Professor and Founding Director of Human Rights Studies at UC Davis Keith David Watenpaugh’s work in public scholarship has not only earned him national recognition, but also helped hundreds of displaced refugees throughout the world. 

In 2021, Human Rights Educators USA awarded Watenpaugh the O’Brien Award for individual achievement for 2021. The annual award honors individuals and organizations who have made outstanding contributions to human rights education in the United States. In giving the award, HRE USA recognized Watenpaugh’s leadership in executing several UC Davis initiatives, in collaboration with partners in the Middle East, that are addressing the needs of displaced and refugee university-level students and professionals. Watenpaugh also was acknowledged for his role as the founding director of Article 26 Backpack and for his efforts in making UC Davis Human Rights Studies the largest program of its kind in the University of California system.

Watenpaugh, who was a member of the inaugural cohort of Public Scholarship Faculty Fellows, recently sat down with Associate Vice Provost of Public Scholarship and Engagement Tessa Hill to talk about public scholarship and his important work with refugee scholars:

Hill: What does “public scholarship” mean to you?

Watenpaugh: Well, at the very root, it's doing what we should be doing as scholars. Imagining our relationship to the world at large — how we can use what we study, work on, and explore, plus share the excitement and enthusiasm we have for our subjects, with others with the goal of contributing to a more peaceful and prosperous world.

It really is built around this core concept that, as a professional in higher education, we have a responsibility to lead. Part of that leadership responsibility is understanding and meeting the needs of the public writ large. For me, it means not just my local community, or California or even the United States, but trying to understand where I can successfully intervene in public opinion or in the humanitarian sphere on behalf of others to protect and promote human rights globally. 

Hill: How has your public scholarship changed during the past few years?

Watenpaugh: For me, the real change happened in 2003 when I was leading a group of scholars in Iraq to try and assess the impact of the war and decades of the rule of Saddam Hussein had on education, museums, the public sphere, and higher education. I returned from that time recognizing I could and should play a role in trying to make the world more peaceful. That’s been at the core of my work ever since — trying to understand how my scholarship, my teaching, my research, my writing as a public intellectual could contribute to peace. I see war and violence as the greatest violations of human rights.  

One of the things about my public scholarship that I began to reflect upon more deeply during the pandemic, is a core though neglected idea this within Human Rights Studies. It's not just about rights, it’s also human responsibilities.

The pandemic really tested — unfortunately, more than it probably should have — our notion of our responsibilities to one another: to protect one another's health, access to education, and access to good food, water, and proper healthcare,  plus trying to treat the impact of the virus itself. Public service during the pandemic began to turn on very simple questions like that for me — what are our human responsibilities to one another? 

Hill: Can you give us some examples of what it’s like to try to do public scholarship during a pandemic? 

Watenpaugh: That’s the great thing about research, you learn just as much through what you can’t do as what you can do. One of the things we could do was the work associated with Article 26 Backpack, which is largely a human-digital ecosystem. We did a lot of the adaptations and changes needed to make it more widely available to people around the world. I had lots of young people and graduates who needed work, and they could do some of the translations of text and internal coding. By mid-summer of the pandemic (2020), we had adapted Article 26 Backpack to its five build-out languages: Arabic, French, Spanish, English and Dari (the Persian language of Afghanistan). That was something we could do.

When we were in the field working with refugees — especially young people who had been in colleges and universities before — they would tell us they felt like the world had forgotten them. One of the things we try to do is remind them, ‘no, we have not forgotten you, we’re going to try to partner with you and empower you to better access your human right to education.’ What was important to me was that a lot of that discussion took place face-to face, sitting in the same place with someone. As much as we tried to resume that human connection that was so important and vital, it just wasn’t there. The pandemic gave us the opportunity to try out an area we thought we could do more through distance with electronic means. Unfortunately, we found we couldn’t. It wasn’t doing the same thing as face-to-face. 

Hill: Can you please share with us some particular challenges or successes you’ve experienced doing this type of work?

Watenpaugh: The challenge I think many of us face is trying to achieve a balance between the kinds of academic research we were trained to do, and the additional requirements of public scholarship. That includes being able to turn off “the Professor” and just listen to people, knowing that you have to be willing to go with the flow. Public scholarship dictates its own terms, not over a 10-week quarter or six-month sabbatical. Understanding there are real people involved. There can be egos, feelings, expectations and politics, and all of these things are outside of the control of the researcher.

With public scholarship, you have to be willing to bend like a tree and not sit like a rock in a stream. 

Public scholarship demands a certain appreciation for human foibles and the complexities of interactions, plus a willingness to be humbled at every turn because of things that don’t always work out quite so well. I've had to become much more patient and allow things to unfold around me. I think public scholarship can be very fun — while at the same time rewarding and pushing the boundaries of thought and scholarship — spending time with people who don't look at the world quite the same way you do. 

Hill: What are your take-a-ways from being a Public Scholarship Faculty Fellow? 

Watenpaugh: There's the anticipated intellectual and academic outcome, which was building mutually-supportive cadres of faculty from across different disciplines. I think it’s important to give more senior scholars structured opportunities to support and mentor more junior scholars — I value that and I think I had some opportunity to do that. I learned a new vocabulary around public scholarship that I could use, and I’ve integrated that into my most recent promotion application. 

On another level, that was the worst time of the pandemic, when we had that Faculty Fellows program. No if’s, and’s or but’s about it. We were completely locked down for part of it, our kids were at home the whole time, we were losing friends and family, so it did what public scholarship can do well – it  built a community around an idea that could foster scholarly development and advancement of its members. As practicing academics, it made our lives better; it helped improve our working conditions in that moment. I don't think I would have been able to experience anything like that anywhere else in the institution during that period. It had an impact beyond what was anticipated.

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