The Civic Humanities: New Approaches to Democratic Futures

MLA 2027 Proposed Special Session: RoundtableCall for Papers (Deadline 3/23/26)Contact: Jen McDaneld (mcdaneld@up.edu) and Molly Hiro (hiro@up.edu) The past two years have seen universities go all in on developing programs to get students talking to each other even when they don’t agree. As a Chronicle of Higher Education article recently put it, “civil dialoguing” has become a “buzzy idea” of late, with organizations springing up across the U.S. to enable colleges and their students to learn how to engage in effective discussion of difficult topics. Jonathan Haidt’s Constructive Dialogues Institute leads the way here, with its neat, accessible Perspectives program becoming available—and even required—on more campuses each year, but enough similar initiatives have followed suit to make what could seem like a short-lived trend feel more like a full-blown movement. While there’s much to find promising about these efforts, we can’t help but notice a marked absence of humanities thinking and practices within them, with the modules of the Perspectives program, for instance, dominated by easy black-and-white categorization and appealing “solutions-based” formulas. In this absence, we wonder: what do the approaches of the humanities have to offer the well-intentioned desires to get students to converse more productively about challenging topics? As English faculty working on a Mellon-funded project to connect the humanities with new forms of dialogue and engagement, we’ve been experimenting with the term “civic humanities” to evoke the potential in bringing humanities mindsets and methods to these discussions. In this roundtable, we invite colleagues to help us explore these possibilities and their capacity for democratic revitalization. What is lost when humanities ways of thinking are left out of efforts to improve dialogue across difference, or better, what is gained when they are incorporated? What constitutes the civic humanities, and how might this be distinct from civil dialogue or civic engagement? And how can the humanities—both their practices and mindsets—forge healthier democratic cultures in an era of increasing skepticism about the value of higher education? Possible roundtable contributions might include (but are certainly not limited to): 

• Sharing projects, either completed or in-progress, that connect humanities research or teaching to local communities or public audiences
• Explorations of how particular theoretical frameworks, texts, or authors define, critique, or contribute to democratic culture, civil dialogue, or civic engagement, from previous eras or today
• Sharing grant projects, undergraduate research initiatives, or other program- and infrastructure-building initiatives for supporting public humanities or public literary studies work
• Successful (or not so successful) pedagogical experiments in building civic engagement using humanities practices
• Considerations of how the humanities can help universities translate the value of higher education to wider publics

 To leave time for plenty of discussion, we’ll ask each participant to base their remarks (~8 min.) on a touchstone quote, anecdote, object, or image. Send a paper title and 150-250 word proposal, along with contact information and a brief bio (no more than 100 words) to Jen McDaneld (mcdaneld@up.edu) and Molly Hiro (hiro@up.edu) by 3/23/26.