In 2021, C21 stopped to ask: what is a book? As an interdisciplinary humanities center in a public university system, we are engaging with 21st-century issues of widespread public concern more directly as they arise and foregrounding knowledge production as transparent and collaborative. This has changed our publication framework to encourage and support ongoing scholarly and community-engaged work across digital formats, and through a variety of media. Through this approach, we are sustaining, connecting, and expanding upon ideas over a longer timeframe and across multiple spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We aim to complicate the two-way dynamic between academic and community-based forms of knowledge production and challenge the assumptions we might have about how ideas flow easily or linearly between the university and its neighbors. Instead, we seek to explore how knowledge production is horizontal, with concepts, systems, and embodied experiences cross-pollinating each other across varied disciplines, histories, and lived experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n