If we believe that public scholarship is a condition for informed public discourse and open, democratic societies, what do we do if the conception of the “public” differs from the ways in which people actually engage with information in today’s world?
Rather than understanding public scholarship as a type of contribution to a “marketplace of ideas” in which research is made accessible to a broad audience, we seek a form of public scholarship that goes beyond public relations and engages in community-building as part of the project of knowledge-dissemination. In this context, public scholarship becomes a political, ethical, and social commitment towards the creation of a public sphere that is not empty or abstract but concrete and present.
Such a project entails its own set of challenges and contradictions, especially relating to politics, history, culture, identity, and language. This workshop aims to open up these questions, drawing on the example of community-based adult education taking place at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture in Vancouver, BC.
A light lunch will be served. This event is co-sponsored Jean Monnet Center of Excellence in Critical Infrastructure Studies and the Public Humanities Hub.
Bio
Adi Burton is an interdisciplinary scholar and community organizer. As the Co-Executive Director of the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture in Vancouver, she works to open spaces of learning and thinking critically about Jewish cultures and histories in a community setting. She completed her PhD at UBC in the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program in 2022. Her scholarly work draws on phenomenology, political theory, and philosophy of education to face the ethical and political challenges of anti-genocide activism, focusing on the concept of responsibility after the Holocaust (with particular reference to Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas). From 2007 to 2022, Burton was an active member of STAND Canada, a national, youth-led advocacy organization working to make ending and preventing genocide a cornerstone of Canadian foreign and domestic policy.
Itamar Manoff is Co-Executive Director of the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. He received his PhD from the UBC Department of Educational Studies in 2025.
Drawing on scholarly discussions in second language acquisition research, educational ethics, pragmatism and phenomenology, Manoff’s scholarly work highlights the existential and ethical dimensions of committing, and learning from, one’s errors in the context of coming into a new language. Working in the field of community-based adult education for over 15 years, Manoff has led and developed educational programming that focuses on social justice, cultural renewal and language education.
He teaches English, Hebrew, and Yiddish courses with community organizations and universities, and is the co-founder of This is Not an Ulpan, a grassroots community-based cooperative language school in Israel/Palestine based on the principles of critical pedagogy.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
