【by Ka-ming Wu, June 2025】
This short essay aims to discuss the new scholarly field of Public Humanities in Hong Kong, Asia. It teases out the meanings of public by figuring out how Public Anthropology and Public Sociology have been talked about in the context of United States higher education. In September 2025, the Chinese University of Hong Kong will launch the new program of Public Humanities, which is a result of merging two programs: Cultural Studies and Cultural Management. Retaining the training of critical theories, textual and visual analysis in Cultural Studies, and the practical instructions of heritage conservation, art management and performance studies in Cultural Management, the new program could become potentially very rich and diverse in teaching and learning. Nonetheless, it might also risk becoming a dump of everything. This essay suggests that it is imperative to understand Public Humanities beyond the superficial rhetoric of public or community engagements, and beyond the institutionalized language of knowledge transfer. Instead, it shows that there is much we could learn from in the ongoing discussion of the publics in the disciplines of Anthropology and Sociology, concerning issues of rights, political freedom, social justice.
The call for more public engagements and benefiting the community is nothing new in the academia. In the United States, the call for more commitments to social engagement started in late 19th century and academics sought to address problems faced by different groups of people. In the discipline of Anthropology, for instance, Franz Boas was very much an activist. He openly opposed racist theories that were popular in the United States and in Europe in the 1930s. Margaret Mead, often hailed as an icon of Public Anthropology, is another example (Shankman 2018). Mead argues that ethnography should not only document cultural practices in a specific tribal community or non-West society but it should serve a broader purpose by revealing insights that could inform and benefit humanity as a whole. Using her work on the experience of adolescents in Samoa in the South Pacific, Mead contested Western notion of gender roles and child development. Her work laid the empirical work and provided the comparative angle for contemporary discussions about the social construction of identity and the role of culture in shaping gender behaviors.
Public Anthropology, exemplified by Mead’s works, is neither just about making research accessible to a broader audience nor merely about the number of popular publications or television shows academics could reach out. The “publicness” here is about introducing complex and critical scholarly concepts that become relevant in or relatable to the general public across cultures. It is about using scholarly work as a critical public intervention on issues of justice and inequalities, even challenging widely accepted social norms.
Moving forward to the twenty-first century, the prominent sociologist Michael Burawoy has also talked about Public Sociology quite extensively. In his 2004 Presidential Address, published by the American Sociological Review, Burawoy (2004) made an open call to defend for Public Sociology as the discipline in the United States is increasingly dominated by Policy Sociology (service research that provides a technical solution to problems) and Professional Sociology (research programs such as organization theories, stratification, sociology of family, political sociology etc.). He also talked about Critical Sociology generating reflective knowledge by revealing dominant biases and oppressions of groups such as LGBT and African Americans. While acknowledging the values of instrumental knowledge, tested methods and conceptual frameworks generated by above three research streams, Burawoy noticed increasing marginality and subordination of the subfield, Public Sociology. By Public Sociology, Burawoy refers to research that make visible the invisible groups, such as the working poor, immigrant workers and the racially marginalized. Public sociologists could work with a labor movement, communities of faith, AIDS groups or immigrants NGOs. Their research topics and products, nonetheless, might not immediately satisfy corporate university demands for international journal publications. This become, however, all the reasons why Burawoy insisted about the values in Public Sociology: its engagement with diverse publics while reflecting different values commitments by academics on the one hand; and feeding public discussion about the academic community as a principled community on the other. Last, he cautioned that too much specialization and the obsessive focus on technicality and scientific methods would make one forget about the original passions for social research: social justice, human rights, and political freedom. In this sense, Public Sociology is ever more needed today as social research needs to respond to what knowledge production serves.
Despite the rhetoric of criticality, most of us in Cultural Studies and the Humanities feel comfortable with the status quo—conducting research and publishing for a small group of colleagues. The pursuit of academic credentials and the emphasis on journal rankings have become normalized in the disciplining of our teaching and research. The new program of Public Humanities shall create a new window for all of us to reflect on our existing relationship with research, scholarship and the publics. How do we in the humanities answer what is our research for and for whom we generate knowledge? Learning from the past and ongoing discussions of Public Anthropology and Public Sociology, Public Humanities in Hong Kong shall not superficially reiterate the cliché of social and community engagements. Indeed, the labor of “public-making” here should go beyond making things easier for the laymen to understand.
Making the invisible visible, engaging the marginalized and defending the civil society should be starting points for us to venture into our new teaching and learning of the field. Already inspired by Western theories of feminism, poststructuralism, critical race theory, and lately the turn to non-human, the new Public Humanities program might consider taking up the challenge of understanding how the personal is political, the private could be public, and the various strategies different groups fight for social justice in non-western and non-liberal democracy contexts. And on top of critical media education and cultural literacy of understanding the racialized and religious others, teaching and learning in the current climate crisis and the nature would be very relevant for us to train responsible citizens in warming ecological future. The public here is therefore about finding new ways we could constitute new and relevant public discussions such socially engaged arts for climate justice, and feminism and ageing society, ecological films and literature etc. Last, the new undergraduate program could be asking our students to make the invisible groups of refugees/ethnic others, LGBT and migrant workers and animals in history, film and literature into projects of museum exhibits and theatre stages. It is perhaps with this practicum part of the field that will truly make the various publics visible and performative. With that, the public making of Public Humanities would be a new teaching and learning process of mutual education and inspirations that AI might yet be able to interfere.
AUTHOR
Ka-ming Wu is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is author of Reinventing Chinese Tradition: Cultural Logic of Late Socialism (UIP 2015) and co-author of Feiping Shenghuo (Living with Waste) (CUP 2017). Her new book Volunteering, Urban Infrastructures and Everyday Urbanism in Contemporary China is forthcoming at the University of Amsterdam Press.
REFERENCES
Burawoy, Michael. “2004 American Sociological Association Presidential Address: For Public Sociology.” The British journal of sociology 56, no. 2 (2005): 259-294.
Shankman, Paul. “The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead: Redbook, Women’s Issues, and the 1960s.” Current Anthropology 59, no. 1 (2018): 55-73.