ABOUT THIS BOOK

As a humanities professional, your skills are in demand. Despite the challenges of a competitive job market, the unique skill set that you possess is highly transferable to various industries and roles. Knowing how to position your creativity, knowledge and empathy is vital for achieving meaningful employment and professional growth.

Hustles for Humanists provides a detailed roadmap for humanities professionals who want to leverage their valuable skills to find or create meaningful work. Drawing from her experiences as an academic turned entrepreneur, Erica Machulak gives practical advice on how to connect with your core values, market yourself, build relationships with clients, and negotiate fair compensation.

This is an essential field guide for finding work that aligns with the core values of your humanities scholarship and practice. It demonstrates how the professional strengths of the humanities can be drawn upon to create fairer, more just and equitable entrepreneurial approaches – whether you’re launching a business, job hunting, or looking for inspiration. Hustles for Humanists helps you unlock the value of your humanities practice and explore exciting new pathways to achieving economic stability both within and beyond academia.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ERICA MACHULAK, PhD is the founder and lead facilitator of Hikma, a social impact startup with a mission to mobilize scholarship for the public good through consulting, training, and storytelling.

CRYSTAL MARIE MOTEN, PhD is a public historian, curator, and writer who focuses on the intersection of race, class, and gender to uncover the hidden histories of Black people in the Midwest. She is the author of the award-winning book, Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee.

SOPHIA VAN HEES, PhD is a creative professional with passions ranging from fine art to cognitive neuroscience. As owner of Brave Snail Designs, she also embraces fearless creativity mixed with slow and meaningful growth.

REVIEWS

"Organizing Professionals articulates and defines a powerful new generation of academic worker-activists who are multi-generational, multi-ethnic, predominantly contingent faculty, graduate students (and, recently, undergraduate students), post-docs, and staff who are fighting for working conditions that go beyond bread and butter issues, that embrace multiple identities, and that respect the lived realities of current academic employees. The higher education labor movement is on a social justice journey like one never observed before, where its members directly confront racist and other systemic practices that do harm within the academy and without, as Gary Rhoades so thoroughly presents."— Charles Toombs, president, California Faculty Association

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Crystal Marie Moten
Prologue
Chapter 1: Choose Your Own Adventure
How to use this book
Chapter 2: Translate Your Strengths into Services
Chapter 3: Name Your Price
Chapter 4: Connect With Your Clients
Chapter 5: The Low-Key Launch Plan
Chapter 6: Grow Your Own Way
Acknowledgments
Notes

Foreword by Crystal Marie Moten ix
Prologue xiii
1. Choose Your Own Adventure 1
How to Use This Book 21
2. Translate Your Strengths into Services 37
3. Name Your Price 67
4. Connect with Your Clients 93
5. The Low-Key Launch Plan 121
6. Grow Your Own Way 143
Acknowledgments 155
Notes 157
Illustration Credits 163
Index 165