Public Scholarship and the Work of Democracy
Bridging the gap between academic research and public understanding
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to be part of the inaugural meeting of the Chicago Public Scholars Consortium at Loyola University Chicago. It was one of those rare gatherings that felt both energizing and grounding– a group of thoughtful, committed colleagues coming together to share ideas, exchange resources, and imagine what it might look like to strengthen this work collectively. We talked about collaborations, institutional challenges, and why this work matters.
And then, after I returned home, I was chatting with someone who is not an academic. As I described the gathering and the work we had been discussing, I used the phrase “public scholarship.”
They paused. “What do you mean by public scholarship?” they asked.
It was a simple question, but an important one, helping me see that “public scholarship” isn’t always an intelligible term. It can sound abstract, even opaque, like something that belongs to the very academic world it’s trying to reach beyond. Public scholarship is foundational to the Institute for Diversity and Civic Life, and I realized that if the language we use to describe it isn’t immediately clear, then neither is the work itself.
So what is public scholarship? And why does it matter right now?
Public scholarship is a practice of taking knowledge created in academic spaces and making it accessible, relevant, and useful beyond those spaces. It’s about sharing ideas in ways that more people can engage, such as through public writing, storytelling, podcasts, community conversations, exhibitions, and collaborative projects. And this kind of work often means thinking differently about language, audience, and format.
At its best, public scholarship is about connection because it creates pathways between research and lived experience. Public scholarship invites more people into conversations about the issues that shape our collective lives.This work can also entail building knowledge with communities, not just sharing articles, books, or think pieces after the fact. Instead, public scholarship often involves collaborative, community-driven projects that begin with the questions people are already asking about their own lives, histories, and futures.
At IDCL, our mission is to build more democratic spaces through storytelling, research, and education. That means we spend a lot of time thinking about how knowledge works in public life– how it is created, who has access to it, and how it shapes conversations about identity, belonging, and difference.
Our team members come from academic backgrounds. We draw from academic scholars in the humanities–collaborating with colleagues from fields like history, religious studies, communications, and cultural studies– to focus on understanding how people make meaning, how power operates, and how histories of exclusion continue to shape the present. We know these topics are deeply relevant to public life. But too often, the scholarship remains confined to academic journals, books, and conferences, circulating within a relatively small and specialized audience.Public scholarship is a way of expanding beyond those traditional forums.
At IDCL, we think of all our work as contributing to public knowledge– especially knowledge about democracy and civic life in Texas. So we also have a lot of conversations with other scholars about what it means to do publicly engaged work. This has led us to one of our current storytelling projects: Scholar Stories, an oral history project that is part of the broader Publicly Engaged Religion Mapping Project. The name might sound a bit niche, but the goal is straightforward: to better understand how scholars, particularly those in religion and the humanities, are working to engage non-academic audiences and contribute to public conversations.
We’ve been interviewing scholars from across the country who are doing this work in creative ways. Some produce podcasts, write for broad, non-academic audiences, collaborate with community groups, and develop projects that help people make sense of complex and often contentious issues. We ask them about their intellectual journeys: how they entered academia, what questions drive their work, and what they have discovered through their research. And we also ask how they came to public scholarship. Because for many, that shift is not built into their training. Public engagement is often something academics figure out later, on their own, and sometimes in spite of institutional structures that don’t always reward it.
Doing public scholarship requires a different orientation, pushing scholars to think differently about the methods and the objectives of creating knowledge. Some of the scholars we’ve interviewed aren’t just producing work that they share publicly. They’re collaborating with communities to shape the research from the beginning. This kind of community-engaged work recognizes that knowledge doesn’t just live in universities, it also exists in lived experience, local contexts, and the expertise of communities themselves. Public scholarship allows us to think differently about participation, especially who gets to be included in the creation and circulation of knowledge.
We are living in a moment characterized by the repression of knowledge, where higher education and research are increasingly under attack. We’ve seen terms like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” politicized and stripped of meaning while efforts to teach about race, culture, and inequality are restricted or defunded. At the same time, public conversations about identity, belonging, and religion are becoming more polarized, distorted, and susceptible to misinformation. In this environment, the gap between academic knowledge and public understanding becomes even wider.
If we want a healthy democratic society, we need informed citizens. But this requires more than just access to information. When people don’t have access to nuanced, accessible information produced through rigorous research, it leaves space for oversimplified narratives, fear-based rhetoric, and ideologies that rely on flattening complexity and excluding difference.
Public scholarship is one way of pushing back against that. It is a crucial tool for building a more informed and engaged public because academics are more than just experts on particular topics. They’re good at research, problem solving, and analysis. Public scholarship means they can bring these skills to broader publics to help people make sense of the world in informed, nuanced, and thoughtful ways. Together, scholars can join with the public to think about how to solve the problems that impact our communities.
And at IDCL, this is central to how we imagine building a more democratic, more pluralistic world.
Interested in perusing some public scholarship? Here are some resources and projects that center on understanding religion in US communities.
Check out the Public Religion Research Institute, a non-profit that conducts extensive quantitative research and analysis on religion in the US. PRRI’s founder Robert Jones also has a popular Substack.
If you want to know more about the impact of Christian nationalism in Texas, David Brockman is a go-to public scholar.
If you’re a podcast listener, Axis Mundi Media features a catalogue of podcast series on topics related to religion in the US, all led by public scholars.
Another podcast I love is “When We All Get to Heaven,” a documentary project that tells the story of one of the first gay-positive churches, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, and how it faced the personal, social, and political trials of the AIDS epidemic.
If you want a podcast that will help you better understand how religion shapes American society, check out “Keeping It 100: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion Podcast.”
And if you prefer videos, check out Religion for Breakfast on YouTube.