The Humanities Institute (THI) at UC Santa Cruz was honored as one of the two inaugural winners of the “Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Community” at the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) annual meeting in May 2024. The award was presented by the Public Humanities Network at CHCI, a global community of centers and institutes engaged in building research through partnership, to recognize and celebrate examples of exceptional public humanities work.
THI nominated its project, Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), a community-driven public history initiative to preserve and uplift stories of Filipino migration and labor in the city of Watsonville and greater Pajaro Valley. WIITH started in fall 2020 with meetings between Dioscoro “Roy” Respino Recio, Jr., founder of the Watsonville community organization The Tobera Project, and Principal Investigators Kathleen “Kat” Cruz Gutierrez, Assistant Professor of History, and Steve McKay, Professor of Sociology. Over the last four years, THI has helped launch and grow this collaborative project, providing seed funding and research development support, creating positions for undergraduate and graduate fellows, and connecting the team with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH), among other support.
As THI Faculty Director Pranav Anand explains, “At its heart, WIITH beats with a thorough-going commitment to collaborative and equal partnerships, an ethic readily evident in the ways that researchers from UCSC and the Tobera Project work together, but which has also translated into an innovative mentorship structure as well as a suite of educational and public programming that connect the team’s research with our communities. Taken as a whole, WIITH seamlessly blends the three pillars of our institute’s work – research excellence, student success, and public engagement – and we have been honored to help the WIITH team develop such a compelling project.”
In the award letter, members of the Public Humanities Network at CHCI noted that the committee was particularly impressed with the way THI transformed a humanities center to a center of and within public scholarship; WIITH’s deep and thoughtful discussions with communities to choose topics together; THI and WIITH’s resilience and flexibility along the way; the impressive reach of THI’s program; the clear intentions and outcomes; and the team’s thoughtful reflections on the lessons learned.
Currently, THI is supporting WIITH with Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley, an exhibition at the MAH that includes materials from the project’s first-ever Digital Archive on Filipino Americans in the Pajaro Valley and works by contemporary artists. Over the last year, THI managed WIITH’s prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Exhibitions Planning grant to launch Sowing Seeds and THI featured the project at the institute’s annual UCSC Night at the Museum in June 2024. The exhibition complements other public history initiatives at WIITH, including the team’s work to create high school-level Ethnic Studies lesson plans and K-12 educational resources based on their original research.
During the CHCI panel to receive the award, THI’s Research Programs and Communications Director, Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell talked about WIITH’s methodologies and outcomes and shared how the project is situated in THI’s strategy for public humanities more generally. WIITH centers community members as co-creators in the production of knowledge during the research. Faculty and students have critically examined their institutional positions and distinguished WIITH’s digital repository from the traditional archive by engaging iteratively with narrators, who have co-developed object descriptions, selected the objects to archive, and maintained physical ownership of their material. Dunkell described how community members, researchers, and program staff at THI all bring distinct strengths to the project and the team has built a strong bond with the Filipino American community in the Pajaro Valley through meaningful relationships and trust.
Another aspect Dunkell highlighted in her remarks at CHCI, is WIITH’s model of multi-tiered mentorship. Faculty have worked closely with graduate students and undergraduate students to continually develop their community-engaged research approach. Since the project started, students have been involved in a range of activities, including conducting oral history interviews, archiving objects, engaging in curatorial research, and developing curricular materials. These opportunities have been supported by THI’s Public Fellows program and the Humanities Division’s Employing Humanities initiative, which have provided students’ with fellowships and professional development support.
THI and WIITH are serving as consultants for numerous other public humanities and community-engaged research projects, including sharing lessons-learned and strategies for best practices. The award from CHCI has helped bolster these efforts and bring this work to a global audience, as THI continues to set a high standard for public scholarship and campus and community partnerships, demonstrating the profound positive impact that humanities research can have both locally and worldwide.
Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley is currently at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. On the final day of the exhibition, Sunday August 4th from 2:30-4:00 pm, WIITH is hosting a Filipino American literature reading with award-winning poets and authors. Learn more here.
