Introduction to the Forum: Toward a Rust Belt Humanities
Reshaping the Rust Belt: Public and Emplaced Humanities
The idea for a Rust Belt humanities emerged from a simple question: What would it take for Clevelanders to understand the potential of their home—their region—and to fully grasp the capacity of the humanities to ignite the powers of curiosity, imagination, and storytelling to transform space into place? As college educators and Rust Belt dwellers, we grew concerned with our students’ lack of critical engagement with their lived experiences. They were tired, disillusioned, and felt “stuck”; home was only a place to dream of escaping, a place first and foremost to leave. Their city of Cleveland had become a “no-place”—characterized in their minds only by emptiness, decay, and decline. Rust Belt humanities was born out of a necessity to address this lack: to fill the gap in what the Detroit River Story Lab calls “narrative infrastructure,” which “refers to the fabric of shared stories that binds a given community together” (Porter 1486). When we anchor the humanities—when we emplace it in the contours of our daily experiences and geographies—we catalyze the civic fabric of our communities and learn to cocreate shared futures.
Case Study: Books at the Market
In 2023, Cleveland Public Library (CPL)—in partnership with local nonprofit organizations, businesses, corporations, associations, media, and government—answered an important call. Mayor Justin Bibb was organizing a city-wide campaign to foster a love of reading across our city. To do so, he set an ambitious goal: the entire city was to collectively read one million books or read for one million minutes over the course of the year in order to raise awareness of the importance of literacy and to nurture a love of reading (Morris).
In September of 2023, toward the end of the year-long project, we were approached by Matt Weinkam, the director of the nonprofit organization Literary Cleveland, to join Marina Marquez, the manager of the People’s University at CPL, in answering the call with the kind of creative energy in which humanists thrive. We were to take over ten booths in the fruit and vegetable arcade in our city’s historic West Side Market—"our largest and oldest continuously running public market.” We wanted to use the power of storytelling to spark new ideas about space: What would it mean to encounter the humanities at work and at play in the site of the Market? Together, we landed on an initiative that has affectionately been called, “Books at the Market,” an interactive experience where visitors to the Market can take home free books and comics from “vendors” sprinkled amongst piles of fresh produce. Our “vendors” include Carol and John’s Comic Shop, a bastion for comics in Cleveland for 35 years since it was opened by mother and son duo, Carol Cazzarin and John Dudas; Comics at the Corner, a nonprofit led by Dawn Arrington that promotes literacy and book ownership in the community; and the Cleveland Kids’ Book Bank, an organization that fosters literacy and a love of reading through free books. The idea was to encourage families shopping for their weekly groceries to also shop for stories. The hope was that Clevelanders would pick up not only fresh produce, but also free books.
In addition to taking over the stalls, we hosted a comics-making workshop to encourage those who were coming to the Market that day to tell emplaced stories: How were they inspired by the space of the West Side Market, and how does narrating this site change the way we think about it and its place in our larger urban story? As this event was also part of our 85th anniversary celebration of the “Man of Steel”—a series of programs we titled “Superman’s Cleveland,”—we were able to frame the activity using the story of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who in 1938, during a time of deep global crisis, looked to the sky as they imagined the first superhero, Superman. These creators reframed our city through comics, and we invited our participants to do the same. Superman—an icon of hope, positivity, justice, and truth—comes to stand in for Cleveland’s untapped potential. Like Siegel and Shuster, how can the 21st-century inhabitants of Cleveland dream up new city scripts? How can making comics help us to think about the future of our region?
What was planned as a one-time event became a standing booth at the Market, which has since been maintained by the Cleveland Public Library. While we do not run its day-to-day logistics, the fruit and vegetable arcade becomes a part of our classroom one weekend each semester. In partnership with Cuyahoga Community College, we invite students to be a part of the project and to reimagine their role as civic actors. Students work as “vendors” for part of the day, giving out books and comics alongside grocers and florists. As they interact with the public, they exchange stories, conversations, and make connections. In addition, they attend a comics-making workshop with creators like local artist Sequoia Bostick; National Book Award winner, Andrew Aydin; and Editorial Director of Boom! Studios, Sara Phoebe Miller—individuals who have all taught our students in this public space. “Books at the Market” is centered on a defamiliarization of a space that for over a hundred years has been shaped by routine, marked by a kind of repeated relationship between vendors and buyers. Our Rust Belt Humanities Lab’s signature program disrupts the familiar experiences and rhythms of the market through its reimagining of the space as a narrative locus and as a hub for stories.
This collective work addresses a regional lack—that of imagination. When our students refer to our region as empty and in decline, they contribute to the process of regional civic decay, and, most importantly, a stymieing of imagination. When they build community through books and comics, they participate in the life of the city and connect with a broader citizenry. Making comics with students from other institutions, they look to the city as inspiration for art. Visitors meandering through the Market on their weekend shopping trips are surprised to encounter our students drawing and documenting the space of the Market and often stop to ask questions, generating dialogue. A project like this asks our students to see not emptiness, but opportunity and potential; it highlights the importance of public space and of thinking together and in close proximity.
Poster by Sina Grace represents the scenes of the West Side Market as part of the broader landscape of Cleveland and the Cuyahoga River.
Our journal uses two descriptors to define the scope of our humanistic inquiry: public and emplaced. For the editors at Rust Belt Studies, the public humanities is a practice of activating and enlivening those spaces of our city fundamental for civic life. What does it mean to take over a public market, for example, and to fill it with stories? The humanities invite us to imagine our homes in new ways—without the humanities, we would have never thought to turn an outdoor market into a makerspace and bookshop. We reactivate space in new ways, breaking routines and habits and encouraging new modes of exchange and circulation. As Perry Guevara and Amy R. Wong write in their 2002 article, “Grounding the Humanities”:
… “region” encodes a fidelity to place, which could signal a capaciously plural humanities grounded in the thickness of relation. If we disidentify regionalism from the tired terms of mainstream politics, we might instead urge its intellectual commitment to place toward interrelation, while leaving behind hierarchy and territory. If we disavow the proprietary logic of the parcel and its disastrous colonial futures, we might instead perceive an ecosystem—“eco” from the Greek oikos for “home”—and all of its emplaced inhabitants. The “region” becomes the local site from which we engage competing claims of different humanities. … The academic humanities may be narrow, but it might help to remember that everything we put out into the world shapes and reshapes that world.
“Books at the Market” is a model for the emplaced public humanities. For too long, the public humanities have been presented as somehow distinct from the particular needs of a region or even from a classroom. In the Rust Belt, the humanities can help us to address one of the crises that pervades our region: generations of people who describe this region only in the negative. This fraying of imagination has lasting effects for civic engagement and investment. Thus, for us, addressing the needs of the region through the humanities can provocatively and productively connect our city and our classroom. As Fisher-Livne and Michelle May-Curry write in the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship, “Public humanities classroom collaborations can move public humanities scholarship beyond the advancement of amorphous ‘public goods’ to time-bound, subject specific, and imperative acts of cultural survival tied to communities and places undergoing radical changes” (15). Thus, as “Books at the Market” becomes part of our classroom learning, we envision a two-way street: the humanities extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom to activate a part of the city in new ways; we use this space of activation to engage and create opportunity for our students—citizens of our region.
We teach at a college that primarily serves students who grew up within a 40-mile radius of campus. We, too, grew up within this 40-mile radius, and our understanding of the regional humanities emerges from this unique positionality. We are exceptionally aware of the impact of the humanities locally because, as we have written before, we were “raised by the Rust Belt” (Trostel and Zullo). We do not look at the region with the eyes of someone who “landed” a job here, but rather as citizens and humanists deeply rooted in place. We recognize the importance of fostering a regional humanities ecosystem and frame our stories not as “surviving” the Rust Belt, but rather as being raised by it. We continue to see the potential of our region. Perhaps public humanities and what we are calling “Rust Belt humanities” will be seen as missionary work, but in an age of civic decay and generative artificial intelligence, we need the vibrancy of the human imagination more now than ever.
Katharine Trostel and Valentino Zullo at the transformed “Books at the Market” booth at the West Side Market on September 24, 2023, in the fruit and vegetable arcade.
Rust Belt Studies: A Journal of Public and Emplaced Humanities
“Books at the Market” is a model for the emplaced public humanities. For too long, the public humanities have been presented as somehow distinct from the particular needs of a region or even from a classroom. In the Rust Belt, the humanities can help us to address one of the crises that pervades our region: generations of people who describe this region only in the negative. This fraying of imagination has lasting effects for civic engagement and investment. Thus, for us, addressing the needs of the region through the humanities can provocatively and productively connect our city and our classroom. As Fisher-Livne and Michelle May-Curry write in the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship, “Public humanities classroom collaborations can move public humanities scholarship beyond the advancement of amorphous ‘public goods’ to time-bound, subject specific, and imperative acts of cultural survival tied to communities and places undergoing radical changes” (15). Thus, as “Books at the Market” becomes part of our classroom learning, we envision a two-way street: the humanities extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom to activate a part of the city in new ways; we use this space of activation to engage and create opportunity for our students—citizens of our region.
When the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College first sat down with the Midstory Team to discuss the founding of a new academic journal—a collaboration facilitated by the generous support of Ohio Humanities—we knew that we wanted to create a kind of public humanities co-op. We envisioned a scholarly publication with a focus in place-based academic work, one that would redefine scholarship’s relationship to its surrounding communities. We aim for a new model of scholarly production that pushes at the edges, one that curates the knowledge produced within academic institutions and translates it for the general public. We hope that our journal will serve as the keystone—anchoring and bridging between the scholarly community and the general public. How can we reimagine the academic publication, and how do we create a publicly engaged Rust Belt discourse?
At Rust Belt Studies: A Journal of Public and Emplaced Humanities, we are committed to a model that is open-access, primarily online, published annually, and anchored in a process of peer review. We hope to embrace human-centered storytelling techniques that will expose people to stories about the Rust Belt region and expand their worldviews. As our mission statement reads:
“Rust Belt Studies uses the framework of the public and emplaced humanities in order to define, explore, and map an understudied region: The Rust Belt. The journal seeks articles which focus on the importance of regional storytelling in fostering a sense of place, identifying and contributing to social solutions, and reimagining the role of the humanities within this sphere. Because so much of the United States’ problems and promises converge on the Rust Belt, the journal aims to model ways to use the humanities to find new solutions, tell better stories, and empower teacher-scholars to imagine new models for fostering civic engagement within their rooted context.”
We have been overwhelmed by the embrace of our nascent journal, which ushers in a new field of study, Rust Belt Studies. We hope that you find the included articles enlightening and inspiring—and that the works push you to see this region with fresh perspective and inspire you to tell different and more nuanced stories about place.
Work Cited
Fisher-Livne, Daniel, and Michelle May-Curry. "Introduction: public humanities scholarship in practice and theory." The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship. Routledge, 2024.
Morris, Conor. “Hey Cleveland! Can you read a million books in 2023?” Ideastream Public Media, May 1, 2023.
https://www.ideastream.org/education/2023-01-05/hey-cleveland-can-you-read-a-million-books-in-2023
Perry, Guevara and Amy R. Wong “Grounding the Humanities.” Public Books. January 20, 2022. https://www.publicbooks.org/grounding-the-humanities/
Porter, David. “The Detroit River Story Lab: Community narratives and ecosystems in Great Lakes research.” Journal of Great Lakes Research 48.6 (2022), 1485–1488.
Trostel, Katharine G. and Valentino L. Zullo. “Raised By The Rust Belt: The Power Of Emplaced Humanities.” The Metropole. February 22, 2023. https://themetropole.blog/2023/02/22/raised-by-the-rust-belt-the-power-of-emplaced-humanities/