Publicly engaged humanities leverage the power of UCLA to meet our community’s needs. They help the university, too.

David D. Kim | September 23, 2024

David D. Kim is a professor of European languages and transcultural studies, associate vice provost of the UCLA International Institute and the inaugural community engagement advisor for the Division of Humanities. His newest book, “Arendt’s Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World” will be published next month by Stanford University Press.

You have read the headlines and analyses: A growing segment of society around the globe is losing trust in democratic institutions — universities, museums, school libraries, governments and news organizations.

This erosion of trust is the price that consumers have had to pay for being complacent about the online echo chambers created by clickbaiting social media. These platforms are divisive, and they offer a false sense of reality, an enormous societal challenge apparent again during the current presidential election campaign.

At this critical moment, UCLA researchers have a renewed responsibility to equip students with knowledge and skills for active citizenship. Community engaged scholarship can play a leading role in fulfilling that educational mission.

Community engaged research can take many forms: participatory action research, public advocacy, volunteerism, social activism and experiential learning. And at UCLA, humanists, in particular, are collaborating with community partners locally and globally to inspire students toward lifelong civic engagement.

Through community engaged research and teaching, humanists are leveraging the power of UCLA to have a transformative impact on communities with real interests or needs. Attuned to humanity’s wondrous diversity and need for social justice, faculty and students in our division collaborate with external partners to promote the study of foreign languages in nearby K-12 schools, to develop empathy for forcibly displaced refugees or to revitalize civil society in a way that only cultural institutions can.

Like the challenges, the possibilities and rewards are many.

I am honored to have been appointed by Dean Alexandra Minna Stern to support these efforts as the inaugural community engagement advisor for the Humanities Division. Other UCLA academic units have equally designated community engagement advisors, and the newly constituted Community Engagement Advisors Network will promote creative and critical community-based activities across the campus. That network is co-led by Professor Michelle Caswell, special advisor to the executive vice chancellor and provost on community engaged scholarship, and Shalom Staub, assistant dean and executive director of the Center for Community Engagement.

In my role as the Humanities’ community engagement advisor, I have three major goals:

• Create opportunities for colleagues and students to network and enhance community engaged work.
• Showcase the exciting work of community engaged faculty and students through various public-facing channels, including the Humanities Division website.
• Collaborate with faculty, department chairs, Dean Stern, Professor Caswell and Assistant Dean Staub to advance an equitable evaluation of community engaged scholarship and creative activity in academic personnel review.

Bolstering our community engaged research and teaching will address two of the primary objectives of UCLA’s new strategic plan. In support of Goal 1, deepening our engagement with Los Angeles, the Humanities Division will strengthen its ties with the Center for Community Engagement. Publicly engaged humanists can also apply for new funding to enhance their community engaged research and teaching, or to strengthen their department’s capacity for community engaged activities.

And Goal 2, expanding our reach as a global university, calls upon us to imagine the work we do, including community engagement, at an international level. Community engaged research and teaching in the humanities address worldwide, complex issues such as climate change and international migration, alongside problems specific to Los Angeles, California or the United States.

My own work includes this sort of global community engagement — for example, with the Thomas Mann House and the Austrian Exile Library. These partnerships create open, respectful dialogues about urgent transatlantic issues among UCLA faculty and students and local communities, as well as European activists, academics, archivists and journalists.

An essential component for community engagement is sustained reciprocity. Cross-sector partnerships between institutions of higher education and non-academic organizations require humility, accountability, a whole lot of communication and a careful coordination of finite resources for knowledge production and problem-solving. They thrive on encounters that build trust among all stakeholders.

To name just two recent examples in the Humanities Division:

• Professor Marissa López curated an exhibition called “Layered Lands” that drew materials from the UCLA and Los Angeles Public Library archives to shed light on how Los Angeles was shaped by a history of land struggles and colonial violence — from its Indigenous roots through Spanish, Mexican and U.S. rule.
• Professor Maite Zubiaurre collaborated with another UCLA professor, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, to produce an acclaimed film called “Aguilas.” The documentary brought attention to the plight of migrants along the U.S.–Mexico border by focusing on Aguilas del Desierto, a nonprofit that sent volunteers into the Arizona desert to find missing migrants and recover the bodies of those who had perished.

By engaging with communities in equitable, scholarly informed and inclusive ways, we can work together to overcome moments of political crisis, to restore the public’s trust in higher education and to fulfill our educational mission as a public research university “for the betterment of our global society.”

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