Administratively housed here at the IAS, the new Minnesota Transform initiative will broaden relationships with local communities and build the University’s capacity to be a site of racial justice.

What happens when you turn historic preservation upside down? School of Architecture Associate Professor Greg Donofrio—also a former IAS Advisory Board member—began his career by looking at historic buildings and working backwards to people who care about buildings. “Whereas now,” he says, “I am interested in forming relationships with people and working backwards to the places they might care about in the built environment.” As he’s followed this new direction, he also co-founded the Heritage Studies and Public History graduate program, which began as an IAS Research and Creative Collaborative, and strives to add diverse perspectives to conversations about history and preservation.

Issue Seventeen (Fall 2020) of Open Rivers was created in connection with the Mellon Environmental Stewardship, Place, and Community Initiative. Many of the pieces in this issue offer an implicit challenge: how might our ways of engaging environmental challenges change if we considered ourselves as related, if we considered the “natural world” as other-than-human relatives? How might this interconnectedness impact our relationships with the world around us and with each other?