Imagine a person giving attention to an artifact, something that another human being has made. A toddler listens to a story, a runner hears a song on a headset, a tourist observes a painting in a museum, or a believer listens to a sermon.

This is one fundamental experience of the humanities. Notice that anyone can do it, even a baby.

Now imagine that several people attend together to something that one or many other human beings have created. Perhaps several students discuss a written text, or a congregation responds to a sermon about a passage of scripture, or a musical group explores a composition.

Attention has now become far more complex. One may attend to the object (such as the text, the song, or the image) and perhaps to the person who created it; to the other people who are also attending to it; to the thoughts and emotions that arise in one’s mind; and to whatever one expresses, often to one’s own surprise. The situation is dynamic in the sense that your view of the artifact can change, eliciting a response from you that others may hear and counter, changing your view again.

Third, imagine that the participants in a discussion are concerned about issues and problems beyond the artifact and beyond their group. In a book club about a current novel, a reader may offer a comment or a question about gender roles in our society. A purpose of a musical performance may be to motivate the audience to take action. Congregants may discuss what they should do in response to Amos 5:24, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

The complexity of the actual world vastly exceeds our capacity to reason about it. We must reason using models, which are simpler artifacts that resemble selected aspects of the world. A cultural artifact is often a model of the world that we can employ or criticize.

To summarize the argument so far: the three fundamental experiences of the humanities are private attention to an artifact, collective attention to an artifact, and participation in a public sphere in which an artifact serves as a model for deliberating on what we should do.

These experiences should remain connected. Even in a public debate, one has–or ought to have–a private relationship to the artifact, what we might call a space of “solitude” even when in company. The public sphere gains its richness from the contributions of many people who have retained their individuality.

We can explore the benefits of these three categories of experience. As just one example, a meta-analysis of the effects of reading fiction finds benefits for literacy, empathy, happiness, and even longevity (Mar, Dunk & Shoemaker 2027).

However, I would not rest the case for the humanities on their outcomes. Results probably vary. Other activities may also have benefits, perhaps even clearer ones. If you try to maximize mental health by finding the optimal mix of reading, running, meditation, and medication, reading might drop out of the formula. Finally, whether an experience of the humanities yields positive returns depends on how we do it. Reading fiction (for example) is not like a pill that lowers cholesterol. It is part of a life, and what happens next depends on us.

Instead of resting the case for the humanities on their outcomes, I would emphasize their intrinsic value. After all, what is the point of living at all? Not to boost our abilities to accomplish the next task until we die, but rather to use our time well. One way–not the only way–to employ our time well is to attend to what others have made, both alone and in company.

I noted that all human beings can have these experiences of the humanities, and probably almost all do so, at least to some extent. Expertise is not required. At the same time, any exercise of attention can deepen with time, focus, and guidance from other people. I can get more out of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop today than I would have gleaned from the same work 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, I was alive but had not even heard of Bishop. And today, some other people can get more from her work than I can because they have developed more relevant expertise. In this sense, anyone can be on a journey to heighten or enrich or broaden our attention.

Today we have expert humanists, such as professors of the humanistic disciplines, curators, editors, critics, and clergy and schoolteachers. Considering that all human beings can experience the humanities, what is the value of their expertise?

First, the scholarly humanities are valuable for their ultimate influence on the layperson’s experience of artifacts. This does not mean that every specialist must always address a lay audience directly. Specialization allows experts to exchange ideas efficiently without having to reexplain their methods, background knowledge, or basic concepts every time. Jargon has immense practical value. Nevertheless, the purpose of a whole body of scholarly literature is ultimately to influence the experience of non-specialists.

Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, and I never came close to meeting her. A vast amount of verse by all kinds of people is available on the Internet. Why then do I sometimes read Bishop? Scholars and critics, who have read much more poetry than I have, have made her canonical. She features in anthologies that I (as a light reader of poetry) am likely to encounter. Sometimes, an anthology offers useful notes or prefatory comments or a biographical sketch that helps me to understand a poet in her context. When things go well, an extensive and perhaps somewhat technical scholarly discussion can filter down to an entry in an anthology that gives me an experience that I would otherwise miss. Similarly, a professional jazz performance benefits from musicology, often transmitted to the performers during their education. And any k12 or college course should benefit from scholarship.

Scholarship can have a positive valence, helping us to see why and how to enjoy an object more. It can have a neutral valence, simply helping us to analyze an artifact. Or it can be critical, in the sense of negative–revealing flaws in the original. The point of scholarship is not to maximize the pleasure that we take from any given artifact or to convince us to value it more, but rather to help us attend to it better. In the extreme, research can persuade us to turn away from a text after we know more about it, although in that case, I think we should turn to another work rather than giving up.

Second, just as ordinary people employ cultural artifacts to make points about the social world, so do professional humanists. Because a cultural artifact is a model of our world, professionals and experts can use it effectively to argue about the world beyond.

I agree with at least two points from the Washington University/Vanderbilt Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. First,

The problem is not that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism. Scholars are members of the polity who rightly take an interest in social problems. Moreover, insofar as their scholarly competence provides them with relevant expertise, it is perfectly acceptable — some would say obligatory (Chomsky 1967) — for scholars to advocate for concrete reforms in light of their expertise

Second:

The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, aiming to debunk or correct the presuppositions of previous scholarship and the wider set of established cultural norms that scholarship reflects.

For the authors of this report, the main problem is not either of these but rather “distortion,” which arises in its “most straightforward form … when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.” The report claims, “Every field we have studied shows some signs of … a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

I recognize examples that meet this description, but I am not sure that I would characterize them as prevalent or getting worse. Instead, I would ask the following evaluative question (which I do not find in the Report): Do humanist participate in the public sphere?

To enter a public discussion, you can have a political agenda; in fact, it can be a contribution. You can adopt radical and unpopular views. And you can even come from a homogeneous community of thinkers. Intellectual diversity is an asset, but not the only one; and in any case, groups of people who appear philosophically homogeneous from afar are often focused on their own worthy debates–whether they happen to be comparative literature professors or evangelical pastors.

However, to participate genuinely in the public debate, you must attend to a real audience. Attending to them means figuring out what they think, value, and aim for. You might decide to change your own mind or at least adjust the questions that you consider timely and pressing. Or you may want to change their minds, but that requires knowing them. If your goal is to inflience the world, you must also thoughtfully choose which audiences to engage. No change will come from offering persuasive arguments to people who already agree.

One reason that some humanists–I do not know how many–fail to engage the public is that they reject or abhor millions of their fellow citizens on moral grounds. Another obstacle is a romantic view that all real people agree, or would agree if only they were liberated from propaganda. Effective rhetoric requires investigating what other people really think, in all their diversity and complexity. This is partly a question for research, but there is no substitute for interacting with a variety of fellow citizens and paying attention to the response.

To conclude: the core of the humanities is a set of solitary and collaborative experiences that all human beings can have and whose primary value is intrinsic, although the humanities also help us to debate the social world. Expertise and professional scholarship can enrich those experiences, even when the scholarship is critical. Experts need not always be directly engaged with non-experts, but the scholarly discussion and the public sphere must be connected.

I would ask to what extent the public and professional humanists are genuinely attentive to each other, in the sense of striving to understand and influence one another. If there is a gap, I would charge professional humanists with fixing it. Perhaps laypeople would be well advised to pay more attention to scholarship. However, only the scholars themselves can convince everyone else to give us tuition, donations, royalties, and tax revenues and to entrust their children’s education to us. And that requires attending to them.

Source: Raymond A. Mar, Rebecca J. Dunk, Lilly H. Shoemaker, “The benefits of Reading Narrative Fiction,” Current Opinion in Psychology, volume 73, 202; the Washington University/Vanderbilt University Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. See also: “The world wants the humanities”; why the humanities could never be automated; the humanities as civic education; paradigms of attention, etc.

“Civically engaged political science (CER) research …. involves political scientists collaborating in a mutually beneficial way with people and groups beyond the academy to co-produce, share, and apply knowledge related to power or politics, contributing to self-governance” (Rasmussen et al 2021).

In this definition, the word “civic” refers to “How people govern themselves. Engaged research teams are self-governing collaborative groups (composed of community organizations, government actors, social movements, and others); their research strengthens self-governance for others.e with a central focus onquestions of power, politics, and governance.”

What does it look like to be involved in CER? Here are some successful trajectories. These are fictional profiles, but they are based on many real examples that I have known. I share the list partly to broaden people’s conceptions of what success might look like:

1. Hired as an assistant professor in a research-intensive university that grants PhDs in political science, a scholar does some CER before winning tenure–along with other research. Publishes some results of the CER along with much other work. Gets tenure on the basis of the publication record.
2. Someone with a PhD in political science takes those skills to a job in a nongovernmental organization (NGO). She works in research and evaluation, rising ultimately to be the CEO of the organization.
3. A political scientist in a college located in a smaller community becomes an important convener and civic leader in that community. This person brings public figures to town and organizes community forums. The college comes to value this role.
4. An experienced social movement activist earns a PhD by studying the movement (studying part-time while continuing to do practical work) and then continues to contribute to the movement as a teacher, scholar, and activist.
5. A political scientist takes a first job after earning a PhD is in a research lab based in a university that is entirely funded by grants and contracts. One grants leads to another, and this person ends up directing the lab. 
6. A professor has a heavy teaching load in an institution that emphasizes teaching. This instructor incorporates students in applied research projects with the local community. They publish informally, for local audiences.
7. A scholar’s research agenda is mostly driven by a methodological or theoretical innovation, but they realize they need to do their research with partners. They gain skills in forming and sustaining partnerships.
8. A political science professor does positivist research by day and social movement activism in the evenings and weekends. There is little connection between these two full-time jobs.
9. An early-career scholar takes job in a community engagement center in a university and makes a career in that center and in others like it, ending as the vice provost for public engagement.
10. A graduate student interested in CER cannot find a way to do CER until after tenure, when his early ideas suddenly germinate, and he conducts a CER project.
11. An academic expert on a social group serves frequently on the boards of relevant organizations, moving from local groups to national and international ones.
12. A political scientist studies local issues, often in dialogue with local activists. This person runs for political office and leaves academia when elected mayor.

I would offer all of these as successful profiles, although one might argue that some represent structural challenges that individuals have partially overcome through unreasonable amounts of struggle.

Source: Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Peter Levine, Robert Lieberman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman & Rogers Smith “Preface,” PS: Political Science & Politics symposium on Civically Engaged Research (2021). See also: civically engaged research in political science.

I am at the eighth Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), a program of the American Political Science Association. Each summer, we gather about 20 political scientists (advanced PhD students, professors, and PhDs working outside academia) for four days of discussions about engaged research, which generally means research conducted in partnership with people or entities that are outside of academia. As we did last year, we are meeting at UCLA in Los Angeles, thanks to the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and UCLA’s Ralph Bunche Center.

I have been thinking about the standing of this kind of research and how it is viewed by powerful institutions. You could think of the following as a draft of a “power map” for civically engaged research in political science.

To start, we might think that colleges and universities are powerful institutions. On the other hand, many organizations and communities or social groups lack power. A junior scholar who wants to remedy that gap should collaborate with a disadvantaged group in ways that empower it. This requires humility by the scholar. In turn, the university and relevant discipline will probably dislike this style of research because it tends to shift power away. Therefore, the scholar will have to struggle against the university. Finally, the government may support engaged research when progressive are in charge, but when the government is right-wing, it will attack engaged research.

This model is not false, but I would like to complicate it.

All communities have power. Some geographical communities that are poor nevertheless wield considerable power though their elected governments. On the other hand, colleges and universities face significant constraints, economic and otherwise.

Senior faculty in departments that chase prestige may not appreciate engaged research because it may seem methodologically unsophisticated and may not yield generalizable conclusions. On the other hand, the discipline of political science has conferred its highest honors on some scholars whose research depended on partnerships, people like Elinor Ostrom and Jenny Mansbridge (or Ralph Bunche, back in the day). Thanks to the original leadership of Rogers Smith while he was APSA president–sustained by his successors–the Association offers ICER to boost this kind of research.

Also, senior administrators in prestigious universities sometimes prefer engaged research because it is interdisciplinary, it engages students, it attracts philanthropy, and it can improve local relationships.

At this moment, federal funding for political science is endangered, and one would expect the Trump Administration to target civically engaged research. Yet political scientists are involved today in federally funded interdisciplinary engaged research projects, and private philanthropic support may be expanding.

In short, I think the power map is quite complex. My ideal end-state would not be a world in which every political scientist does engaged research. I admire other kinds of research as well. But I would like to see more and better civically engaged research, and moving toward that goal requires navigating a context of both opportunities and risks.

See also: the landscape for civically engaged research (2025; rather similar to these remarks); Civically Engaged Research in Political Science (2023); bootstrapping value commitments (2022)