Press Retreat Inspires a "Sense of Possibilities"
In late July, Humanities Without Walls hosted a two-day University Presses Retreat at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This event convened faculty and students, community partners, and six university press editors for a series of presentations and conversations to explore how HWW-funded community-engaged research projects might find a home in book format.
Now in its final years of funding, HWW’s Grand Research Challenge supports community-engaged research in the humanities for the faculty, students, and community partners of HWW consortium institutions. Each of the eleven project teams funded by the latest two rounds of the Grand Research Challenge have demonstrated a commitment to HWW’s guiding methodologies of “reciprocity and redistribution,” which emphasize equitable research collaborations oriented around the needs and expertise of community partners.
The four research teams who participated in this retreat are each focused on different critical project goals: documenting the health and cultural impacts of Long COVID, designing curriculum for community education in the wake of mass school closures, Indigenous American cultural revitalization, and urban environmental justice movements.
While these projects differ in scope and ambition, their shared methodological commitments aim to engage non-university collaborators in genuinely equal partnerships that are not unidirectional or faculty-centered (i.e., from campus outward, or hierarchical in ways that privilege presumptively white western scholarly expertise). In working in reciprocal relationship with community organizations, many Principal Investigators of Grand Research Challenge projects have discovered that their non-university partners see as much value in preserving their work between book covers as faculty do.
As described by Teresa Mangum, Professor Emeritus and an editor of the Humanities in Public Life series at the University of Iowa Press, the driving question behind this retreat was, “How can one capture the evolving process, the people—which might include not only several scholars and community experts but whole communities—the temporalities, and the diverse outcomes of such projects?”
Asif Wilson, an Assistant Professor in the University Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Education, participated in the HWW Press Retreat with his Grand Research Challenge project partner, Ms. Irene Robinson, founder of Women and Mothers of Multiple Colors, and one of the Dyett Twelve hunger strikers.
“Ms. Irene and I have been dreaming of writing a book length manuscript together but weren't quite sure what that involved and what presses would be open to our unique collaborative relationship,” says Professor Wilson. “The HWW Presses Retreat not only provided us with a clear and accessible process on how to submit a proposal but also created a relational milieu to build the necessary partnerships with a number of academic presses.”
Four presses from among HWW consortium institutions participated: editors from the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern University. The retreat program was designed for an audience of varying familiarity with publishing. Each respective press team presented on important aspects of the process: stages of book production; the different aims and audiences of academic, trade, crossover, and open access books; financial, contracting, and permissions considerations; and writing collaboratively across diverse project teams.
“Between the opening sessions, packed with clear-eyed advice about the needs and constraints of publication and through the brainstorming conversations about ways to turn those potential limits into affordances, everyone who attended gained a rich, catalytic sense of possibilities,” Mangum observed.
HWW plans to host a second Presses Retreat in Chicago in July 2025, with an updated program including presenters from university as well as other kinds of presses (i.e. tribal presses, independent publishers, trade presses, and others).