MSU Scholar Profiles
Anita Skeen
Only the most absent-minded could miss the posters hanging from lampposts, the bookmarks being given away at local bookstores, and other signs advertising the One Book, One Community project. The event brings together a host of community members and Michigan State University students, faculty and staff who read the same book simultaneously over a period of several weeks. The ensuing conversations, discussion groups, and hands-on arts projects offer a way of studying literature that transcends traditional classroom practices and creates dialogue among people about issues related to the text in question and to the larger community itself. Anita Skeen was instrumental in bringing the One Book, Community project to East Lansing and MSU as the head of the Residential Option in Arts and Letters (ROIAL).
Currently, as the Arts Coordinator and a Professor in the new Residential College in Arts and Humanities (the successor to ROIAL), Anita Skeen, plays a major role in developing and coordinating student-based community outreach projects that help to bring the humanities to the public arena. One of her goals is to develop, in partnership with local community organizations, compelling projects that will move students out into the wider community and create “the bridge [needed] to overcome the university/community gap.” By fostering students’ interest in service-based education and helping them to participate collaboratively in community-building efforts, Skeen hopes both her students and the wider community will reap lasting benefits.
Part of the challenge Skeen faces is to integrate community and student needs and wishes so that everyone participating in a given project has the opportunity to profit from the effort. One of the most memorable projects Skeen coordinated at MSU involved working with Sudanese exiles who have made their new home in the Lansing area. Members of the Sudanese community worked with MSU students in joint writing, music, and art projects related to the Sudanese experiences and recent Sudan history; by bringing these two groups together, Skeen hoped to make the refugees’ transition to their new community easier and to introduce students to the arts and culture of a group they might not otherwise encounter. Sudanese involvement in the project allowed for a rich and lively engagement focused on ideas and topics that at first glance may have seemed very distant from MSU’s campus or the City of Lansing.
Public humanities, as Skeen sees it, is about developing opportunities for “people to come together and make a community within a community.” In the early 1990s, Skeen worked to do just that in Oklahoma City after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. She ran workshops in which the city’s residents wrote their thoughts on pieces of art that had survived the bomb, an act of catharsis to help them deal with their grief. Skeen says the workshops offered her a glimpse of the effect of the humanities on the human experience: “There is a huge need for community writing projects, because the people out there have a lot to say, and it seems writing is the way to do that.” The kinds of exchanges Skeen is instrumental in creating demonstrate the ongoing necessity of public humanities work: “You provide people a place and someone to guide the workshop, and it’s amazing what they can do. The interaction and discussions that come before and after the writing are marvelous.”
