The Engaged Humanities Studio brings together scholars, students, artists, activists, and community members through collaborative projects to address issues of pressing social concern. We focus on experiential, community-based, and critical-making practices that combine humanistic modes of inquiry and understanding with extra-humanities disciplines, non-student communities, and/or pressing social issues that would benefit from humanistic perspectives.
Humanities Methodologies + Community Engagement + Critical/Creative Making
While this program’s primary purpose is to support projects, the program more broadly seeks to cultivate a campus community that better understands and appreciates the civic potential of the Arts & Humanities and the role they can play in helping us to shape a more just and compassionate world.
Each year, the EHS invites Swarthmore faculty, staff, and students to apply to be EHS Fellows. In close collaboration with community partners, each fellow embarks on a 12- to 18-month project that addresses a contemporary issue through the arts and humanities. Potential applicants and current Fellows are invited to view the Engaged Humanities Studio Handbook for more information.
Current Projects
About Time
Nina Johnson, Associate Professor of Sociology & Anthropology, Black Studies, with The Grater Freedom Think Tank and, Ken West
This project is a film and media installation that highlights the experiences of Philadelphians sentenced to life in prison in Pennsylvania who have since returned to their communities. It will reveal the voices of people who were never meant to be heard, whose stories we were never meant to know.
Child Storytellers aRISE
Donna Jo Napoli, professor of linguistics and social justice, with the Community Pennsylvania School for the Deaf
Napoli will collaborate with the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (PSD) on producing bimodal-bilingual video books for families and classrooms to share with their deaf children in which the signers themselves are children.
Seeking Refuge: A Shared Learning Experience
Ben Smith, assistant professor of Arabic, with Yaroub Al-Obaidi, designer, researcher, author
This project will pilot an exciting engaged learning experience embedded in a new fall semester first-year Arabic Studies seminar, Refuge: Resettled in Philadelphia. The seminar's workshop component models engaged scholarship and anti-racist community engagement in that it is community-designed and learning outcomes are shared equally with students and community partners. Students will learn about, and from, Arab communities in America through direct community engagement as well as traditional course readings and discussions at the front end of the seminar. In addition, each workshop will be catered by a member of the Arabic-speaking community here in Philadelphia as an opportunity for this community to share their culture and have resources directed their way.
Celebrating Higher Education Behind Bars
Deven Ayambem ’24, a mathematics and engineering major, with David Buckley ’21, artist-in-residence and teaching assistant, Eastern University
Creative expression and the arts stand in stark juxtaposition to the subjugating processes of incarceration. In prisons, where individuals are reduced to the free (or nearly-free) labor they can provide to corporations and the State, creativity serves as a powerful instrument for people to express and reclaim their humanity. This project will work with currently incarcerated individuals to create an exhibition.
Chinatown Untrimmed
Chunyang Wang ’23, who majored in medical anthropology and was named a Humanity in Action Fellow, with Jing Ying of Artiva Hair Salon.
This project seeks to transform a Chinatown hair salon into an imaginary archive to explore the question: How has Chinatown changed and developed over the years? Through inquiries of historical archives, newspapers, and development projects, we continue to understand how extra-communal narratives of development are developed. The project draws on on Takahashi’s idea of imaginary archives to “envision unrecorded pasts, produce other means of legitimizing information, make old systems signify differently, and imagine as yet undetermined futures through the evocation of everyday people’s personal experiences of suffering, displacement, and loss.”
