Introduction
The UBC-Vancouver Public Humanities Hub (PHH) is delighted to announce this year’s competition for the Public Humanities Public Engagement Awards. A total of six (6) $1,000 awards will be given to faculty/students and one partner organization who have exhibited outstanding public humanities engagement in the past two years.
Eligibility Categories
- Tenured/tenure-track award: to recognize the Public Humanities contributions of a tenured or tenure-track UBC-Vancouver faculty member (in research or educational leadership streams) in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.
- Lecturer, sessional, or postdoctoral fellow award: to recognize the Public Humanities contributions of a UBC-Vancouver lecturer, sessional, or postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.
- Graduate student award: to recognize the Public Humanities contributions of a UBC-Vancouver graduate student in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.
- Partner organization award: to recognize the contributions of a partner organization working on a Public Humanities collaborative project with an eligible UBC-Vancouver scholar in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.
Members of the Public Humanities Hub Advisory Board are not eligible to be nominees or nominators. Previous Public Engagement Award winners are not eligible to be nominated.
Public Humanities Hub Public Engagement Award nominations
The Public Humanities Hub recognizes that there are many diverse publics and many diverse humanities methods for engaging these publics. We encourage nominations of individuals a) who employ more traditional forms of engagement, i.e. through print and broadcast media, and/or b) who employ more creative approaches like community partnerships, podcasts, videos, films, exhibitions, festivals and more. We are particularly interested in recognizing scholars whose work has contributed to the expansion of the range of voices in public discourse and who attempt to facilitate reciprocal dialogue with broader publics. For examples from previous years, see https://publichumanities.ubc.ca/funding/public-engagement-award/public-engagement-award-winners-2024/
For the award that recognizes the Public Humanities contributions of a partner organization, we encourage nominations of organizations that have partnered with a UBC-Vancouver Humanities scholar(s) to do public humanities work, broadly conceived. We are particularly interested in recognizing organizations whose work has modelled and encouraged reciprocal forms of knowledge exchange.
Public Humanities Scholarship
- Humanities? The Public Humanities Hub (PHH) supports scholarship across a range of fields of inquiry in Arts, Education and Law; academic work that is located within a diverse set of interpretative and analytical knowledges and critical methods. Humanities and posthumanist, or digital methodologies in academic humanities projects are primarily analytical, critical and speculative and are not typically deployed positivistically to produce empirical data. Humanities methodologies are not usually oriented towards those determinative accounts of cause-effect commonly located in the social sciences. Humanities research typically involves scholarly usage of particular qualitative, interpretive, digital, hermeneutic, exegetic methodologies, including narrative, memoir, genealogy, phenomenology, literary/visual/acoustic analysis, composition, theory, performance, ekphrasis, archivism, animated archives, enhanced critical curation, visualization, cultural analytics, fluid textuality, filmmaking, mapping, poesis and diverse other methods.
- Public Humanities? For the Public Humanities Hub (PHH), public humanities scholarship can refer to humanities research that prioritizes public-facing engagement; research that aims to bring traditional and non-traditional academic research within reach of a broader audience. Alternately, public humanities can refer to scholarly engagement that seeks to reimagine and collaboratively curate and in fact, redistribute, access to the capacity to create knowledge amongst a very broad set of publics, including most particularly, communities historically and persistently marginalized.