Seminar readings will be drawn from the humanities, social science disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, and various public sectors including mainstream journalism, alternative media, digital platforms, community-based organizations, and currently incarcerated groups.
Gillian Harkins (English) has developed a new graduate seminar based on her work as a 2016 Mellon Summer Fellow for New Graduate Seminars in the Humanities. The fellowship, part of the Simpson Center’s Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics program, gathers a cohort of UW faculty to develop new courses with significant public scholarship components.
The course, Collaboration Across Walls: Public Scholarship as Means or Ends, offered in fall 2018, explores public scholarship as both an outcome and a method of inquiry. It focuses on issues of incarceration and critical carceral studies. More:
We will explore these questions by studying one sample practice: collaboration across geographies or architectures of incarceration. Readings will be drawn from the humanities, social science disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, and various public sectors including mainstream journalism, alternative media, digital platforms, community-based organizations, and currently incarcerated groups. Course outcomes will include content knowledge in critical carceral studies; skills acquisition in multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral literacies and communication; and production of a project in “public scholarship” connecting content knowledge and skill versatility.
The course joins a growing list of new seminars arising from the Reimagining program: Public Spheres, Public Media (with Stephen Groening), Feminist New Media Studies (with Regina Yung Lee), and Organizing Film Festivals as Public Scholarship (with Leigh Mercer).
Harkins is also the recipient of a 2018-2019 Simpson Center Public Scholarship/Community Engagement award for Prison Education Collaboration, a project she is co-leading with Dan Berger (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Megan Ming Francis (Political Science), and Megan Ybarra (Geography). Harkins is also a founding organizer of Transformative Education Behind Bars, a project that connects UW faculty and graduate students with educators at community colleges, nonprofit organizations, other university programs, and correctional facilities to expand educational access and justice for incarcerated students.
Congratulations, Gillian!