During the rest of this week, as we commemorate Avidly’s second (!) birthday, we’ll be running a selection of pieces on public intellectualism and the public commons. It is often a struggle to connect scholarship– particularly in its usual forms (the peer reviewed article, the monograph)– to the contemporary public sphere. Avidly was born out of a desire to generate these connections, and it has been a successful experiment. But it is not one without its own set of urgent questions. So this week we consider the what, how, and whys of public intellectualism. What counts as such? How is it counted and why?
The pieces we’ll be featuring consider the efficacy of writing itself, the construction of expertise, the role of gossip, community, and disagreement in both academic/intellectual culture, and the (gendered) labors of the public intellectualism. Please join us in thinking these issues through!
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[…] joined the L.A. Review of Books’ “LARB Channels” project, celebrated its second birthday by publishing a series of essays on a topic that is a perennial one on this blog: public […]