{"id":14626,"date":"2026-01-27T20:31:03","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T02:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/c21\/?p=14626"},"modified":"2026-03-27T17:28:50","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T22:28:50","slug":"slow-digest-minding-the-humanities-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/c21\/slow-digest-minding-the-humanities-gap\/","title":{"rendered":"Slow Digest: Minding the Humanities Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week\u2019s edition of <\/em>Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee Pritchard<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTHE GAP BETWEEN THIS ROOM & THE COMMUNITY IS TOO BIG,\u201d wrote one audience member during the State of the Humanities MKE panel discussion. The comment, submitted anonymously after the discussion, landed with quiet force. It named something many in the room were already feeling but had not yet said aloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The panel discussion, titled \u201cState of the Humanities in MKE,\u201d brought together leaders from humanities programs across the city. Yet despite its focus on Milwaukee, the panelists did not reflect the full makeup of the city itself. All identified as white, with the exception of C21 director Jennifer Johung, and all were heads of humanities programs within academic institutions. What was notably absent were community members, artists, organizers, cultural workers, and educators, whose humanistic labor often unfolds beyond university walls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This observation is not offered as criticism of the panel\u2019s organizers, but rather as a reflection of a broader and recurring pattern. Academic institutions too often position themselves as the primary, sometimes exclusive, sites of humanistic knowledge. The question implicit in the audience comment lingers uncomfortably: Is it institutional habit, or hubris, that leads universities to imagine themselves as the sole stewards of the humanities in a city already rich with cultural life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it institutional habit, or hubris, that leads universities to imagine themselves as the sole stewards of the humanities in a city already rich with cultural life?<\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Audience questions made this tension explicit. One participant asked, \u201cHow might we combat intellectualism while acknowledging (or balancing) how humanities exists within and outside classrooms? What do we do about previous university \u2018ownership\u2019 and \u2018gatekeeping\u2019 of the humanities?\u201d Another followed with a related concern: \u201cHow can we combine these ideas of reciprocal research and partnering with MKE\u2019s creative communities?\u201d These are not abstract provocations; they are grounded, local questions, rooted in lived experience and longstanding relationships to the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the panel named the stakes of the moment, the breakout rooms, surveys, and audience questions revealed its fault lines. Across conversations, a shared theme emerged. People are not rejecting the humanities themselves; they are rejecting the systems that currently contain, define, and gatekeep them. Feedback and conversation with audience members suggest that the humanities are alive and necessary but misaligned with the realities of people\u2019s lives, labor, and communities. The gap between the humanities of higher education and the humanities of the city remains wide and increasingly visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Panelists described the humanities as essential to survival \u2013 intellectually, emotionally, and culturally \u2013 and breakout participants largely agreed. Yet many also named a growing disconnect between this expansive vision and how the humanities are often experienced within institutional settings. Graduate students and junior scholars, in particular, spoke about the pressure to \u201cprove\u201d the value of humanities disciplines to increasingly skeptical students, often through metrics and outcomes that feel ill-suited to humanistic work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What students are resisting, many argued, is not the humanities themselves, but institutional versions of them that feel abstracted from lived experience. When the humanities become overly professionalized, jargon-heavy, or inward-facing, they lose the joy, curiosity, and relational meaning that draw people to them in the first place. Across roles and positions, breakout room participants returned to a shared conviction: joy, not crisis rhetoric, sustains humanistic work. Meaning, storytelling, connection, and imagination remain the humanities\u2019 strongest arguments and their most generative bridges to community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Community partnerships or extraction?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collaboration was widely celebrated, but not uncritically. Panelists emphasized coalition-building with Milwaukee\u2019s nonprofits, arts spaces, and K-12 educators, often describing the city as already rich with cultural \u201cpollinators.\u201d C21 Director Jennifer Johung extended this framing through a metaphor she attributed to former Milwaukee Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton<\/a>, suggesting that rather than competing with existing cultural work, institutions might focus on \u201cpollinating the pollinators\u201d by listening first, sharing information and resources, and supporting the grassroots collective organizing already underway across the city. Her reflection gestured toward a model of engagement grounded less in institutional ownership and more in relational support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breakout participants largely welcomed this vision, while also insisting that metaphors alone are insufficient. Pollination, they argued, cannot simply mean symbolic inclusion or rhetorical alignment. It must involve a redistribution of power, credit, and material resources. Without those structural commitments, even well-intentioned collaborations risk reproducing a familiar pattern of extraction reframed as partnership under the language of care. Participants asked difficult but necessary questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n