How do we create learning communities that offer participants the agency to thrive? This is one of the core questions we’ve been exploring with our research partners at the University of British Columbia through Beyond the Academy: Professional Agency and Learning in Virtual Contexts. 

In August 2022, Hikma co-facilitated a virtual dialogue at which our research partners, Dr. Jillianne Code and Dr. Andrea Webb, shared emerging insights from their quantitative and qualitative work and invited feedback on how best to translate these findings into tools and resources. 

Through this process, PhD alumni, grad students, scholars, professional society representatives, and higher ed leaders from the US and Canada shared an expansive list of links that they have found most helpful in supporting graduate students and reimagining the future of scholarship. 

In this post, we’ve synthesized the list of resources crowdsourced from those who joined our dialogue. We are grateful that you joined us and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Guidelines, Groups, and Collections:

• The new MLA Guidelines for Public Humanities emphasizes the ethical questions that arise in community-engaged scholarly work.
• Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) have brought out an Ally and organization toolkits, soon a disability, inclusive language, and BIPOC.
• Imagining America brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. 
• Community-Based Research Canada is a national champion and facilitator of community-based research excellence, a research approach addressing challenging societal problems.
• National Humanities Alliance: Humanities for All showcases a large collection of higher ed-based public humanities projects.
• Humanities & Public Life Book Series at the University of Iowa provides a space for publishing about publicly engaged humanities scholarship.

Graduate Programs and Initiatives:

• Public Scholars Initiative at the University of British Columbia reimagines PhD pathways using broader conceptions of scholarship and scholarly products.
• Humanities for the Public Good at the University of Iowa aims to prepare students to center equity, inclusion, and social justice in any career.
• Public humanities spotlight features various public scholarship work being done at the City University New York Graduate Center.
• Next-Generation Dissertations explore new models of scholarly work.
• Digital Dissertations resource page at City University New York.
• Grad Career Consortium aims to build a diverse community of professionals and empower them to advance the field of graduate and postdoctoral career and professional development

Conferences and Forums:

• National Humanities Conference brings together representatives from colleges, universities, state humanities councils, cultural institutions, and other community-based organizations to explore approaches to deepening the public’s engagement with the humanities.
• Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS). The topic of the 2022 conference was "The Future of Graduate Education: Toward Local and Global Relevance."
• Research Impact Canada KMB Forum an emerging forum that is open to critical and constructive scholarship.

To learn more about this study, and watch a replay of the virtual dialogue, visit www.hikma.studio/research. 

“Beyond the Academy: Professional Agency and Learning in Virtual Contexts” is a research partnership between Hikma and the University of British Columbia funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). 

Research Team: Dr. Jillianne Code (Principal Investigator, UBC), Dr. Andrea Webb (Co-Investigator, UBC), Dr. Erica Machulak (Co-Investigator, Hikma), Kieran Forde (Research Assistant, UBC).