The Humanities Truck Takes Academia on the Road

Understanding the human experience is a core mission of the humanities at institutions of higher learning. Yet, researchers often fail to engage with many of the marginalized groups already underrepresented in academia—leaving the scholarly record incomplete and limiting the scope of this essential work in the humanities. With the Humanities Truck, American University (AU) brings its approach to collaborative scholarship off campus, onto the streets, and into conversation with real communities around Washington, DC. 

The Humanities Truck is a fully customized delivery truck that serves as a mobile platform for collaborative, community-based research, scholarship, and exhibitions around the DC metro area (DMV). Both the interior and exterior of the Truck were designed to support multimedia exhibits, with screens, speakers, and a magnetized exterior that enable easy installation of the exhibits and facilitate interactive workshops. Recent work includes a project to record songs written by incarcerated musicians, filmmaking workshops for youth, and a project tracing refugee art and politics in the DMV.

The Humanities Truck is one important facet of the university’s mission as an “anchor institution” for the DMV, committed to supporting publicly engaged research that addresses the region’s most pressing issues. The Truck travels to local events, community organizations, and everyday public spaces across the city, bringing multimedia pop-up exhibits, speaker series, performances, and other innovative models for presenting humanities scholarship. Since its launch in 2018, the Truck has held more than 260 events, connected directly with nearly 30,000 community members, and established a substantial digital archive that has been viewed nearly 300,000 times.

What makes the project so much more than just a vehicle for mobile pop-up exhibits is its capacity for reciprocal knowledge production. The Truck doesn’t just set up exhibits at local events for passive viewing or capture data for researchers to interpret back on campus. Rather, as a mobile workshop, recording studio, and makerspace, the Truck creates a two-way street for humanities scholarship. AU faculty and student fellows bring these tools into the spaces where DC communities live and work, inviting residents to share their lived experiences and become active participants in the university’s research. 

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the Truck took on a new role as professors began using the Truck to deliver food to vulnerable communities around the DMV. Although they initially were hesitant to conduct research in the midst of this crisis, they discovered people in the community were interested in the project’s focus and expertise in the humanities. The project also offered an ideal way to engage communities outdoors in ways that aligned with public health guidelines. In addition to delivering more than 2,500 meals, the Humanities Truck team conducted about 150 interviews, held community forums, and produced several documentaries—creating a real-time, on-the-ground record of the nation’s capital amidst a global pandemic, a contentious presidential election, and the historic Black Lives Matter movement. 

Some faculty members initially pushed back about whether the humanities were a valuable use of DMV residents’ time and resources, with so many experiencing mass unemployment and significant economic deprivation. Director of the Humanities Truck Project Dan Kerr, whose work has long challenged the boundaries between humanitarian work and the humanities, argued instead that the DMV needed the Truck now more than ever to make sense of the unprecedented events unfolding before them. He explains that “if we want to change things ever, then we have to be able to stop and think and reflect about what those things are and how they're impacting us and what we want to do about them.” 

Delivering critical services alongside humanities scholarship builds on Kerr's previous work as a graduate student in Cleveland, OH, interviewing the unhoused recipients of a weekly meal-sharing program. Kerr found that participants were interested not just in discussing their own experiences, but also in making sense of “how their personal experiences interrelated with structures of power.” Kerr believes that this meaning-making work is just as essential during moments of crisis—especially given that many of the vulnerable communities the Truck aims to reach may always be in a state of crisis. He says that his primary goal has always been “to figure out how we can engage those communities that aren't traditionally going to museums or coming to university events . . . that is exactly where the Truck is at its best.”   

With renewed funding from Mellon in 2023, AU continues to mobilize and enliven the humanities with new exhibits, events, and research. The team will develop and conduct at least 18 year-long projects, 20 public forums, 50 workshops, and 30 pop-up exhibits across the DMV. Previous and ongoing exhibits and other projects are available for viewing on the Humanities Truck website or through the community archive.