How does community shape scholarly practice? This roundtable features positive models of collaboration, new media modes of cross-institutional work, and transformative approaches to fostering inclusive, productive, and supportive academic environments, all achieved despite—but perhaps even more vitally in response to—the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic. Significantly, these collaborations all feature at least one nineteenth-century scholar, suggesting the value of this historical period in liberal arts curricula: helping students think about historical trajectories and the relationship between current crises and past decisions—as well as understanding that "crisis" seems to suggest imminent problems, while in fact things like institutional racism and climate catastrophe have been recognized and critiqued since at least the nineteenth century.
The last year has tested and exhausted university and college faculty, students, and staff. As we sought to normalize teaching, research, learning, and administrating the day-to-day operations of higher-ed institutions during a global pandemic, “pivoting” between in-person and virtual interactions, learning to manage “fluid” situations, we also collaborated with each other. Motivated by the horror and unethicalness of ongoing and connected patterns of racial brutality and environmental devastation, the groups of scholars represented here reached out to each other across disciplines and institutions to create new knowledges. Conscious of a longer history in which higher education has been complicit with eugenicist, white supremacist, and exploitative/extractive ideologies and practices, these knowledges were collaboratively created with the aim of interrupting this complicity and reimagining the role of academic production toward equitable and liberatory, not oppressive, futures.
Actively decentering the role of the singular expert, these clusters of scholars have worked to foster collaboration beyond their own groups, as well. This outreach includes developing a collaborative, interdisciplinary program that helps faculty across a Small Liberal Arts College practice social justice theory in their classrooms (Willis and Gillson); directing the Transformative Learning in the Humanities three-year, Mellon-funded initiative at a public university to foster collaboration between instructors and students, empowering students to engage with their education and take ownership over their learning, essential skills for civic engagement (Katopodis and Le); creating an accessible, open-source digital-humanities project that features content and pedagogical approaches that seek to “undiscipline” the traditional research and teaching of Victorian Studies by incorporating the insights of other fields, including Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and promoting the work of BIPOC/BAME scholars, early-career scholars, and contingent faculty (Bauer, Fong, Hsu, and Wisnicki); or developing a course co-taught with scholars in Environmental Studies and in Media and Cultural Studies on the Anthropocene at a SLAC, showing the value of cross-disciplinary and cross-historical collaboration for thinking about big questions that interest our students (Tange).
Finally, I have been intentional about including groups that consist not only of a range of ranks (graduate student, assistant, associate, and full professor), but also disciplines (English, Asian Studies, Urban Education) and institutions (small liberal arts college, Hispanic-serving Institution, state university). These kinds of cross-rank, cross-disciplinary, and cross-interdisciplinary collaborations demonstrate how diversity strengthens the projects and includes communities even beyond the collaborators.
This roundtable will ask each of the four groups to present on their collaborations for a total of eight to nine minutes, so as to spend half of the session time on substantial discussion.
Questions we will ask our collaborators to think about in advance:
How has the pandemic created “opportunity” for the kind of collaborations you’ve done? How has it hindered it?
How do you think your research and teaching in nineteenth-century studies in particular has enabled your cross-disciplinary, critical, issues-engaged, collaborative work? What lessons can we learn from this about the value of nineteenth-century studies, whether US, British, transatlantic, or global? In and outside the institution?
What advice do you have for other groups with an interest in the kind of collaborations you’ve done? What do you wish you had known before you started? What were some of the biggest lessons you learned from others? What did you learn about yourself?