EMORY MAGAZINE | WINTER 2024
SHARING THE PATH
TO KNOWLEDGE
From embracing the art of storytelling to practicing acts of “radical hospitality,” Emory’s Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement seeks to make research and academic ideas accessible to everyone.
By Daniel Christian. Illustrated by Davide Bonazzi
In a nondescript classroom at the Burruss Correctional Training Center — a state prison about an hour south of Emory’s campus — the ancient Greek practice of xenia is alive and well, as is the practice of public scholarship.
The two go hand-in-hand, says Sarah Higinbotham, assistant professor of English at Emory’s Oxford College.
Xenia, or “guest friendship,” was a custom for welcoming strangers, an ethical obligation to hospitality premised on the idea of exchange. The host would provide food, shelter and provisions for the journey ahead; the stranger, perhaps now warmed by the fire of an ancient mudbrick home, would share under lambent glow the travel-worn stories of their origin, struggle and destination — and receive the story of the host in return.
In a similar spirit, Higinbotham creates a space to listen to the stories of her students, both in her Emory classroom and at Burruss, one of the nine Georgia prisons offering higher education courses through Common Good Atlanta, a nonprofit she co-founded.
She then shares her own stories — those of Shakespeare and John Milton. Here, knowledge sets forth on paths both well-worn and unexplored, branching into directions unexpected and profound. As much as Higinbotham teaches, she learns. To her, that is public scholarship.
EMORY’S COMMITMENT TO PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
In spring 2024, Emory launched the Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement, joining a growing list of universities that have committed to sharing research beyond the walls of the institution. The center, based at the Oxford campus, creates opportunities for Emory faculty, staff and students to share their research and ideas with people all over the world.
Kenneth Carter, the center’s founding director and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology, believes that Emory can be a leader in this space — and that in many ways it already is.
But what exactly does that nebulous term “public scholarship” mean?
Carter defines it as “anything we’re doing that communicates our scholarly work to the general public” — whether that’s through community programs or media engagements such as podcasts and op-eds. It’s also when academics leverage the power of storytelling to support their research.
Beyond that, Carter says public scholarship is about maintaining — and even improving — the relationship between universities and the public. “The information that gets translated in public scholarship is important, but I also think it’s critical for the public to see institutions like universities as trusted sources of knowledge.”
Toward that goal, Carter says a priority for the Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement is making research and academic concepts more accessible to everyone.
“It’s always been a passion of mine to release the knowledge from academic books and journals, because that knowledge really belongs to all of us,” he says. “A lot of people think that universities are these walled-off ivory towers, inaccessible physically and intellectually. Sharing that knowledge is a part of what we're supposed to be doing. It’s that idea of ‘in service to humanity.’”
The first-ever Ideas Festival Emory — the center’s flagship event — took place in September on the Oxford campus and brought this very concept to life. The festival’s programming was robust, featuring a high-powered lineup of more than 40 scientists, authors, musicians, filmmakers and scholars from Emory and beyond in conversation with one another. (A recap of some of the festival’s biggest ideas can be found on page 30.)
Free to students and the public, the event welcomed all to join.
“I wanted to create something that was open to the community,” Carter says. “I want people to be able to revel in the ideas and walk on campus and see a great talk by an award-winning person — and to not only be inspired but be proud of the great stuff that’s happening at Emory.”
The keynote event was a live recording of the Sing for Science podcast — which pairs musicians with researchers to discuss the intersections of their work — that featured Grammy-winning producer, hip-hop artist and Atlanta native Jermaine Dupri with Joycelyn Wilson, a Georgia Tech professor of hip-hop studies and digital humanities.
Dupri, perhaps best known for his 2002 hit single with Ludacris “Welcome to Atlanta,” also announced an internship opportunity for two Emory students at his record label, So So Def Recordings. Applications were open to all four undergraduate schools and selected interns will begin work with Dupri in early 2025.
The Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement has also partnered with two major university programs — Oxford’s Center for Pathways and Purpose and the Emory Pathways Center on the Atlanta campus — to create internships associated with future speakers at the festival.
“We’ve been hearing from other universities, and they’re excited about what we’re doing,” Carter says. “We did not invent public scholarship and we’re not the only ones doing public scholarship. But we're hoping to be able to elevate [our commitment to it] through programs like the Ideas Festival.”
CULTIVATING A TWO-WAY RELATIONSHIP
Much like Higinbotham, Carter emphasizes the importance of a “two-way” relationship when it comes to public scholarship. That relationship can extend to schools, communities in need, or larger industries, but it is always based on listening. “It’s really important to not only learn from the public, but also to understand what’s important to them,” he says. “What is the knowledge they have that they’d like to share in the public sphere as well?”
Asking those questions can help tear down the walls of that proverbial ivory tower, Higinbotham says. “That had to crumble,” she says. “This idea that somehow you go to college and everything you learn is inapplicable to the real world — that couldn’t be further from the truth. The things that we’re doing at Oxford and Emory have enormous impact on the world outside the walls of our actual university.”
Motivated by the incarceration of her uncle, Higinbotham started Common Good Atlanta in 2008. The organization now teaches courses in literature, writing, the humanities and math and science in nine prisons, five days a week. At the Ideas Festival, she gave a presentation on how offering higher education courses at prisons can make a huge impact and drastically reduce the incarceration recidivism rate.
Higinbotham’s expertise is in Renaissance literature, particularly the violence of the law in Shakespeare. She is well aware of the distancing effect — the air of stodgy academic tradition — that the Renaissance or the classics can evoke.
The great paradox, she says, is that the idea of the ivory tower can be dismantled with lessons from the subjects most associated with its construction, like xenia. She has used Renaissance literature to build bridges with communities, such as the incarcerated, that don’t have the resources to participate in American higher education.
For Higinbotham, public scholarship starts there — not behind a podcast mic or at the sight of a blinking cursor that precedes an op-ed, though she does those too. Traditional media offer important avenues for original storytelling and sharing information, she says, but the potential of public scholarship is most realized when it involves human-to-human connection.
She goes back to xenia — and the idea that public scholarship is an act of “radical hospitality.”
“As a professor, that is what I should be modeling,” Higinbotham says. “In terms of public scholarship, it means that I’m not limiting what I’m doing to a certain subset of students who have met certain criteria. We have an obligation, just as they had in the ancient world, to say, ‘Let me open my doors. What is it that I have that you need? What can I do to equip you for the next stage of your journey, wherever that’s going to be?’”
She invites them to bring their experiences to the table, quoting the swineherd in “The Odyssey” who invites a bedraggled Odysseus into his island hovel.
“Tell me where you come from, and the troubles you have seen,” the swineherd says.
When such a table is set, Higinbotham says her incarcerated students respond in ways that leave her “dumbstruck.” She has even developed new perspectives on her own work.
“The text will suddenly explode with a completely original interpretation,” she says. “Sometimes [an incarcerated student] will say something that, in 400 years of Shakespeare criticism, I’ve never seen that lens on this moment before.”
Higinbotham recalls a reading one student had of a baffling few lines in “Hamlet.”
Late in act 5, Hamlet apologizes to Laertes for killing his father. But in the middle of his speech, Hamlet switches to third person:
Was ’t Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness. If ’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy
“That part is cut from every [live] play of ‘Hamlet’ I've ever seen,” Higinbotham says. “Because it’s just so weird that he stops apologizing and starts talking about himself in the third person.”
But her incarcerated student seemed to understand, from personal experience, that reckoning with one’s own wrongdoing is easier said than done — and that the text conveys more than Hamlet’s derangement.
“He said, ‘Sometimes that’s all you can do. You have to disassociate in order to be able to get up in the morning in prison. You have to disassociate from what you did, the harm that you caused.’”
The moment was so powerful that it informed Higinbotham’s own scholarship and the way she teaches Shakespeare at Emory.
“Suddenly, a ‘problem’ passage that every director pulls out, and that I had always just skimmed over, made sense,” she says. “Shakespeare must have known that there are points at which, even in the middle of an apology to someone that you have harmed, you have to think, ‘That couldn’t have been me.’ And I get emotional talking about it.”
The inaugural Ideas Festival Emory — hosted by the Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement — was chock-full of insights from more than 40 scientists, scholars, musicians, filmmakers and other creative minds who came together to share their work with the public this fall. Set on the Oxford College campus and free of charge to all, the festival featured discussions, storytelling and performances dealing with important topics of our time. Center Director Kenneth Carter described the event as a “buffet” of public scholarship.
DEPLOYING DIVERSE APPROACHES TO PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Scholars across Emory are engaging in public scholarship over all sorts of platforms and in ways big and small. Laurel Bristow, associate director of audience development at the Rollins School of Public Health, helped conduct clinical trials and interacted directly with patients on hospital frontlines after COVID-19 struck in 2020. A year later, she started creating Instagram videos to share evidence-based information and resources during the height of the pandemic. In no time, her account became a social media sensation, a reliable resource in a media space swirling with conflicting reports. She has amassed more than 380,000 followers to date.
“I was uniquely suited to be able to understand complex research that was coming out at the time at rapid speed,” Bristow says. “I found comfort in my understanding and wanted others to be able to feel the same way and make informed decisions that are best for them and their families, instead of feeling overwhelmed and panicked.”
Bristow continues to be a trusted source of information as the host of a new weekly podcast called “Health Wanted” — a partnership between Atlanta public radio station WABE and Rollins — where she answers public health questions that affect listeners’ everyday lives.
“If science education during the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that people really want to understand the world around them and have the tools to be able to spot when they are being given bad information,” she says.
In Emory’s political science department, Andra Gillespie has helped contextualize the ever-changing political landscape of the United States in the public sphere for years. Her research explores the mobilization of voters, race and political leadership in the post–civil rights generation.
With an expertise in such an impactful field, Gillespie — who serves as an associate professor and director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute — wants to share her knowledge. Each election season she makes the media rounds in print, radio and TV to talk about information and perspectives that could prove helpful to voters. She’s written op-eds for Politico and the Washington Post, has been quoted in major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on news programs with CNN, Bloomberg Television, PBS and numerous international outlets.
“I see public scholarship as an extension of teaching,” she says. “While it is important to conduct and share research with colleagues who can provide critical feedback, it is also important to distill that knowledge for wider audiences. Our wider audience is first and foremost our students, but it is also important to consider the broader community in our understanding of who is a part of our classroom.”
Gillespie found herself in great demand with local and national media in the weeks leading up to the 2024 presidential election, providing her insights on the process to millions. She also was a key participant at the Ideas Festival Emory, where she spoke about “fake news” and how individuals are more likely to believe stories that align with their own preexisting beliefs.
For her, these forays into public scholarship are significant because they enrich political dialogue and educate voters. “By effectively communicating the latest findings in my field and showing how they help us interpret political phenomena in real time, I hope I’m helping to elevate the conversation and give people the tools they need to be informed citizens who can help preserve American institutions and feel confident in holding elected and appointed leaders accountable in appropriate ways,” she says.
Meanwhile, Justin Burton, associate professor of physics, is engaged in public scholarship for audiences of all ages, including a speech at the Ideas Festival on how his lab is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve science mysteries.
He’s also inspiring K-12 students to ask questions about how the world works. In 2019, on a whim of scientific curiosity, Burton and his team began researching the elemental makeup of bubbles. How do bubbles maintain their form, often “thinner than a human hair,” while expanding in size — sometimes bigger than a car, if you find the right street performer.
The answer was polymers, “a long chain of goopy molecules that you can put in a solution to give it some stretch and prevent the film from breaking.” Burton shared the research on several kids’ TV programs and podcasts and was interviewed by the BBC. The project was a light-hearted demonstration of how science can be used to answer questions — a skill the next generation will need to cultivate in the years ahead, he says.
“Kids are going to have to deal with so many problems that have to do with science, from climate change to AI, and the sooner that we can get them interested and get them to ask questions, the better,” Burton says. “I just want kids to follow their own curiosity.”
Recently, he’s been working with fourth- and fifth-graders in a DeKalb County elementary school science club. There he’s been using his Emory research on glaciers and climate change as a jumping-off point for activities. At their next meeting, they’ll be crafting “flubber glaciers.”
“We’re building glaciers out of slime,” he says. “We’re going to watch them roll downhill, just like they do in Antarctica over hundreds of years, and they’re going to track the motion using a stopwatch.”
DEVELOPING SKILLS AND COLLABORATING LOCALLY
The Center for Public Scholarship and Engagement has more on the horizon as Emory continues to position itself as a leader in the field, Carter says. This May, it will host its first Public Scholarship Academy, a four-day workshop for academics focused on developing skills in public scholarship.
For its inaugural gathering, the academy is partnering with the Alan Alda Center for Science Communication at Stonybrook University to develop a custom program on scholarly storytelling. Several journalists will also discuss how scholars can build relationships with the media. And there will be a full day focused on podcasting, as well as training on how to write op-eds and participate in TV interviews.
“We’re creating this pipeline of academics who can learn how to be great public scholars at the academy and who we then may be able to showcase at the Ideas Festival,” Carter says.
The academy will also feature a session with Atlanta-based improv group Dad’s Garage. “So much of improv is releasing storytelling,” Carter adds. The idea was initially inspired by the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, which has its own Public Scholarship Institute and has used the group in past programs.
Prior to heading up the center, Carter earned a reputation as an effective storyteller himself. He shared his research on the psychology of thrill-seeking across many platforms, from museum exhibits and TED Talks to news programs and podcasts. Through these experiences, he learned the importance of forming a connection with his audience and being honest about his own connection to the material.
“There’s an expression in academia that research is me-search,” Carter says. “There are things that academics are trying to find out about themselves, or the world, through their research. They are often inspired to do that because of a personal connection.”
Carter recalls a moment writing his book, “Buzz: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies,” when this perspective began to crystallize. “I had the draft done, and my editor read it and said, ‘This is really interesting, but there’s not a lot of you.’ And I thought, ‘Why should there be?’ But he said people want to know: ‘What is my connection? Why is this important to me?’ That can draw people in.”
To help share these stories of scholarship, the center is launching the Ideas Festival Emory Podcast this January. The program will expand on many of the conversations from the 2024 festival and build excitement for the 2025 event.
The inclusion of the Dad’s Garage improv troupe in the academy is indicative of the kind of partnerships the center wants to foster — especially with the local entertainment industry.
“Georgia is a perfect place for this,” Carter says. “The entertainment industry is a storytelling industry. We can learn from them about the importance of storytelling and how to tell the stories of our scholarship. My goal is to engage in those partnerships in strategic ways, so that in five years we have a sustainable, exciting, viable and well-known festival and academy.”
The partnerships, though, need to continue to center the public and reflect Higinbotham’s ideas of “radical hospitality,” Carter says. That’s why, in the lead-up to the Ideas Festival, he met with local librarians who interact with and program for the public every day.
Higinbotham agrees that engaging local communities — especially those “who have been excluded from having a life of the mind” — is where public scholarship can have the most impact, recalling an idea from Bryan Stevenson, author of the 2015 New York Times bestseller “Just Mercy” and 2020 Emory Commencement speaker.
“Stevenson says there is power in proximity, and the only way to solve our social problems is through proximity,” Higinbotham says. “I think fostering proximity is an ideal application of public scholarship.”
Photography by Kay Hinton, Suban Dey, Bryan Meltz and courtesy of Common Good Atlanta, Sarah Higinbotham.
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