Introducing GradSN Blog Series: Pluralizing Engagement and Engaging Pluralities

… “Take me to our early
Years,” my first girlfriend says. “Leave
the windows open for the house sparrow to enter
your dream,” I say ... then I awaken, and no city is in
the city. No “here” except “there.” And no there
but here. If it weren’t for the mirage
I wouldn’t have walked to the seven hills ...
if it weren’t for the mirage!

(In her absence I created her image, 
by Mahmoud Darwish; Translated by Fady Joudah)

Iowa City, where I am writing this piece from, touts itself as the UNESCO City of Literature and it certainly deserves the recognition. The Iowa Summer Writing festival is one of the highlights of being a city of literature, where many people from different walks of life are invited into literary circles, public and paid writing workshops, and reading events. The webpage for the festival explains, “As a writing program, the Festival is proud to belong to Iowa City …. Iowa City has long been a haven for writers, and The University of Iowa our ancestral home.” A program belonging to the city and homed by its university may as well be a beautiful example of a community engaged program of an anchor institution. What is distinct about this example, though, is the plurality of genres and forms of knowledges and writings that are produced. 

Against the exclusionary, and rightly called, disciplinary norms of the academia, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival is inclusive of knowledges that rarely appear in university’s sanctioned peer-reviewed journals, except for quotes and second-degree interpretations of academics. And despite decades of advocating for engaged scholarship, the practice remains marginal and often incapable of leaving the academic genre of writing. One only needs to look into the archives of International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community-Engagement to realize the journal of a flagship organization to advance research on engaged scholarship is no different in its writing genre than most other academic scholarship. 

In introducing the GradSN blog series, I want to think of blogs as this third space of writing where the here or there of community-university become indistinguishable. While a graduate students’ blog, this blog series attempts to acknowledge multiple forms of expression that graduate students from different walks of life produce. Can blogging itself allow for these multiple ways of knowing, being, and writing to find home beyond the confines of academia? What if poems, fictions, academic writings, multimedia and creative forms of expressions, could all have a home in this third space of blogging? What if engaged scholarship could be liberated from its early roots in disciplines, become a practice of freedom in academia? The GradSN blog series is an invitation to write on various aspects of engaged scholarship by honoring the voices of graduate student authors. GradSN members come from different backgrounds and this blog series seeks to reflect such pluralities of forms of writing and thinking and being and knowing. It is for this vision, of multiple forms of knowing and knowledge traditions to co-exist affirmatively, that it will be worth to continue to advocate for engaged scholarship as a movement to transform the academia and its many communities.

Milad Mohebali is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Iowa College of Education, and incoming assistant professor in the Educational Administration department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Milad can be reached at miladmohebali@gmail.com.