What We Do
H&A in Action creates connections among student learning, faculty scholarship and creative activity, public programming, community engagement, and humanities advocacy across the College of Humanities & the Arts. We build the structures that allow ideas to move beyond a single course, event, or department and develop into collaborative projects, public experiences, sustained relationships, and a stronger public case for the value of humanities and arts education.
Our work takes several interconnected forms.
Support Ambitious Faculty Projects
The Artistic Excellence Programming Grants (AEPG) provide funding and year-round project support for faculty- and staff-developed programming. AEPG projects bring students into direct contact with artists, scholars, community experts, creative practices, and consequential questions while giving faculty experience developing proposals, managing funded projects, building collaborations, and documenting impact.
AEPG has now supported a decade of programming across the College.
Learn about AEPG’s history, impact, and future
Connect Programming to Student Learning
Public programming becomes most meaningful educationally when students have opportunities to participate in the work surrounding it.
H&A in Action helps faculty connect performances, exhibitions, workshops, visiting artists and scholars, public conversations, and community projects with courses and other forms of experiential learning. Students may conduct research, create performances or films, develop exhibitions, interview community members, design communications, produce public-facing scholarship, or bring questions generated by an event back into their academic and creative work.
Curricular Communities provide one structure for developing these connections across courses and disciplines.
Explore Curricular Communities
Create Public and Community Connections
SJSU sits within a rich network of artists, cultural organizations, public institutions, neighborhoods, businesses, schools, and community expertise. H&A in Action develops opportunities for faculty and students to work within that larger environment.
Through public programming and initiatives such as H&A in San José, projects can bring university expertise into public spaces while also bringing community knowledge into teaching, research, and creative practice. These relationships include collaborations with cultural organizations, civic partners, artists, libraries, museums, and other organizations throughout San José and the South Bay.
Build Interdisciplinary Connections
Many of the questions taken up through the humanities and arts exceed the boundaries of a single discipline. H&A in Action creates opportunities for faculty and students to work across fields and to connect humanistic and artistic inquiry with technology, science, design, business, health, and other areas of study.
Initiatives including the Digital Humanities Center and the Advanced Institute for Ethical Technologies (AI-ET) provide spaces for exploring how humanities and arts expertise contributes to questions involving technology, culture, ethics, interpretation, and public life.
Explore the Digital Humanities Center
Explore Advanced Institute for Ethical Technologies
Make the Work Visible
H&A in Action also documents what happens through these projects.
Attendance provides evidence of reach, while participant surveys, final project reports, assessment, and the Stories of Engagement help us understand the experience behind those numbers. They show how students participated, what people learned or encountered, how collaborations developed, and how faculty connected programming with teaching, scholarship, creative activity, and community engagement.
This documentation creates a public record of the College’s work while also helping faculty articulate the significance of engaged scholarship and creative practice.
Explore the Stories of Engagement
Explore Reports & Publications
Advocate for the Humanities and Arts
The work of H&A in Action also provides evidence for a larger public case for the humanities and arts. Stories, assessment data, faculty and student experiences, grant-funded projects, and records of community engagement can help demonstrate what humanities and arts education contributes to students, communities, and public life.
H&A in Action brings that evidence into national humanities advocacy. SJSU has participated in the National Humanities Alliance’s annual meeting and National Humanities Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C., where College representatives join advocates from across the country in conversations about federal support for humanities research, education, cultural institutions, international education, and public programs.
That advocacy is itself an engaged project. Faculty and students help translate the College’s work into forms that can travel beyond the university. For the 2025 advocacy effort, students created print and video materials, faculty and students recorded short testimonials about the value of their work, and H&A in Action drew on years of programming, assessment, Stories of Engagement, grant activity, and other evidence to communicate SJSU’s contributions to the humanities.
The same materials have value beyond a single trip to Washington. They provide the College, departments, faculty, students, and partners with reusable ways to communicate why this work matters—to policymakers, funders, university leaders, prospective students, community organizations, and the broader public.
Explore National Humanities Advocacy Day 2024-2026
Experiment, Learn, and Build What Comes Next
H&A in Action has developed through experimentation. Individual projects can reveal new possibilities for curriculum, collaboration, public programming, faculty support, or community partnership. Successful practices can then inform other projects and become part of the College’s larger infrastructure.
That process allows H&A in Action to function as an evolving ecosystem rather than a collection of separate programs: ideas move among faculty, students, courses, projects, partners, and communities, creating possibilities that no single initiative could produce on its own.
