Public humanities and the illusion of engagement

By Noel Galon de Leon

There is a comforting illusion that the humanities become “public” the moment a museum opens its doors for free, an art exhibit is installed in a mall, a heritage house welcomes visitors, or a literary festival gathers audiences in a beautifully restored plaza. We often congratulate ourselves for having brought culture closer to the people simply because people were physically present. But is presence the same as participation? Is attendance equivalent to engagement?

These are questions that deserve to be asked, especially in a place like Iloilo where heritage, literature, food culture, architecture, and the arts have become increasingly visible in recent years.

Public Humanities, as understood by scholars such as Jill Lepore, Barbara Franco, and the National Humanities Alliance, is not merely about bringing the humanities outside the university. It is about creating meaningful encounters where communities become active participants in interpreting, questioning, preserving, and reshaping culture rather than remaining passive consumers of curated knowledge. Public Humanities is therefore less about exhibition and more about conversation; less about displaying culture than democratizing the authority to define it.

Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly uneasy every time another exhibition opens with elegant speeches, glossy invitation cards, polished exhibition panels, and photographs destined for social media. There is nothing inherently wrong with exhibitions. I have organized and participated in several myself, and I believe deeply in the transformative power of seeing books, artifacts, photographs, and artworks brought together in physical space.

Yet exhibitions often end exactly where Public Humanities should begin. Visitors arrive, admire the objects, take photographs, perhaps read a few captions, post them online, and quietly leave. The exhibition records another successful attendance figure, another accomplishment for the institution. But what remains afterward? What conversations continue once the gallery lights are turned off? Whose voices have been heard beyond those of the curators and invited experts?

If the public leaves exactly as they entered—informed, perhaps, but not transformed—can we honestly claim that the humanities have become public?

This question resonates deeply within the experience of Iloilo. Over the past decade, the city has earned national recognition for heritage conservation, creative festivals, adaptive reuse of historic structures, local museums, literary events, culinary tourism, and public art installations. The restoration of heritage districts, the proliferation of museums, and the celebration of local identity have undoubtedly strengthened the city’s cultural profile. 

Yet beneath this success lies an important tension. Heritage has increasingly become something to consume. Historic streets become Instagram backdrops. Murals become selfie walls. Museums become tourist destinations. Festivals become economic engines.

None of these developments are inherently problematic. Tourism matters. Economic sustainability matters. Visibility matters. But Public Humanities demands that we ask a more difficult question: who benefits from these narratives, and who remains unheard?

The danger is that culture gradually becomes performance rather than participation. Local communities may find themselves represented but rarely consulted. Fisherfolk, market vendors, neighborhood elders, community storytellers, Hiligaynon writers outside established literary circles, indigenous voices, teachers in public schools, children, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ communities often appear only as subjects of exhibitions rather than collaborators in producing them. Their stories are displayed, interpreted, and celebrated, yet they seldom possess equal authority in deciding how these stories should be told.

Public Humanities challenges precisely this imbalance. It insists that expertise is important but incomplete without lived experience. Scholarship gains greater relevance when it enters into dialogue with the communities from which knowledge originates.

The American scholar Jill Lepore has argued that the humanities help societies understand not simply what happened in the past but why those histories continue to matter in the present. This insight becomes especially relevant in Iloilo, where every restored building, every commemorative marker, every literary archive, and every cultural festival represents an interpretation of history rather than history itself.

Public Humanities therefore requires transparency about whose interpretation is being privileged. Every exhibition is an argument. Every museum label reflects choices. Every cultural program decides what deserves remembrance and what may quietly disappear. Neutrality is often an illusion.

This is where universities carry an enormous responsibility. Institutions of higher learning have long been producers of historical research, literary criticism, ethnography, and cultural documentation. Yet too often this knowledge circulates almost exclusively within journals, conferences, and classrooms. The language remains inaccessible, the publications expensive, and the audiences highly specialized.

Public Humanities asks scholars to embrace a different ethic of scholarship. Research should not only advance academic conversations but also enrich civic life. The challenge is not to simplify knowledge until it loses complexity, but to communicate complexity in ways that invite broader participation. As Barbara Franco observed in her work on public history, the goal is not simply educating audiences but sharing interpretive authority. Communities do not merely receive knowledge; they help create it. 

This is perhaps why I remain unconvinced that the growing number of public art exhibitions alone can deepen civic engagement. Art displayed without sustained dialogue risks becoming decorative. Literature exhibited without readers’ conversations becomes archival. Heritage celebrated without difficult discussions about displacement, inequality, colonialism, labor, environmental degradation, or urban development becomes nostalgia.

Public Humanities flourishes not in carefully controlled exhibitions but in spaces where disagreement is possible. It grows when visitors are invited to question rather than simply admire, to contribute rather than merely observe.

Imagine if every exhibition in Iloilo extended beyond gallery walls into neighborhood discussions, school partnerships, oral history workshops, community archives, public reading circles, digital storytelling projects, and multilingual exhibitions in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and Filipino, or collaborative documentation led by residents themselves.

Imagine exhibitions that continue months after closing because communities have assumed ownership of the conversations they began. Such initiatives may never attract the same social media attention as visually stunning installations, but they embody the democratic aspirations of Public Humanities far more faithfully than another successful opening reception.

The humanities become public not because they occupy public spaces but because they cultivate public thinking. Democracy depends not only on informed citizens but on reflective citizens capable of interpreting history critically, questioning inherited narratives, empathizing across differences, and imagining more inclusive futures.

This is why Public Humanities matters today. It reminds us that culture is not a finished product to be exhibited behind glass. It is a living negotiation continually shaped by dialogue, memory, conflict, creativity, and collective responsibility.

Perhaps the most provocative question we should ask ourselves in Iloilo is not how many exhibitions we have organized, how many museums have opened, how many tourists have visited, or how many heritage awards we have received. The more urgent question is far simpler and infinitely more difficult: after all these celebrations of culture, have we actually become a more culturally engaged public?

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.