Students attending colleges and universities in Texas are required to learn about Texas politics, yet many students and professors know little about the way Texas government works. When Jim Henson began the Texas Politics Project around 2001, it took the modest form of an open-source online textbook intended as a resource for teachers, professors, and students for fulfilling this requirement. It was not long before it expanded into a much more extensive program for teaching Texas politics.

The Texas Politics Project began conducting statewide public opinion polls in 2008, which have now become a crucial aspect of the Texas political landscape. In more recent years, the Texas Politics Project has expanded to include online courses, internship programs, and other events and seminars to inform public political debate and engagement across the state of Texas.

I spoke with Jim Henson, the Director of the Texas Politics Project, to learn more about the origins and evolution of the project.

Zoya: Could you talk to me a bit about the Texas Politics Project and how it got started?

Jim: The Texas Politics Project grew out of the fairly basic project of building an online textbook about Texas government in the early 2000s. We wanted to create an open-access resource that students and professors could use in class, but we also wanted something that would be a public resource for people who needed to know or were interested in Texas government and politics.

Once we got the site up and running, it gained some success not only at UT but at community colleges and other colleges around the state. That led to us branching out into running the government internship program, which in turn put me in touch directly not only with students working in government but with the people they were working for at the legislature. After that we began doing public polling, which led into the partnership with the Texas Tribune.

In the midst of all that, we started doing public events. The public events became part of the internship course, but we also videotaped them so that the content could be included in our outreach efforts and the online textbook. We tried to do everything in a way that would serve more than one purpose and always have a public-facing element to it.

Zoya: Who are the people who participate in the Texas Politics Project?

Jim: Until four years ago, I created most of the intellectual content for the site with support from the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) on the technical end. When we started doing the polling, we brought in some graduate students as Research Assistants.

Zoya: What about the internship programs? Is it mostly UT students who participate, or are there internship programs open to the broader Austin community?

Jim: We have a few different internship opportunities. One is catered specifically to UT undergraduate students, and it is an upper-division internship course in the Government department. We also have two programs that are for the general public. We run a public bulletin board, a website where students can browse postings and find available internships, potential hosts, and employers. We get a lot of positive feedback on that. The other thing that we do that is not limited to UT students is run a Texas legislative internship seminar at the beginning of every legislative session. It is a day-long event in which people are going to be interns or new staff learn from veteran staff members in the Texas politics world. We have had people from the advocacy lobby community talk about ethics, journalists talk about dealing with the press and what the press is after, and parliamentarians of the house and senate talk about procedure and how the legislature operates.

Zoya: I saw that you recently did a poll about #metoo. Could you use that as an example to talk about what the polling process is like, how you use the polls, and how you come up with the ideas for the polls?

Jim: There is a hybrid sense of goals that get invested in the polls and color the process. Because we have a media partner in the Texas Tribune, we are mindful of their needs and their priorities, which are to be current, to inform public debate, and to drive traffic to their site. The #metoo poll was part of the battery on gender. It was one of a number of topics we focused on in this poll because it was in the realm of public discussion.

We started putting the #metoo poll document together in mid-January when discussions of sexual harassment and sexual assault were really in the air. We knew that we wanted to probe attitudes on that and to see where it was in the political landscape of the state and the cognitive landscape of the voters. We asked questions about the perceived impact of the discussion of sexual assault and sexual violence, but we also revisited a couple of batteries that we had already put in previous polls that asked people about their perceptions of discrimination experienced by different groups of society. We wanted to see if this public discussion had any impact on perceptions of discrimination against women compared to other groups.

We asked people: how much discrimination do you think this group of people experiences? The perception that women experience discrimination went up slightly after participants went through and assessed each group. We then asked participants to rank the groups by relative levels of discrimination. The most interesting result is that women did not move at all from previous surveys. We had asked the question in 2016, and only 3% overall in Texas ranked women first on that list. After the ensuing year and a half of the #metoo movement, all the high-profile cases of harassment and sexual assault, and the discussion and dissemination of those discussions over different realms—it was still 3% in February of 2018.

Zoya: You mentioned earlier that you have gotten a lot of positive feedback on the bulletin. What other kinds of feedback have you gotten about the Texas Politics Project?

Jim: Different aspects of what we do get different kinds of feedback. We have gotten really positive feedback on the textbook, though there was a little bit of a tricky transition from when we moved from being a free open resource to selling it. The thing we get the most dynamic feedback about is the polling. The polling has become, within the political community and media, an expected presence, something that is bound to generate discussion, feedback, criticism—particularly during campaign season. Our polls have really become part of the public political process in the state. You asked if we get feedback…it’s a feedback machine now! People expect the poll to be there, and we try to deliver.

Zoya: How has working with the public in this way affected your own research?

Jim: Working in Texas and working with the public led to a complete reorientation of my focus and my work, but it also led to a fundamental reorientation of what I thought of as my target audience. I am not a tenured faculty member, and I have created a different niche here that has been liberating for me. I am more interested in politics than I was in research scholarship in Political Science. The Texas Politics Project has created a vehicle for taking the tools I learned from my academic training and orienting them toward informing public debates rather than academic debates.

Zoya: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Jim: The thing we fundamentally try to do—and it is something that in the current political context might be more important or more urgent than it has been in my lifetime—is to provide the material for evidence-based arguments and evidence-based discussion in the public realm. What we are ultimately trying to do is to provide material that will help ground political discussions. We do not take sides or push certain political viewpoints. The agenda is really to use evidence and have some fact-based exchange.

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Picture the home (or homes) where you grew up. When was your neighborhood built? Did most people in your neighborhood own or rent their homes? What did your neighbors look like? Were there a lot of immigrants or your neighborhood? A visible transient population? Was there a lot of green space? What kind of businesses were around? Were their churches, synagogues, mosques, and/or other places of worship? What kinds of social services were available? Did you live near hospitals or government offices? Now, picture what that neighborhood must have been like nearly 100 years ago. For many people, the ethnic and religious makeup of their neighborhoods may have looked very different. Yet even the most diverse neighborhoods contain relics of the architectural, legal, and social actions that defined their demographics.

For the public scholars involved in the Mapping Inequality project, unveiling the financial, legal, and social structures in the creation of neighborhoods across the United States is a critical lens through which to study the history of American inequity. Mapping Inequality presents access to a national collection of “security” maps and area descriptions produced by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation between 1935 and 1940. These interactive maps are representations of real maps that HOLC created by gathering data from mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers to create color-coded maps of credit worthiness and risk in metropolitan neighborhoods. This practice of redlining—refusing loans or insurance to homeowners based on their ethnic and/or racial identity—was a defining factor in the racial and financial makeup of American cities. The urban ghettos of Chicago’s West and South Sides, New York’s Chinatown and Little Italy, the Jewish populations of the Boston area’s Brookline neighborhood, and Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles are all examples of the ways that redlining shaped cities across the United States. There are currently 150 cities represented on Mapping Inequality’s map, and the website is constantly being added to and expanded.

Mapping Inequality is a collaboration between three research teams: the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab; University of Maryland professor Richard Marciano from the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) at the College of Information Studies (“Maryland’s iSchool”) with a team of students; and Virginia Tech History professor LaDale Winling and a team of students. Information on the website is built upon materials collected by an earlier $250K IMLS-funded grant (LG-05-06-0158-06) called  T-RACES (Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces) with David Goldberg at UC Irvine and Chien-Yi Hou at UNC Chapel Hill; and a 2013 NSF/OCI Grant (0848296) called Cyberinfrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records (CI-BER), a cooperative agreement between NSF and NARA, with Cathy Davidson and Robert Calderbank at Duke. Additional website research and texts were created by N. D. B. Connolly, the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.

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Graduate students often wonder how their work fits into their lives outside the university. We publish and present papers with the hope that they contribute significantly to our fields. But for many scholars, public engagement in the form of podcasts, blog posts, youtube channels, and creative writing have helped us feel that we are contributing to public discussion as well. Graduate students usually have even less time and resources than faculty so their efforts are especially noteworthy.

Pterodáctilo is the graduate student publication of Hispanic and Lusophone literature and linguistics in the UT Department of Spanish and Portuguese. First published in 1984 as the printed journal Dactylus, Pterodáctilo has undergone a series of transformations—most notably a shift from print to an online multimedia format—that have allowed it to highlight the creative and critical work of graduate students for each other and for public audiences. The online magazine has expanded to include a range of poetry, fiction, interviews, video shorts, photography, and audio content, as well as academic articles. The current editors of Pterodáctilo are Ana Cecilia Calle Poveda, Ana Almar-Liante, and Samuel Ellis Ginsburg. Contributors include students from UT’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and related departments and scholarship as well as pieces submitted from scholars and creatives outside of UT. I spoke with current editor Samuel Ellis Ginsburg and graduate student and contributor Ashley Garcia to learn more about Pterodáctilo in its current iteration.

Ginsburg is a graduate student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He received his BA from the University of Pittsburgh and his MA from NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He currently studies 20th-century Caribbean literature and corporal politics and economies.

Ashley Garcia is a first-year graduate student in the Iberian and Latin American Languages and Cultures PhD Program, housed under the Spanish and Portuguese Program. She studies violence in contemporary Mexican culture. Aside from her academic research, she is interested in human rights work and writing creative pieces for Pterodáctilo.

Can you talk a little bit about Pterodáctilo and your involvement with it? What are the aims of the project, and how did it get started?

SG: Pterodáctilo is a magazine that focuses on Latin American, Brazilian, Iberian, and Latinx culture. It started as a traditional literary journal named Dactylus. It was revived a few years before I got to UT with the idea of making it a mostly online journal. I am one of its current editors. Our goal now is to take advantage of the online platform with shorter posts, podcasts, videos, photo essays, and a social media presence.

AG: I started writing for Pterodáctilo last semester, and my plan is to continue posting pieces. From my perspective, it serves a platform that graduate students can use to express their interests in a writing form that differs from what we typically see in academia.

Who participates in writing, researching, and editing Pterodactilo? And who is your audience?

SG: Our writers are mostly UT Spanish graduate students, with a few people from Comparative Literature, LLILAS, and English. It is all volunteer. Our audience is mostly other UT students, though through social media we have been broadening that network to people from all over that are interested in what we are writing about.

AG: All graduate students from the department (and even outside the department) are encouraged to write for the magazine. Since each student has different interests and writing styles, research takes form in different ways. Sometimes you will find a book review, a chronicle, or an interview. However, you will also find poems and prose that may be partially inspired by current events or subjects we are covering in class.

A lot of our audience is academic, but I try to write for a broader audience. While I like to write about complex subjects and experiences, I keep the language simple so my friends and family can enjoy the pieces as well.

What were the goals you set out to accomplish when the project began? Have you met them? How have your aims or focuses changed over time?

SG: Our goals were really to just give grad students a platform to write what they want, and I think we have met them. Our aims have changed a little bit by including more content on issues surrounding Austin (like Gun Free UT). This wasn’t our original goal, but it has really helped us better connect to what is going on around town.

AG: The biggest jump has been changing from a journal to an online publication. Changing from print to online makes the work available to a broader public.

What kind of feedback have you received so far?

SG: The feedback has been good. I think more and more people are reading the posts we publish. The biggest sign of positive feedback is that more and more people are contacting us to write for the website. I think that means that they are seeing it as a valuable space.

AG: Most of the feedback I have heard comes from friends and family. They have been surprised by my pieces (in a positive way) and have encouraged me to keep exploring my writing skills in different ways.

How has working with a public audience influenced your scholarship?

SG: Personally, it has helped a lot. I have gotten to workshop a couple of ideas on the blog that eventually got turned into academic papers or presentations. I think the blog offers a great space for putting out ideas and starting conversations.

AG: From my perspective, this is a symbiotic relationship. I grew up in the U.S.-Mexico border, so this has heavily influenced my work with human rights issues in and outside the academy. I started studying violence in contemporary Mexican culture because I was frustrated with the impunity that many people face. Learning about the culture allowed me to work with human rights organizations, and these experiences have helped me narrow my own interests in the academia. I have witnessed how important it is to share my experiences and perspectives about these issues with a broader public, and this is the main reason why I have turned to publications that are not purely academic.   

Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Cantu

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“Diacritics” is the term used for the accent marks that change the pronunciation and meanings of words in written in a variety of languages, including Vietnamese. DiaCRITICS is also a play on words to describe a group of writers, researchers, and artists engaged in public scholarship and criticism of culture produced in the Vietnamese diaspora. It is the official blog of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network and a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Its aim is to review and expose its audiences to the music, scholarship, literature, visual art, and performances of creators from the Vietnamese diaspora. Articles are published in English, Vietnamese, and French to reach the broadest audience and a diverse base of contributors. Popular media intermingle with academic scholarship, depicting the vast breadth of creative output of Vietnamese-diasporic cultures.

Pulitzer Prize-winning creative writer and University of Southern California Professor of English Viet Thanh Nguyen established diaCRITICS in 2010. At the beginning of 2018, Vietnamese-Danish-American author and musician Dao Strom took over as diaCRITICS’ Editor. Both its creator and new Editor are California-based, but contributors represent a vast array of global Vietnamese-diasporic communities. 

Image courtesy of Huy Cao

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How will the moment of time in which you live be remembered? Will Occupy Wall Street or the anti-Trump movement be written into history as the 1968 of the 21st century? Are our lives a turning point in the political, economic, or social conditions of the modern world?

For Rutgers University History Professors Jochen Hellbeck and Johanna Schoen, it is necessary to archive the political thoughts, emotions, and experiences of people living the current moment so that these questions can be answered at the most personal level—today and in the future. The American Pulse Project is a website that posts directives—questions about the current social and political climate—for people living in the United States in the 21st century, from all backgrounds, ages, and political viewpoints, to address based on their own thoughts and experiences. The idea is that the archive will take the “pulse” of the nation year by year and provide a plethora of narratives that capture what each moment was like.

Anyone living in the United States can participate in the American Pulse Project. The first directive was posted on November 24, 2017, and those who respond to it will be invited to continue answering these directives as they are produced. The website is sponsored by the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University. The project is led by Jochen Hellbeck and Johanna Schoen in cooperation with Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Marion Bacher, and Marshall T. Poe.

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East Austin has only recently become home to craft cocktail bars, yoga studios, high-end vintage clothing stores, art house movie theaters, and food trucks lauded by the New York Times dining section. For someone new to Austin, unfamiliar with its complex history, it is difficult to imagine that these neighborhoods were intentionally segregated by city planners, that I-35 once demarcated the racial division of the city. However for many native Austinites, this history is part of their lived everyday experience. Though the explicit segregation of the city is no longer its law, many of Austin’s vibrant communities remain geographically, economically, racially, and culturally divided. These communities are all affected by many of the same issues—housing costs, education, transportation, healthcare, legal services—and Virginia Cumberbatch believes that  the best way that they can be addressed is for members of these communities to come together.

For Cumberbatch, Director of Community Engagement at the Division of Diversity and Engagement at UT-Austin, the university is an institution with deep financial, medical, and educational resources. The purpose of the Community Engagement Center is to integrate UT’s resources into the community. One of the ways that it does this is through the Front Porch Gatherings, a series of events that bring members of the Austin community together with faculty, nonprofit organizations, community religious and activist leaders, and others, to talk about many of the issues faced by Austin’s most underserved communities. I spoke with Virginia Cumberbatch to learn more about the Front Porch Gatherings and their role within the larger goals of the Community Engagement Center.

Can you talk to me a little bit about the Front Porch Gatherings and how they got started?

The Community Engagement Center focuses on connecting the resources of the university to the community. We leverage the financial resources, the leadership, the research, and the students of the university to address priority issues facing our most underserved communities here in Austin. One of the ways we have tried to facilitate that is through our Front Porch Gatherings.

This was a renewal of a concept we had done a few years ago called Community Dialogues, which were about hearing from the community about the most pressing issues like health or education. After about a year of Community Dialogues we realized that we wanted to make sure that we were not just scratching the surface, so we created a new model of what Community Dialogues should look like, and we called it the “Front Porch Gathering.” We consider ourselves the “front porch” of the university: people coming onto a front porch and talking and keeping constant communication and contact. We are the community’s first entry-point into getting resources from the university.

We launched the Front Porch Gatherings in fall of 2016 to create time and space to explore priority issues collectively as a community. For us, that meant taking away what is often a top-down approach—where thought-leaders and experts talking at the community in a panel style or a presentation, so the agency is taken away from the community. We want to reposition residents as experts in the room. What we try to do with the Front Porch Gatherings is invite all of those various perspectives.

What goes on in these meetings? What do they look like?

We really try to customize what the Front Porch Gathering experience will be like based on the topic, and then from that, we do small group break out sessions that are facilitated by experts in that space, and they have predetermined questions that they walk people through, through their own lens and experience. We are creating a space for that kind of dialogue and actionable conversations. You see partnerships form—maybe this organization did not know that this individual was the person to talk to about an issue—people realizing what happens when you are in a room together and everyone is given the same sort of agency.

At our seventh Front Porch, for example, we talked about immigration, particularly speaking about how federal and state immigration policy shape the local landscape here in Central Texas. What we try to do is ground the conversation in personal narrative and experience. We opened up the evening with two people—one was a Dreamer, the other a DACA recipient, sharing their stories about living in a mixed-status house, which means that some people may not be documented. It set the tone for the rest of the evening, and people took that to their conversations rather than just talking about the data and statistics.

Another example is the first Front Porch we did in September about education, equity, and East Austin. We talked about the disparities in public education as well as the opportunity gap in East Austin, which we opened up with a talk from Dr. Terrance Green, who has been developing this access model of how to improve schools in underserved communities.

How do you reach out to the community? Who is the audience you are looking for, and how do people find out about these events and participate in them?

We do this in a variety of ways; one is that we reach out to our nonprofit organizational partners because they may be have immediate contact with people who might be experiencing the ramifications of some of these institutional issues. Additionally we team up with churches and schools to get the word out.

We need to know what the proper channels are to connect with depending on the topic. So for immigration, we know this is a sensitive topic, and some people might be reticent to engage in the conversation—so we held that Front Porch Gathering in a church, hoping that that would create a sense of safety and intimacy for that conversation. Another way that we create that space where residents want to come is that we are really adamant about making sure that we are in the community hosting these events rather than asking people to come to UT. As much work as we have done at the university for the community to become more trusting of it, it’s still an intimidating space, spatially as well as culturally.

How do you select topics for the Front Porch Gatherings?

Our topics are based out of our four areas of focus at the Community Engagement Center: health disparities, education equity, criminal justice or law, and housing and affordability. For example our affordability and gentrification conversations are aligned with the work of Dr. Eric Tang at the Social Justice Institute, which is one of the programs that we incubate.

The health disparities Front Porch Gathering was based on the work of the moving-in of the resources of the UT Medical School but realizing that that’s not going to solve all the problems where there are gaps. Then there are community members who come to us with issues they are seeing and want to discuss. This second year we are really seeing more of a response.

What kinds of feedback have you gotten about the Front Porch Gatherings so far?

At our Front Porch Gatherings, we always have a survey about things that are missing and ways that we can dig deeper in a particularly nuanced part of a conversation. We are going to be talking about gentrification again in December, but this time we are going to be talking about affordable housing and how appropriate it is to retain the needs of populations. We’re not talking about the displacement—we’re talking about how Austin is building all this affordable housing, but is it appropriate for the mother of three, or is it appropriate for the single person who is college-educated?

The surveys are great—they are very concrete. But what I really lean on as my measuring stick about the usefulness of this program are just emails I get and people I have talked to afterwards. For instance at our immigration program, I had someone come up to me…and I am only going to reveal his race because it gives context to his comments. He was a Caucasian pastor of a predominantly white church here in Austin, and he told me that the conversation was an amazing opportunity for him to hear about how this policy was affecting not just some theoretical person but someone living in this city, someone who is right down the street. It gave context to what often times can feel like a very distant conversation. He talked about how he really wanted to recreate that experience for his congregation. For me, that was really great, continued affirmation that our approach to this is resonating with people.

You started up the meetings again during the 2016 election…did that have anything to do with people wanting to be more engaged with community-level political organizing? Or is that just circumstantial?

It was not intentional prior to the election, but it was definitely a driving force for the need of something like this. People feeling—on an institutional level as well as an individual level—that they want to have spaces where they could explore and learn more about particularly pressing issues that are sometimes divisive or sometimes misunderstood or sometimes, unless it is your lived experience, you don’t know about. I think we saw an uptick in people’s engagement because of the sort of sociopolitical climate happening at a national level. One of our most well-attended events was about gentrification. Another really popular event was one about reentry and affordability for people moving out of the criminal justice system back into the community but don’t have the support they need to do that successfully. These are things that, taken out of national context, are often in the news, are highly politicized—I think people’s interest in that is definitely connected to the fervor felt pre-election and post-election. I also think that people are actively seeking ways that they can engage themselves in a meaningful and productive way.

How did you end up working at the Community Engagement Center? Did you grow up in Austin or go to UT?

I am a native Austinite, born and raised here. I did not go to college here—I went to school in Massachusetts—Williams College. I came back to Austin and worked in Public Affairs and Public Relations, and then I went to graduate school at UT at the LBJ School in Public Policy. I was offered a fellowship—a Graduate Assistant position in the Division of Diversity in Community Engagement. While I was in school, and prior to that, I was really involved in community work focused on social advocacy—particularly to underserved communities of color. The work that I did while I was a graduate student was primarily focused in documenting stories of the integration of the first black students into UT. That turned into a project and then a book.  

Culminating all of those experiences, the Community Engagement Center had been without a Director for about a year, so they were looking for someone to come in and provide infrastructure. When I went into my second year of graduate school, the position was offered to me, and I actually took it before I graduated. I have been the Director here for a little over a year.

Clearly your research is intrinsically linked to community engagement and public scholarship already. How has working on the specific Front Porch Gatherings project and Community Engagement Center contributed to your research, professional development, or the kinds of projects you want to do in the future?

Lately what I consider to be my purpose is being a bridge-builder and reconciling fractured community relationships. Especially having grown up in this city—and as amazing a city as I think it is and all the things it has given to me and others—I still feel like there is a façade around Austin as being progressive and liberal that oftentimes masks a very inconsistent reality of problems and inequities of the city, being one of the most economically segregated cities in the country, and the historical narrative around segregation in this city that for some people is still very much a reality in terms of where resources are and where they are not. I see that and know how very much it is still a part of our stories, however we have not always had—and I don’t think we still do across the board—an understanding that we are not as cognizant as we should be at a systematic, institutional level of how these things are continuing to build inequity and division in our community.

For me, the Front Porch Gathering is a microcosmic example of what can happen when we allow our history, our stories, and our lived experiences to provide understanding and context of how we can move forward in rectifying particular broken practices or policies. The point of Front Porch Gatherings is not necessarily to come up with solutions, but instead to be a stepping stone in shifting that policy or abandoning that particular practice. For me, it has reinforced that as a practice of something not just tangible but productive—creating time and space for people to share their lived experiences, and doing it in a constructive manner. We are very particular about the questions we ask and where we bring our conversations, and if we could do that on a city level, on a national level, then we would probably make headway—at least a little bit quicker than we are doing.

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Do your great-great-great-grandparents remember where they were on the evening of April 14, 1865? Though this may not be a question most of us ask ourselves, it is one that might be answered by exploring the digital archives of the Remembering Lincoln project. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln left a mark not only on the fabric of American history but on the memories of those who lived during this historic event. Much like the narratives that now define the tragedies like the John F. Kennedy’s assassination and September 11th, oral histories are integral to understanding the history of the Civil War, Antebellum America, and Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Ford’s Theatre has been collecting and publishing archival materials pertaining to this historic event. Newspaper articles and personal letters from 1865–66 are juxtaposed with later historical narratives to present a complex resource for exploring the memory of Lincoln’s assassination. The project began in October 2013 with a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Ford’s Theatre worked with a variety of institutions, researchers, educators, and scholars to put together the digital archive. In addition to digitizing and publishing a searchable archive of materials related to Lincoln’s death, the Remembering Lincoln project provides resources for educators to teach with the materials.

http://rememberinglincoln.fords.org/

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The ever-shifting positions of the planets and stars scattered across the night sky have invited the curiosity of their onlookers since the age of antiquity. They have acted as tools of navigation for travelers and as guidance for astrologers. Modern astronomy developed over centuries, searching for clues into the nature of the universe, matter, and the origins of sentient life. In the wake of the limits of even the most expansive studies of our astronomers, mysteries of the cosmos abound. Dreams of distant galaxies have inspired writers, artists, and pop-cultural icons ranging from H.G. Wells to Carl Sagan to Gene Roddenberry. The facts, fictions, and mysteries outer space hold intrigue for people far beyond Astronomy’s scholars and practitioners.

At the University of Texas at Austin, the Astronomy department opens its telescopes for public viewing on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. At these Star Parties, Education, Outreach, and Visitor Program Coordinator Lara Eakins and student volunteers set up telescopes for viewing constellations, galaxies, the moon, and planets, special celestial events—whatever is visible from the UT campus on a given evening. Such events help non-scientists—and future scientists!—to learn astronomy through experience. Facilitators parse basic concepts, fun facts, common misconceptions, and that which is still unknown about the field of astronomy. In addition to scheduled Star Parties, the Astronomy department goes to schools and leads special workshops for youth groups, new and prospective UT students, and other community organizations. I spoke with Lara Eakins to learn more about UT-Austin’s Star Parties.

1. What comprises your role in the Astronomy department, and how did you end up working there?

I came to UT as Freshman majoring in Astronomy in 1990 and graduated in 1994. While I was a student, I was a member of the Astronomy Students Association, which started my Freshman year and is still going strong, and I did some outreach events then. Some of that was just helping with the film series (and I mean that literally—we were showing 16mm films), and sometimes it was going out to schools with telescopes. We didn’t do nearly as much of it back then as the students in the group do now.

I was originally going to go to graduate school at the University of Florida, but it didn’t work out, so I stayed at UT part time in my undergraduate research job for a year and worked retail part-time to make ends meet. In 1995 the Astronomy Outreach and Education Office position opened up, and they decided to make it a full-time position, so I applied for and got the job. And I’ve been here ever since!

The nature of my job has changed quite a bit over the years though. I still manage the teaching demo equipment, but the days of helping professors choose slides for their lectures and replacing overhead projector bulbs are long gone! I still run the Wednesday night star parties, of course, and I do field trips for local school groups. I also help out at things like Explore UT. I used to do a lot more things like elementary school science nights and career days myself, but as time has gone on more undergrad and grad students and postdocs have come to me about helping out with things like that, so I mainly just organize things now. I still go out myself from time to time, like when my old elementary school was looking for someone to come talk about astronomy. I couldn’t resist that! I also help out at Astronomy on Tap (which isn’t officially sponsored by UT, but it is run by astronomy postdocs and grad students).

Over the past few years, I’ve had to take on more administrative duties, so it’s great that we have so many people volunteering to go out to schools and do other programs that I don’t have the time to cover myself anymore.

2. Can you talk a little bit about what happens at Star Parties?

We’re pretty informal at our star parties—we just start out with the telescope on an object and people line up and come through and observe. I tell them a little about what they are seeing and then answer questions. How many things we see can depend on what’s up—and bright enough to see in the middle of Austin!—as well as the size of the crowd.

3. How did the Star Parties get started, and what do they look like today?

I’m not sure exactly how the star parties at Painter Hall got started, but I know they were already pretty well established by the 1950s. As best I understand, the Wednesday night star parties at Robert Lee Moore Hall originally started on the 14th-floor roof area with small telescopes during the 1985-1986 apparition of Halley’s Comet. I think part of it was because of the large crowds at Painter, and the department wanted to give more people opportunities to see it. I’m not sure how the decision was made to keep the RLM ones after Halley was gone, but I suspect it was still drawing enough interest that it was worth keeping that additional night.

The move to the 16-inch telescope at RLM happened in 1998, and I was involved in that. The telescope was originally purchased in the late 1970s and then had an upgrade/update in 1998. We began using it for public viewing at that point because it was finally a reliable telescope! Prior to that, the telescope was mostly used for a few undergraduate projects and an undergraduate majors observing lab and had a very wonky drive system. It was also nice for me, since it meant that I didn’t have to carry telescopes onto the 14th floor roof and set them up manually.

3. Who participates in the Star Parties? Who leads them, and who comprises the audience?

We have all kinds of people and groups come to our public viewing. We get a fair amount from the general public, especially in the summers. Sometimes they are families with kids interested
in astronomy, but some are just people who heard about them and decided to visit. During the long semesters, we get a lot of students from our introductory astronomy classes coming for their courses and some students who visit because the star parties are on the “Gems of the University” list.

We also get groups like high school students taking astronomy, groups of local schools, and Girl and Boy Scout packs.

I run the Wednesday nights, and we currently have two astronomy undergraduates sharing Painter Hall telescope duties. In the past we’ve also had graduate students running those nights.

4. How has the project evolved or expanded over time?

When I took over the Wednesdays at RLM in 1995, the summer viewing was pretty slow, and a lot of the time had pretty low attendance. We don’t tend to advertise a whole lot, since when we
do get some publicity, the star parties can get then get very, very crowded. But about five years ago we started getting more exposure in lists of “Fun Free Things to do in Austin” and other similar things, as well as some coverage in the Austin American Statesman and Austin Chronicle, and that really bumped our summer numbers up! We also have some groups in the summer that come from various camps that UT hosts over the summer. Our undergrads also host special star parties for Freshman Orientation.

5. What kind of feedback have you gotten about the Star Parties?

People really seem to enjoy them, and I’m proud to say, we’ve won two Austin Chronicle “Best of Austin” awards (Critics Choice 2010 and 2013). I have people who come back too, which is always a good sign that we’re doing something that they enjoy. I’ve had some regulars who have been coming back once or twice a semester over many years now! One frequent comment I hear is people say, “thank you all for offering this,” which is great feedback that tells us that people really appreciate that we give them these opportunities to look through our telescopes.

6. How has working with the public influenced your own scholarship and/or teaching?

I don’t do any formal teaching or research now, but fielding questions from kids and the general public is great for keeping you on your toes! It’s also a good way to gauge what people are taking from science stories that they hear in the media, as well as some of the not-so-scientific things they read on the internet. I’ve ended up learning a lot about some of the astronomy-themed conspiracy theories that have popped up over the years, which often come from people’s lack of more than a cursory understanding of astronomy. The peak of this was around the so-called “Mayan Apocalypse” of 2012 where some claimed that a rogue planet would crash into the Earth or flip the Earth, etc. There was a lot of misunderstanding of how solar system astronomy works in that!

http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/public/parties.html

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Some people may not consider history to be the sexiest topic, but for podcast hosts Lauren Gutterman and Gillian Frank, the histories of sex and sexuality are unique keys to understanding both the past and the present. Sexing History brings these lesser-known stories of history to life through short-form podcast storytelling rather than academic books and articles.

The show is co-hosted by Lauren Gutterman, Assistant Professor of American Studies, History, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Gillian Frank, Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion. Through collaboration with a larger community of scholars of sexuality, Gutterman and Frank present engaging narratives about everything from Evangelical women’s sexual “marriage manuals” to the story of an African-American doctor who was convicted of manslaughter for performing an abortion post-Roe vs. Wade. I spoke with Gutterman and Frank to learn more about Sexing History, the scholarship that developed its stories, and the role of the podcast format for bringing history to the general public.

TiP: Could you talk a bit about how Sexing History got started? How did you come to decide on the podcast as a format for this public history project?

GF and LG: We both love listening to podcasts, and we saw a need and opportunity for a podcast focusing on the history of sexuality in the US. As editors at Notches: (Re)marks on the History of Sexuality, an international history of sexuality blog, we had already been editing and writing short pieces on sexuality history for a public audience. We thought that the podcast format might allow us to reach even greater numbers of people.

This past summer we settled on the name Sexing History, designed a logo, and began establishing our online presence and social media profile. We also began working with a talented team of producers on the project: historians Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui and Devin McGeehan Muchmore. Allen Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation generously provided us with the necessary start-up funds to purchase recording and editing equipment, and we were able to launch Sexing History this fall.

TiP:  What are some of the goals that you have set out for Sexing History? What are the most important tasks you hope to accomplish by engaging with the history of sexuality in this format? How do you go about selecting topics for your podcast that speak to contemporary interests and concerns?

GF and LG: Sexing History aims to provide listeners with an historical context for contemporary debates over sexuality. In a twenty-to-thirty-minute podcast we are limited in the terrain we can cover. So we try to take a close look at a particular individual or story as a way of exploring much broader social issues. For example, our first episode on Aaron Fricke’s 1980 legal battle to attend high school prom in Rhode Island with a same-sex date addresses broader issues including queer youth activism and social anxiety around young people’s sexuality.

We brainstorm potential topics as a group and focus on stories that allow us to add something new to the conversation. We have focused on issues that interest us personally and that speak to the present in some way. Our episode on Dr. Kenneth Edelin, an African American doctor who was convicted of murder for performing an entirely legal second-trimester abortion after Roe v. Wade, has perhaps the clearest resonance with the present, as the House just recently passed a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks, and thus criminalize doctors who performed such procedures. This newest bill directly reflects the ways that the anti-abortion movement shifted tactics after Roe v. Wade, to focus on restricting the availability of abortion rather than directly overturning the Supreme Court’s ruling.

TiP: Who are you trying to reach with this project? Do you foresee collaborating with students in the future?

GF and LG: We’re trying to reach the widest possible audience. We hope that our podcast attracts listeners who are intellectually curious and interested in powerful stories about the past that help us understand our present moment better. We already collaborate with students. Our producers Devin and Saniya are currently completing PhD programs, and we welcome pitches from students for story ideas.

TiP: Have you gotten any feedback on Sexing History just yet? If so, what are people’s reactions to it?

GF and LG: So far the feedback online and in person has been supportive and enthusiastic. We’ve heard from historians, journalists, and everyday folks who like listening to podcasts that our episodes have sounded professional and that our stories are compelling.

TiP: How has researching, writing, and performing for a podcast informed your own work?

LG: As a teacher and a scholar I care a great deal about storytelling, about finding ways to make the past relevant and accessible and engaging. But working on Sexing History has helped me to think more precisely about storytelling techniques like building a narrative arc, providing context without losing the through-line, crafting a satisfying conclusion. I haven’t had an opportunity yet to apply these new skills to my academic writing, but I expect that the experience I’ve gained working on Sexing History will make be a better writer generally.

GF: I echo everything Lauren says above. I would also invert the question and say that our own work thus far made creating Sexing History possible. Lauren and I both have written for popular audiences and have experience translating difficult or obscure ideas for audiences outside of the academy. We also have experiences working together and with a larger team on joint projects. Whereas much of academic work is solitary, we’ve thrived on collaboration.

TiP: Do you have any advice for students and/or scholars who are interested in expanding their research to engage a broader audience?

LG: Try to avoid academic jargon. Know that in writing for a broader audience you will have to streamline your story or issue. And cut out a lot of information that you might include in an academic text.

GF: Remember what made you fall in love with your research. Bring that excitement and energy to your writing. If you can highlight the stakes of your scholarship—why it matters and why it excites you—you’re already halfway there.

https://soundcloud.com/user-197021129

https://www.sexinghistory.com/

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Ajay Singh Chaudhary taught the first course of what would become the country-wide nonprofit interdisciplinary teaching and research institute, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, in New York City in 2012. This single course about Plato and Aristotle, initiated by a recent Columbia University Comparative Literature PhD, has grown into a national organization with active groups in Philadelphia and New Jersey and seeding schools across the midwestern United States. BISR offers rigorous, sliding-scale, four-week-long continuing education courses on a variety of topics to members of the communities where satellites of the Institute are located. Classes are taught by a combination of faculty members; some, like Chaudhary, have devoted their academic careers to the project, whereas others teach at BISR in addition to appointments at Hunter College, Columbia University, University of Denver, University of Cincinnati, and Manhattan College, amongst other institutions.

BISR takes its name from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the pre-WWII Germany research institute and free school associated with Marxist cultural theorists including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. This inspiration imbues BISR’s courses on subjects as diverse as Enlightenment Philosophy, Classics, Art History, History of Science, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Economics with a leftist ethos that presents education as something accessible and enjoyable for people of all ages, within and beyond the academy. Current and upcoming course titles include “Edward Said: Culture and Empire,” “Alternative Economies: Market Socialism,” “Critical Global Health,” and “Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah, Messianism, and History.” In addition to the Institute’s central courses, BISR runs courses under a Community Initiative, which pairs with New-York-based nonprofit organizations providing services for homeless, low-income, or formerly incarcerated New Yorkers to provide free humanities education for these underserved residents. BISR also teaches outside of organized classes by presenting faculty research for the general public through a blog called Tzeitung and the Podcast for Social Research.

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