What is known as crossover scholarship must be rethought as a generative scholarly engagement. Karlyn Crowley, professor of English at St. Norbert College, argued recently that the way that crossover scholarship is thought about as uni-directional is inaccurate. That is, it is not a one-way street from the academy to the public. Instead, the effective metaphor for crossover scholarship is “ecology,” where academic work cycles from public to academic to public and back again — full circle.
When one thinks about examples of “crossover ecology,” we feel that a good example would be some of the work of George Yancy, professor of Philosophy at Emory University. For example, what has become a well-known series on race for The Stone in the New York Times “features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.”
Yancy’s interviews featured some of the most important philosophers and intellectuals of our time. The concluding entry for the 19 interviews he conducted was Yancy’s own piece, “Dear White America.” Interestingly, it was Yancy’s concluding article that went viral and national.
Going viral can sometimes mean going bad. The responses to “Dear White America” included threats and violence. Yet this article impacted thousands of people in terms of thinking more deeply about White supremacy and encouraged many to look at his important work on race and whiteness, and the work of those scholars, some of whom had not been interviewed before through such an important venue as The Stone. Thus, Yancy created a sort of archive of intellectual work on race that had implications beyond the White/Black binary. In turn, the responses of the public have created opportunities to continue to examine philosophy and race, thus its use as an example in this article.
Given our mutual investment in the concept of crossover ecology, we decided that it was important to come together and delineate important ways of conceiving of crossover scholarship as ecology. Thus, in this article, we will discuss the ways that crossover ecology affects four aspects of scholarship:
We both began to critically engage the overall dimensions (positive or negative) regarding the concept of crossover ecology, especially when one looks closely at the etymology of the term “ecology.” It implies the sense of a relational dwelling place, a relational habitation, a movement away from the/a center. In stream with the etymology of the term ecology, we came to realize that the 19 interviews at The Stone very much fed other aspects of Yancy’s philosophical corpus, revealing important conceptual relational ties. And while the racist vitriol that he received was discouraging and even deeply saddening, the positive ecological fruits, as it were, outweighed the negative responses.
The interviews were designed to engage in a critical and insightful discussion about race within a larger public sphere, a dynamic relational space where readers got to dwell together. The interviews were not designed to exclude, but to include, to function as a gathering space of voices. While it is true that the academy is a relational space, it tends to be hermetic, a space where only certain credentialed individuals are allowed to participate. Academic credentialing, though, can also function as a process that excludes the non-credentialed, treating them as if they do not have anything of importance to add to the conversation. This can function as a form of epistemological violence where we violate their capacity to know.
