On the Ground with David Demarest: Toward a Methodology of Scholar Activism

For David P. Demarest Jr. (1931-2011), who taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for over thirty years, teaching and research were a form of activism, and activism was another dimension of scholarship and pedagogy. His interdisciplinary work bridged classroom and community, text and image, history and memory, and advocacy and inquiry, thereby providing an exemplary model of integrated educator-scholar-activist practice. His interests ranged from literature to landscape, from preservation to interpretation, from photography to murals, and from the Carnegie Library to the Croatian Catholic Church. As a community and political activist, he focused most often on fighting racial injustice, resisting war, and preserving crucial sites of working-class history and life. Best known outside of Pittsburgh for spearheading the republishing of Thomas Bell’s classic novel of industrial working-class immigrant experience, Out of This Furnace, he strove to foster public participation in dialogues about working-class experience and the meaning of place, just as his teaching took students off-campus and into “the field.”