PROPOSAL TYPE
Working Group
SEEKING
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
RELATED TOPICS
- Advocacy
- Consulting
- Reflections on the Field
ABSTRACT
As public historians, how might we use our understandings of different time scales to make space for the difficult-to-quantify work of public history? Building on past conversations around labor advocacy and a framework Jenny Odell uses in her book Saving Time, this working group would explore the different timelines historians work within: client- or academy-driven, on the scale of generations or geologic time, responding to crises both urgent and ongoing.
When these timelines conflict, how do we make more time, both at and beyond the individual level? What resources or shifts in our ways of thinking and working will we need to make these changes? This working group would aim to identify strategies to focus future advocacy work.
DESCRIPTION
Goals for this proposal include gauging interest and seeking additional panelists. Panelists would ideally range from emerging to senior public history practitioners.
Also open to potentially narrowing the scope of the working group to focus on consulting and freelance public historians.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Laurel Overstreet, [email protected]
ALL FEEDBACK AND OFFERS OF ASSISTANCE SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY JULY 7, 2023. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.
This is an interesting topic. I would be curious to consider if this is actually two sessions in one? I think discussing the working timelines of being a consulting or freelance public historian and best practices to those working on timelines that are client-driven would be a really rich working group. However, I feel like this session also touches on the urgency of public history in these “unprecedented times” and how as public historians, we could share resources and best practices on how we can move through these times. I would love to see how this is fleshed out.
Thanks for submitting an interesting topic for a working group session. Yes, I would agree that you should narrow your focus in order to invite more participants. I agree that the discussion of consultants/freelance public history work is relevant, but I would suggest defining what urgent message that you would like attendees to consider? Are you discussing how to begin consulting work by inviting emerging professionals as panelists to discuss their success and mistakes? Are you inviting public historians that became consultants either through a job change or life circumstances to discuss their experiences. I know a few of my friends considered consulting work when many museums were downsizing due to the COVID pandemic. I would also research how consultant work has impacted the public history field and has it been sustainable?
Best to you on planning your session.
the title of the proposed group read to me like a bit of an anti-capitalist, slow work to ensure folks are here to do the long work, with rest and shared labor (ie: how do we make space for laborers/ourselves to do the work), but the session description reads differently to me (ie: how can we work more efficiently? how can we rearrange to get more work done?). I think both/either would make for a good working group–and neither may have been what you meant? Or you’re really getting at the tension between these two things?–which would also be compelling, but I can see that it is difficult to write!
If you’re thinking more of the first or combination/last idea here, those are things I might be interested in working with you on. If you aren’t thinking of any of that, that’s ok & I hope this comment doesn’t further muddy the waters. Regardless, you’re on to something here, I think. It is just a matter of teasing it out more clearly, something I definitely empathize with
Kristen, the tension between the two areas you named is a lot of what I was getting at, and the reason I had trouble focusing the proposal (as Sierra and Marian also pointed out). In talking with some other interested panelists, I think we’re going in the direction of a roundtable discussion looking at the different timeframes public historians work under in their various roles and how they balance them.
I’d love to hear more about your own thoughts on the topic, if you’re still interested!
This idea is an important one, Laurel. Several of us in the working group that met to discuss ethics in 2018 and 2019 were interested in these discussions related to labor and the type of work public historians do and how it is valued (or not) in society as a form of paid labor, so you might reach out to the people who were members of that group (“Economic Justice and the Ethics of Public History,” which met in 2018 and 2019).
Hi Laurel, this is a really great idea for a working group. I think the group might benefit from incorporating a disability justice perspective. (See the concept of “crip time,” for example: https://www.firstpost.com/living/the-value-of-crip-time-discarding-notions-of-productivity-and-guilt-to-listen-to-the-rhythms-of-our-bodies-8440551.html/amp and https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684.)
I would suggest getting in touch with Nicole Belolan. She might be able to offer you some additional suggestions for participants or ideas. You can also reach out to me directly if you’d like to discuss further!