Detroit Humanities Hub
Welcome! The Detroit Humanities Hub is a public humanities initiative of the WSU Humanities Center that encourages collaborations between humanists in the university and the community.
Overview
The Hub provides financial and practical support for humanities programs that connect the university community with the public along one of five thematic “spokes”:
- Arts and cultural heritage: Exhibitions, film screening series, reading groups at libraries, public art projects, historic preservation projects, and more
- Community activism: Protest art, oral histories of Detroit activism, facilitation of community-designed urban planning, graphic design for nonprofit groups, and more
- Education: In-school K-12 enrichment activities, curricular development, K-12 summer and after-school programming, tutoring initiatives, and more
- Entrepreneurship and industry: Assistance with project design, marketing, research, user-experience design, and tech writing for tech start-ups, small businesses, minority-owned businesses, and more
- Medical humanities: Art and music therapy programs, reading groups at senior centers, creative writing workshops for health workers, dramatic performances at hospitals, and more
The Hub creates opportunities for local residents to share their expertise with faculty, staff, and students, and vice versa. In doing so, the Hub seeks to put WSU’s knowledge to work for and with the community, not just in it.
Aims
- To fulfill the university’s mission to serve the Detroit community
- To redefine the urban humanities (a field at the intersection of design, history, urban planning, and cultural studies)
- To offer a new vision for the relevance of the humanities to the 21st century