One year ago today, we hosted an afternoon tea for 120 humanities scholars, staff, and community partners to celebrate the Public Humanities Hub’s first year at UBC Vancouver. As we sat with one another, enjoyed hors d’oeuvres, and shared ideas about potential collaborations for the upcoming year, we didn’t realize that in just one week, UBC would be transitioning to online classes and encouraging faculty and staff to work remotely due to concerns about the new coronavirus we had been hearing about.
The Hub, like many of our colleagues, had to make changes to our programming. Upcoming talks and a four-day Digital Humanities conference would now have to be reconfigured for a virtual format. We are thankful to have been able to maintain and build new connections with colleagues and the broader community online, and also acknowledge the challenges that resulted from the new reality, the halted plans, the losses.
Before we left Sage Bistro that afternoon, we asked attendees to write something down on a small piece of paper embedded with wildflower seeds: What does your ideal partnership project look like? We collected your ideas so that our community’s feedback could inform the Hub’s growth and programming. We envisioned planting the seed papers on campus and watching the flowers grow, a visualization of all the ideas that our conversations that afternoon had planted.
Like seeds that remain dormant in unfavourable conditions, many of our plans had to be put on hold due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, with mass immunization (faintly) on the horizon, we are thinking of ways to re-learn how to carry out our mission to support collaborative, public-facing humanities research and scholarship in person: to INCUBATE, COLLABORATE, COMMUNICATE, and ADVOCATE. We remain committed to using our resources to support UBC humanities scholars and knowledge exchange between scholars and the wider community.
Can we assist with bringing your humanities project to fruition? Please get in touch.
Photos by Oliver Mann.