Table Of ContentT HE SCHOLAR AS HUMAN
T HE SCHOLAR
AS HUMAN
RESEARCH AND TEACHING
FOR PUBLIC IMPACT
Edited by Anna Sims Bartel
and Debra A. Castillo
C ORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
C opyright © 2021 by Cornell University
T he publication of this book has been made possible in
part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
F unding to make this book available open access was
provided by Cornell University's Office of Engagement
Initiatives.
Chapter 9: Copyright © 2018, originally published
as “Making Law” by Gerald Torres, chapter 15 in
ResponsAbility: Law and Governance for Living Well with
the Earth, ed. Betsan Martin, Linda Te Aho, and Maria
Humphries-Kil. Reproduced with permission of Taylor
and Francis, a division of Informa plc.
T he text of this book is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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F irst published 2021 by Cornell University Press
L ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Castillo, Debra A., editor. | Bartel, Anna Sims,
1973– editor.
Title: The scholar as human : research and teaching for
public impact / edited by Anna Sims Bartel and Debra
A. Castillo.
Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University
Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011148 (print) | LCCN 2020011149
(ebook) | ISBN 9781501750618 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501750625 (epub) | ISBN 9781501750632 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Community and college—United States. |
Learning and scholarship—Social aspects—United
States. | Humanities—Philosophy. | Education,
Higher—Aims and objectives—United States. | United
States—Intellectual life—21st century.
Classification: LCC LC238 .S36 2020 (print) | LCC LC238
(ebook) | DDC 378.1/03—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011148
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011149
Cover illustration: Mural painted by Molly Metz and
MK Rix, Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion, Philadelphia.
Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Contents
I ntroduction
ANNA SIMS BARTEL AND DEBRA A. CASTILLO 1
Part I. Humanizing Scholars 17
1 . Humans as Scholars, Scholars
as Humans
ANNA SIMS BARTEL 19
2 . To Be, or To Become? On Reading
and Recognition
SHAWN MCDANIEL 42
3 . Present: Humanity in the Humanities
A.T. MILLER 52
Part II. Engaging Artifacts 67
4 . Humans Remain: Engaging
Communities and Embracing
Tensions in the Study of Ancient
Human Skeletons
MATTHEW C. VELASCO 69
5 . Forgotten Faces, Missing Bodies:
Understanding “Techno-Invisible”
Populations and Political
Violence in Peru
JOSÉ RAGAS 93
6 . A Ride to New Futures with Rosa
Parks: Producing Public Scholarship
and Community Art
RICHÉ RICHARDSON 108
vi CONTENTS
Part III. Considering Resistance 127
7 . Finding Humanity: Social Change
on Our Own Terms
CHRISTINE HENSELER 129
8 . Performing Democracy: Bad and
Nasty Patriot Acts
SARA WARNER 143
9 . Making Law
GERALD TORRES 156
1 0. W hat’s It All Meme?
ELLA DIAZ 169
Part IV. Using Humanity/ies 191
1 1. P erforming the Past, Rehearsing the
Future: Transformative Encounters
with American Theater Company’s
Youth Ensemble
CAITLIN KANE 193
12. “From the Projects to the Pasture”:
Navigating Food Justice, Race, and
Food Localism
BOBBY J. SMITH II 212
13. “I Heard You Help People”: Grassroots
Advocacy for Latina/os in Need
D EBRA A. CASTILLO AND CAROLINA OSORIO GIL 227
Afterword: The Prophetic Aspiration
of the Scholar as Human
SCOTT J. PETERS 248
T HE SCHOLAR AS HUMAN
I ntroduction
A NNA SIMS BARTEL AND DEBRA A. CASTILLO
T here are two great and immiscible tides
affecting faculty life in the early twenty-first century: publicness and special-
ization. The publicness tide would sweep faculty work toward ever-greater
public engagement and purpose, while the forces of academic specialization
drive faculty toward more rarefied, often particularized, often short-lived,
and “productivity”-oriented ways of knowing and doing. While the strength
of each tide varies by institution and even by discipline, most faculty are
likely to encounter some variant of both of them. And in these encounters,
they may find profound questions of vocation and identity that are both
crucial to address and foreign to most academic environments. Thus, many
faculty are left to find their own way on these seas, perhaps carried along by
funding mandates or institutional mission shifts, without opportunity for
deep, rigorous reflection on their own sense of purpose and its action on and
within their scholarship.
T his book tells two kinds of stories. One is the set of stories each scholar
brings, connecting their personal and professional lives in new ways, so generat-
ing valuable insights about their own integrative processes as well as important
articulations of what the academic professions might do to better encourage
such integration. The other, larger, story is that of the communal matrix in
which these integrative stories grew—an experiment in co-creating new spaces
of connection that might support the kinds of deep integration we seek.
1
2 INTRODUCTION
D uring the academic year 2016–17, the Mellon Diversity Seminar at Cor-
nell University performed an experiment. We acknowledged from the start
that our scholarly lives may be formed by our identity but that we often miss
the chance to explore h ow— what that formation looks like if we create space
for such reflection, if we develop a microculture of larger human purpose
that explicitly embraces our scholarship as an instrument of our work in the
world. In the process of this seminar, we explored what happens to us, to our
work, to our sense of connection to one another, our departments, our institu-
tion, our disciplines. And most importantly, the seminar made space for us to
explore these questions together, on the theory that a community of practice,
a learning community, meeting weekly over an academic year, can constitute
a Sargasso Sea, shaped by but not swept up in these tides of faculty culture.
T he coeditors, Anna Sims Bartel and Debra Castillo, share a profound
commitment to advancing the public work of academics, and their collabo-
ration allows them to develop both of these kinds of stories. As a named
chair in comparative literature, director of the Latino/a Studies Program
(LSP), and (in 2016–17) director of the Mellon Diversity Seminar, Castillo’s
leadership in and with communities has led to the creation of the LSP as
an “engaged department,” with meaningful curricular pathways in which
students learn the public purpose and practice of their discipline by working
alongside community colleagues. She also reaches across institutional bar-
riers to promote research and teaching on critical social issues, most lately
centering on migration studies. She is an active mentor and partner for other
faculty with public interests and an advocate for institutional change to pro-
mote them. Bartel, on the other hand, chose not to pursue the tenure track
and has built a career as academic, activist, and administrator, making higher
education more useful in the world. She does this through coalition-building,
strategic intervention, and network-weaving, recognizing that shifting cul-
tures and practices toward public engagement sounds very nice but is in fact
the work of a movement, not an individual. Deeply rooted in the multidis-
ciplinary field of service-learning and community engagement, she is one
of few colleagues (and even fewer staff members) at Cornell with serious
and specific scholarly contributions to public humanities as well. And, of
course, she brings the valuable capacities of the professional administrator,
implementor, and strategist, enabling us to “herd the cats” of this enterprise
more effectively together. Most of all, this collaboration embodies one of the
central principles it champions: there are many ways of knowing and doing,
and the hard work of the world demands them all.
T his book, then, tells these stories. One is the set of stories each scholar
brings, exploring a disconnect or connecting their personal and professional
