About Us

Interspaces is a site for anyone interested in the full range of human experience and expression, throughout time and around the globe. While some of our content is lighthearted, what unites our community is a commitment to serious study of the things that sustain human and other-than-human life: Study as sustained attention to some part of the world in order to change it. Study as “what you do with other people,” and a name for the “incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities that is already present” in everyday life. Study as a set of practices that transcend, flee across, or ignore the borders of institutions and disciplines so that they can attend to the everyday lives, struggles, and aspirations of real people in ways that are responsible and meaningful to their (our) communities.

We name the mode of study we are practicing here “the engaged and public humanities” (ENPH) because that phrase will be on the site creators’ diplomas, resumes, and CVs forever, and because, despite that, we are unsure exactly what it means and how we ourselves relate to ENPH as an emerging disciplinary formation. Public humanities is an emerging academic area of study and a practice of engaged research, writing, and creation that extends beyond and blurs campus-community borders. Much public humanities practice involves engaged community partnerships, in which scholars and community partners collaborate to produce knowledge, and much of the work of the public humanities strives toward social justice goals. This site is our space and occasion to test, triangulate, and theorize the engaged and public humanities as our mode of study.

Interspaces also enacts ENPH as a practice. It offers students, practitioners, and scholars a platform to engage in our practice publicly, if tentatively and uncertainly at times, and to explore how doing the work changes our thinking about the work. 

Who We Are

For the present (2023), we are fifteen graduate students and one adjunct professor brought together by the MA Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities and the MA in Art and Museum Studies at Georgetown University. We are trained in studio art, art history, literary studies, theater, political science, history, communications, psychology, Black studies, and cultural studies. We work in higher education, research centers, college admissions, nonprofits, and museums. As a group who studies together, we are all teachers, students, collaborators, curious, cautious, sometimes radicals, sometimes reformers, always committed to our practice as one that “makes hope possible rather than despair convincing.”

At present, our time together is limited. We are producing this site as a class project in a public writing class that ends in May. Most of us will graduate in August. Our mode of study is defined in part by this timeline but we know that answering the questions asked through Interspaces will be a project that continues far beyond our time together.

For the future, we hope you will join us.