Sara Wilmshurst
This post continues my conversation with Corey Slumkoski (Acadiensis Blog), Tom Peace (Active History), Samia Dumais (Histoire Engagée), and Jessica DeWitt (NiCHE’s The Otter – La Loutre). For more, see our series page of Essays on the Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.
SW: Which challenges does your project face today?
TP (AH): Relevance. Active History has not done enough to engage the public. We remain a bit of a niche forum. It would be great to see the site become something that non-historians make reference to in their day-to-day conversations.
SD (HE): L’enjeu des privilèges des membres est au cœur de nos préoccupations en raison des positions variées occupées par les membres d’Histoire Engagée (professeur.e.s, étudiant.e.s, fonctionnaires, etc.).
JD (NiCHE): Money and labour, as with any humanities initiative these days. Although we have been able to raise $10,000+ annually for four years, it takes a lot of effort to get that much money, and we feel like we have potentially reached the peak of how much we can raise that way. Now that the website/blog is in a good space, we very much want to be able to once again organize in-person events, support grad students, and other activities that made the early years of NiCHE so enriching. But we need a lot more cash to be able to do that. Our Executive is currently working on and brainstorming ways to apply for grants and other larger sums of money. We also rely a great deal on the labour of early career and precarious scholars (like myself) and have found it frustratingly challenging to get tenured and late career scholars to willingly pick up some of the slack. And as we all know, the academic landscape is not great for anyone right now and the future feels uncertain.
CS (AB): The constant challenge is to find content. Generally, by about this time of the year – Spring – it is difficult to find material for the blog. Thankfully, the Spring issue of the journal has come out and we can promote some of the essays in it on the blog. We also try to solicit posts from scholars who have presented at the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference or the CHA Conference (which only has a handful of papers that deal with Acadiensis’ geographical area anyway).
One challenge that may be unique to the Acadiensis Blog is a reluctance on the part of authors to publish a piece on the blog that comes from an essay when they are hoping to have that essay published in a peer-reviewed journal. We try to assure authors that publishing on the blog will in no way impede them if they publish in the journal, but often this isn’t persuasive. It seems that these authors either are looking at another venue for their work that may not be as open to publishing on our blog, or they are worried that if their essay is rejected by the journal it will hurt them if they choose to seek a second journal in which to publish. We have also had experiences in the past where, owing to a lack of communication between the blog and the journal, we at the blog have contacted authors about publishing with us when the very same work was rejected by the journal. Now we have better communication, and were even able to publish on the blog in serial format a piece that did not meet the criteria for publication in the journal (and the author was happy to have the piece published).
SW: What impact has your project had?
SD (HE): Histoire Engagée occupe une place à part dans le paysage historiographique de la francophonie. Nous avons publié des textes rédigés par des auteurs qui proviennent de l’Afrique, de l’Europe, du Canada et du Québec. L’intérêt pour Histoire Engagée est toujours bien vivant après plus de 15 années d’activité : nous recevons toujours un nombre élevé de textes. Nous attribuons ce succès à la souplesse du format des textes que nous acceptons. En effet, nous acceptons des recensions variées, donc pas seulement des livres d’histoire : documentaires, expositions et pièces de théâtre font partie des œuvres recensées.
TP (AH): Active History has played an important role in building community among historians in Canada. Though we have not been the only organization working at this, we are a core forum for historians in Canada. I like to think that the state of the historian’s craft in Canada is richer because of the work that we have done.
CS (AB): This is hard to assess. I know that our cooperation as knowledge mobilization partners on SSHRC grants has helped a couple of teams of scholars receive SSHRC grants. I also know that the SSHRC that helps fund the journal benefits from having the blog listed as an online outlet for the journal. More broadly, though, I think that we’ve helped bring short form scholarly writing to a broader audience. I also think that we’ve worked with a number of early career scholars (and not just he undergraduates I mentioned above) to help them begin the publication records.
JD (NiCHE): It is difficult to summarize the impact of NiCHE in a short paragraph. There are few Canadian environmental historians, particularly those who were new scholars in the past twenty years, that do not point to NiCHE and its support and networking opportunities as having a positive impact on their lives. The strength of these ties have also impacted global environmental scholarship and Canadian history as a whole. Historian Daniel Samson wrote several years ago that “it is probably fair to say that NiCHE has been as influential in shaping Canadian historiography as Harold Innis or Donald Creighton in their days.” I think that is a good note to end on.
Thomas Peace notes, “Relevance. Active History has not done enough to engage the public. We remain a bit of a niche forum. It would be great to see the site become something that non-historians refer to in their day-to-day conversations.”
Dr. Peace is correct, but this is the nature of academic history. My interests in history are equally specialized and of minimal interest to most people, and likely most historians.
Most people prefer either big topics or a topic that is niche-adjacent. For example, Civil War buffs will get into the weeds on specific topics. History Today, a UK publication, is a good example of what most people interested in history like to read. Developing entries akin to History Today may be helpful.
I teach secondary school history and use many History Today articles in my world history classes. Students, for the most part, find them interesting, readable, and relevant to what we are studying. An example of an active history article I’ve used with my students was the one about the CHA residential school statement. It was a big topic tied to a significant historical and contemporary issue.