Professor Michael Burroughs wins national grant

Grant supports new series of public programs and oral histories on incarceration at the Kegley Institute of Ethics

By California State University, Bakersfield

May 11^th, 2021

The humanities – subjects like history, literature and philosophy – make transformative contributions to our world. When they step beyond the walls of a university, the humanities can enrich public life in unique and vital ways: amplifying unheard or forgotten stories, giving public discourse depth and context, and applying essential insights from the long history of human inquiry.

The Whiting Public Engagement Program (WPEP) is a distinctive national grant founded to champion the public humanities in all forms, and to highlight the roles scholars play in work to deploy the humanities for the public good. Since it began in 2016, the WPEP has given $2.4 million to launch and expand projects in the U.S. and beyond. Winners are selected through a highly competitive process beginning with nomination by a university, scholarly society or state humanities council and proceeding through two further stages of peer review by expert public humanists.

Today WPEP proudly awarded seven $50,000 Fellowships and five $10,000 Seed Grants to a vibrant cross-section of public-humanities collaborations. Their projects draw on topics from the vibrant multi-ethnic history of California’s San Gabriel Valley to the philosophical underpinnings of the criminal justice system, and they use media from traveling exhibitions to K-12 curricula to historical bike tours.

Dr. Michael Burroughs, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Kegley Institute of Ethics at California State University, Bakersfield, will receive $50,000 for Humanities Behind Bars, a series of public programming on mass incarceration and reimagining public safety, bringing together formerly incarcerated scholars, activists and other thought leaders for community dialogue.

Humanities Beyond Bars will also initiate an innovative oral history project focused on formerly incarcerated students, introducing a wider public to their life stories, experiences of re-entry after prison, and their unique successes and challenges while pursuing higher education. The recollections of formerly incarcerated students have never been systematically collected and, thus, this initiative will fill a substantial gap in historical knowledge related to the experiences of formerly incarcerated persons while serving as a central outlet for formerly incarcerated students to tell their stories.

"We are thrilled to support Professor Burroughs, the other 2021-22 Fellows and Seed Grantees, and their collaborators as they infuse the humanities into public culture," the Whiting Foundation wrote in a press release.

In California’s Central Valley, a region with one of the largest incarcerated populations in the country, Dr. Burroughs is leading the Humanities Beyond Bars Project in collaboration with CSU’s Project Rebound and Historical Research Center to deepen understanding of the historical roots of imprisonment and its material and philosophical implications on people who live through it.

“The humanities make a crucial difference for all of us,” said Daniel Reid, executive director of the Whiting Foundation. “These twelve projects – and the many others being led by scholars and other public humanists in every part of the country – will build bridges within and across communities, enrich our understanding and help us interpret the world around us, and make our lives more meaningful through deep context, rich exchange, and careful inquiry.”