsend and Norman Bradburn, ‘The State of the Humanities circa 2022’, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 151, no. 3 (2022): 12, doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01925.

3. 3 Matthew Frye Jacobson, ‘Afterword: The “Doing” of Public Humanities’, in Doing Public Humanities, ed. Susan Smulyan (London: Routledge, 2020), 170, doi.org/10.4324/9781003058038-102.

4. 4 Useful references for researchers working with history methods include Jennifer A. Cramer, ‘“First, Do No Harm”: Tread Carefully Where Oral History, Trauma, and Current Crises Intersect’, Oral History Review 47, no. 2 (2020): 203–13, doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2020.1793679; Liz H. Strong, ‘Shifting Focus: Interviewers Share Advice on Protecting Themselves from Harm’, Oral History Review 48, no. 2 (2021): 196–215, doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2021.1947144; Verusca Calabria, Jenny Harding and Louise Meiklejohn, ‘Oral History in UK Doctoral Research: Extent of Use and Researcher Preparedness for Emotionally Demanding Work’, Oral History Review 50, no. 1 (2023): 82–102, doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2023.2175698.

5. 5 Daniel Fisher, ‘Goals of the Publicly Engaged Humanities’, Humanities for All, National Humanities Alliance, accessed 10 November 2023, humanitiesforall.org/essays/goals-of-the-publicly-engaged-humanities.

6. 6 Ibid.

7. 7 Yuliya Komska, ‘A Stained Glass in Lviv’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 March 2022, lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/a-stained-glass-in-lviv/.

8. 8 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).