Practising Public Scholarship || Philadelphia Dreaming: Discovering Citizenship between the University and the Schools
✍ Scribed by Mitchell, Katharyne
- Publisher
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Year
- 2008
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 148 KB
- Edition
- 1
- Category
- Article
- ISBN
- 1405189126
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
My twin sister Ellen and I were born in Philadelphia in 1963. "Philadelphia" means love of those who come from the same womb (delph-). Translated as "brotherly love", Philadelphia, like its Latinate cousin "fraternity", renders political friendship in familial terms. My early career as a psychoanalytic critic focused in part on the psychic pleasures and costs of philadelphia (as incest and fratricide). At mid career, largely due to my work with public schools, my interests turned to philadelphia as citizenship, but without relinquishing the affective and erotic lining of the word. Along the way, I gave birth to four children, including triplets, who daily test the frontiers of philadelphia in everything they do. In a variety of scenes both strictly academic and more experimental and domestic, I am in search of ways to zone and rezone philadelphia for my students, my readers, my family, and myself.
By far the most transformative public work in my academic life was the founding of Humanities Out There (HOT), an educational partnership between the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine and a local, largely Latino school district in nearby Santa Ana. In the spring of 1997, I was enjoying the first fruits of tenure and the challenges of new motherhood. When I received a lunch invitation from my Dean and my Associate Dean, I had no idea that my professional life was about to change forever. Over soup and salad, the deans asked me to organize outreach efforts for the School of Humanities. A few weeks later, I found myself launching HOT. With the support of our next dean and several visionaries on campus and off, the program has survived sea changes in state funding and outreach nomenclature in order to become a model for university-community engagement at UCI and across the nation. During 10 years of this work with schools, I found myself alternately challenged, exhilarated and exhausted, but the final impact has been a genuine change in every aspect of my professional life, from my writing and teaching styles (clearer, more direct, more grounded), to my vision