NCPH Working Group: Ethics & Economic Justice (Case Statement: Guild, Econ. Models)
Jess Lamar Reece Holler — Caledonia Northern Folk Studios
oldelectricity at gmail dot com || caledonianorthern.org || @oldelectricity

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A sustainable, just future for public history (and allied cultural work) means bravely navigating  questions of ethics, economic justice and equity around two poles: equity and economic justice for and with the communities we serve and collaborate with; and second, equity an d economic justice for   public historians. Ideally, the solutions we forge may trouble even that polarity, amplifying and making sustainable the expertise of community scholars and partners (ranging from the non-profits we collaborate with on applied projects, to our narrators in oral history efforts, & beyond) and integrating  the work of public history into community efforts. This vision reflects a participatory community organizing model known as “collective impact” — something I myself learned about from non-historian community organizer collaborators (thanks, Whitney and Johnnie!) on a community-based public   history project! Who woulda thunk: unconventional collaborations generate new knowledge, alternative economies, and translatable methods!

Within communities, we need to get beyond models of trying to protect, save, grow, finance and fortify public history institutions in a vacuum. Most non-profit cultural and humanities organizations are struggling for funding; but that doesn’t mean that relationships between institutions, sites and venues of practice need be competitive or hunkered down in a scarcity model. There are models for transformative, community-involved public history practice that suggest collaborative, rhizomatic alternatives — sharing staff, resources, projects and working in partnership. In my own public history, public folklife and oral history consultancy, I partner with existing history (and even non-humanities) organizations to build out community-collaborative “public history for social change” projects. This work often involves creating partnerships with other organizations and institutions, and even collaborative grant-writing efforts. Our newest project, the Marion Voices Oral History Project, in partnership with the Marion County Historical Society, is a collaboration across ten institutions!

Instead of fundraising just for MCHS, our grant proposals include lines to support community scholar representatives from those partner organizations (from libraries to churches to high schools to a local nature center; and better-endowed partner organizations (the county extension office, the radio station, public library) have  volunteered space, snacks, in-kind support, equipment, and the donation of their  own salaried staff time. Oral historian and activist Danielle Dulken has also spearheaded awareness around the importance of paying oral history narrators (OHA 2018; publication forthcoming), in recognition both of the labor of storywork and the disproportionate and not-always-acknowledged benefits that collected oral histories of vulnerable narrators, in particular,  accrue  to  powerful institutions seeking to diversify their collections and change their image. These efforts go had-in hand. Yes — when there are dozens of community partners at the table, and everyone from the local pastor to the barber who is interviewed are getting a piece of the pie, there’s definitely more to fundraise; but so much more can happen when these collaboratives form and take not only the spirit but the structure of the collaborative seriously, and help make it a job (which is already is) for everyone involved — not just for salaried, FT staff-line public historians coming from powerful institutions.

For this work, it’s actually important that we displace the notion of their being a singular, expert public historian, and recognize, in practice, what we  talk about all the time in this field: the real and radical  local expertise of our community partners. That might seem contrary to other goals of our Working Group, at first — indeed, trust me, the second part of this statement is dedicated to questions of living wages for public history professionals! — but we can move past the fear that materially and practically sharing authority somehow diminishes the professional salience or livability of our own work, and look, instead, to collaborative models of abundance. We don’t suffer from this problem as much as some fields — my other public humanities field, for example, public folklore, has a peculiar infrastructural history handed down from incredible activism and advocacy work by Bess Lomax Hawes and others, of one “state” folklorist in each state, ensconced in a funded line at either the state arts or humanities council.

While this model was a remarkable innovation that brought dynamic, talented folklorists to positions of state power, with funding to do great work, and has produced a booing field of state folklife and folk    arts programs, I also wonder how much a single site of power or practice serves communities. — or the profession. In practice, of course, there are many folklorists in each state (and some states, some forty- odd years after the launch of the first state programs, have many — like New York; and some, like Ohio, have none. (What does it mean if you’re a cultural worker in a state, and not the “state” folklorist? I’m glad, in some ways, that public history already has a more dispersed and networked model.)

But what, even in our field, as we (especially, perhaps, emerging professionals!) might it look like to imagine, instead, not a job for one person, but a dispersed, regional network of public historians or cultural workers, tackling projects in small, networked localities, but partnering together for larger recommendations, advocacy and insight? I draw inspiration from one such model close to home — the Ohio History Connections’ Local History Office, and Ohio Local History Alliance, which runs an Ohio History Service Corps AmeriCorps program, under the direction of Amy Rohmiller, which serves not itself (i.e., the central-ish, well-funded, Columbus-based state historical institution) but   multiple participating local history organizations within the state, who could use paid, professional public historian, but might not be able to independently put up a line to hire them. Each filed member serves      a primary institution they’re partnered with, but as a part of their term of service, is also “shared”      across one or several other institutions within a several-county region, who don’t have the benefit of a full-time OHC Americorps volunteer member. What would it look like for public history work in communities to follow such a dispersed, rhizomatic model, instead of seeking to consolidate power in a single place, perch, or position? And what might it look like if such cooperative models aimed to serve not just public historians and history audiences, but the wider community, not only in league with but direct symbiosis with other sorts of public service organizations. Thus, we could ask: what would it look like to ‘turn again,’ from solidifying and bolstering up our own field and fortifying institutions, to building networks, and making our public history institutions (whatever form they take) porous to the bridgework, and the “edgework,” that permaculturalists and others always find the most fruitful and resilient?

For practitioners, one key issue we face in the field — and especially emerging, first-generation, queer, indigenous, of-color, immigrant, working-class, disabled and other historically marginalized  practitioners — is how to make our work livable. Like, really. In an era of unpaid internships (no more    at NCPH, though — thanks, y’all!) and unlisted salary levels in job postings, public history work is    rarely sustainable except at a few highly privileged institutions. A survey I conducted in 2017 indicated that even senior practitioners sometimes don’t feel they make enough to live, or experience precarity in their public history work lives. Many of us have forged entrepreneurial and collective models of making this work happen, but may rely on soft-money funds from particular grants or projects to sustain our livelihoods. Even then, there’s often pressure (for grant-funded public history work, at least) to pitch wages as low as possible (or, every non-profit/local historical society’s favorite line: let’s just use student/ retired volunteer labor!) to make a grant competitive. Conditions in the field aren’t going to change unless we work together — after all, why would a museum pay a collection manager $20 an hour when they’re sure they could get someone fresh out of graduate school who would be willing to work for less? Our field, like many, is built, in practice, on informal  and  unacknowledged  scabbing.  There  are alternatives.

I’ve been inspired, on this front, by the work of the Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) collective — a New York-based arts activism group founded in 2008, looking to set standards to raise wages for working artists across all sectors of the industry. Functioning as a union without a union (or a dispersed union, you might say), W.A.G.E. has compiled a standardized list of baseline rates for galleries, museums and other venues dealing with artists and exhibiting their work; and has then developed an economic/labor justice certification program by which museums can enroll, signal their participation in the W.A.G.E.  baseline rates, and gain traction by being, basically, a hip-and-with-   it institution which supports practices that help create living wages for artists. Conversely, museums   and galleries which are not (or not yet) W.A.G.E. certified leave themselves open to question, boycott by professional associations, and boycotts by individual artists, who may refuse to exhibit or collaborate with the institutions, in solidarity with fair wages for all artists across the field. Moreover, in Fall 2008, W.A.G.E. launched a digital “transactional” platform, WAGENCY, to enable non-unionized artists to organize, navigate pay with institutions, and to give open access to “digital tools and the necessary collective agency to negotiate W.A.G.E. fees or withhold content when not paid them.” WAGENCY, the collective writes, “… is how we propose to organize an unpaid workforce in an unregulated field.” Now take a second — a real second — and imagine this; but for us.

While this model may, at first blush, seem difficult to replicate in the public history world, artists and public historians actually have  alot in common — we  work across a range of genres in a range of   settings and contexts, with a wide variety of methods, tools, specialties, in dispersed settings; and we   ain’t got a union. So, for those worried that it may be impossible to translate, I offer — if W.A.G.E. could come up with sets of rates that work for and account for the differences in practices of painters, filmmakers, performance artists, glass-blowers, sculptors, and beyond (presumably in consultation with those artists), and platforms to ensure “those who contract [artists’] labor” pay those wages, I believe we can come up with a set of baseline field-standard rates that include lines for archivists, collections managers, museum educators, living history interpreters, community engagement specialists, oral historians, historic preservationists, and more. Such a field-wide “rates sheet” wouldn’t have to be exhaustive, and certainly, employers and granting agencies would be free to fund above those rates; the document would largely exist to set a “least-acceptable” baseline rate for our work, across the field; which could be included as an appendix or logo in grant applications or job applications, so that negotiations won’t fall on precarious funding-seekers, but could be backed by our wider field. If NCPH and AASLH could develop a mechanism to adopt and publicly support such a baseline wage set, and promote/public lists of our version of W.A.G.E.-compliant institutions, as well as our public history   grant programs, and major museums and institutions across the field, we’d get along way towards transforming the field. That’s the future for public history (and public humanities and allied cultural  work write large) that I want to see in the world.

I know the question I’m going to get is — but, Jess, wouldn’t such a thing as a baseline rates sheet for public history work become especially onerous for the smallest, and already most-precarious institutions? How could an all-volunteer historical society, for example, afford to pay a contract oral historian, say, $300 per interview, or their collections manager $30/hour … especially if they’ve been relying on “non- professional” local volunteers? Does that mean such a small institution could get “boycotted” by professionals and the wider field for non-compliance, furthering a rift between “professionalized” and “amateur” public/local history organizations? I don’t think so. Indeed, W.A.G.E. offers a tiered model — the more an institution makes, the higher baseline pay it’s expected to pay artists to maintain W.A.G.E. compliance. I envision a W.A.G.E.-type model for public historians as a way to justify support to help smaller and upstart institutions create livable wages for public historians — affixing a rates sheet document and official support letters from NCPH and AASLH leaders may help a small historical  society make a case for transitioning from project-support and volunteer labor to creating an operating budget for paid staff. And the adoption of a national or international set of public history baseline wage standard, backed by NCPH, AASLH, and major funding agencies and institutions, could be mobilized   to help procure federal funding for a collaborative program, perhaps similar to AASLH’s S.T.E.P.s program, to help smaller institutions with smaller budgets rise to those standards. Certainly, it would prevent the sort of “scabbing” and undercutting that sometimes unintentionally happens in no-salary/ wages-listed job competitions or grant cycles, where the candidate with the best qualifications — but   who pitches the lowest acceptable salary or hourly rate — wins. Yes, that sort of strong-arms our institutions into making change; but that work comes from us, as a field, as NCPH members and  AASLH members, as practitioners, united in a dispersed union — and it’s not up to workers, solely, to defend.

So: a new (old!) ethics for economic justice for our work within and with communities; and for our work, for we are workers, always. Now, it may seem impossible or counterproductive to try to reconcile these poles — how can the sort of walls-down, resource-sharing collaborative networking I suggest in the first discussion be squared with a firm committment to living wages for public history workers? How can    we, say, pay community scholars or oral history narrators and envision dynamic, multi-institutional programs and funding models, while enabling and holding to a baseline standard of livable wages in our field that will make public history and allied cultural work fields truly accessible to needful voices? To me, that work goes hand-in-hand. Yes, it may require some radical re-imagination of structures of fundraising, of how we think about institutions, about where and with who we do public history work. And yes, I believe, this work will build a model of abundance in both areas — building abundance for   our communities and community partners is building abundance in the field, and vice versa. That’s why the ethics and economic justice parts of our working group title are joined. Changing capital — funding structures, baseline rates, commitments to community reciprocity in cash and not only in assumed    value, labor politics — changes culture; and an anti-capitalistic future for abundant, collaborative, networked public history work might start with these experimental praxes. Let’s make it happen.

Thanks to: Rachel Boyle, Stella Ress & Dan Ott (our fearless & visionary organizers) & my fellow WG members, Whitney Gherman, Johnnie Jackson, Brandi Wilson & the Marion County Historical Society, Danielle Dulken, the Oral History Undercommons working group, Roger Beebe (for introducing me to W.A.G.E.), Amy Rohmiller & Andy Verhoff at Ohio History Connection, Ohio Humanities, AASLH’s Emerging History Professionals committee, Hope Shannon & Hannah Hethmon, the graduate student unionization movement (s/o to GET-UP!), all the bad bosses, my mom, Jeff, & everyone on Twitter/IRL who’s helped me think & feel about organizing, labor, & radical community equity in public humanities practice

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