"A nine-hundred-page novel by a white author decidedly dead as a doornail. Sixty or so South Los Angeles teens, clamorously alive. How might their stories intertwine? This question drives this books story--how students at Foshay Learning Center, a public school in South LA, annually studied a Charles Dickens novel as part of their AP English curriculum, for close to a decade, and how, in that journey with the long-form 19th century novel, a key fellow traveler emerged--that is--the city itself. In telling the story of how LitLabs layered literary readership celebrates and studies embodied inhabitations of urban space, this book argues for a public humanities defined by granularity. Instead of offering a grand, abstract mission, LitLabs shows public humanities being realized in locally grounded, community-oriented work, in meticulously orchestrating practices and pedagogical interactions that extend our attention, bringing, in this instance, minds to bear on the details of literary interpretation and the details of the urban environment. The students in the projects Barrios narrates in this book were scholars with the University of Southern Californias Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI), a college pathway program aimed at preparing first-generation students from the majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods that surround the university for higher education. In 2010, building on curricular innovations Barrios had developed in public school classrooms, a partnership between NAI and the Dickens Project was struck to support the goal of guiding students through the challenge of reading these novels. This book is about that annual, communal studying of a book by Dickens, and it centers an approach that uplifts hyper-locality as a curative for a universalism that masks an unexamined reverence for the Western canon, or even print literacy, for that matter; it challenges the universalism that often mars approaches to public engagement projects that work to restore these books and the histories of their authority, to "relevance.

" At its core, LitLabs meets the cultural challenge big canonical books pose to South LA teen readers head on. It proves how, in fact, they are some of these texts most confident, authoritative, and visionary readers. They did so by literally putting the book in its place. Dickens on Florence and Normandie, the corner of Western & Expo, on the metro, in the park, by the playground. Dickens remixed on stage and on walls, with maps and with music, through digital editing and analog drifting. Instead of erasing the difference between Dickens implied readers and his newest ones, LitLabs showed how emplaced and granular public humanities is the key for producing readings that confront the cultural distance between material worlds that collide in such encounters. Public humanities, can and should, be fundamentally embodied and poetic, in this case, by positioning itself within and productive of, an urban habitus cultivated and activated by a bodys relations with others and ones environment. Granular public humanities make syntax contiguous with the street, the page with protest, the book with the built environment.

It infuses the practices and materials of everyday life with the commitment to the imagination, charting territories of unlikely connection among the cultures we inherit and inhabit, and the street, sidewalks, cities, and interlinked worlds in which we live"-- Provided by publisher.