Consortial Partners Reflect on Humanities Without Walls’s Evolution

September 25, 2023

The Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls network has created stronger, lasting institutional connections.

In the beginning, Humanities Without Walls was an untested idea. An experiment. Building HWW’s infrastructure was an evolutionary process, with several of the consortial partners finding ways to map or adapt HWW ideologies onto pre-existing institutional landscapes, while other members of the consortium forged ahead into more uncharted territory.

In this article, HWW speaks with consortial partners Jennifer Gunn (University of Minnesota), Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), John Christman (Pennsylvania State University), Teresa Mangum (University of Iowa), and Bill Hart-Davidson (Michigan State University), about the footprint of HWW projects on their respective campuses.

“The consortium helped stimulate [our collective] imagination,” said Jennifer Gunn, former director of the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota.

Being a partner on HWW work has helped the IAS promote the value of interdisciplinary work across the University of Minnesota system while significantly expanding many different partnerships, collaborations, networks, and relationships.

The HWW partnership has funded several significant research grants through the Grand Research Challenge project, including two current projects: “Archival Repatriation and Boarding School Healing: The Morris Indian Industrial School and White Earth Nation” led by Kevin Whalen, associate professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies on the Morris campus, as well as “Environmental Justice Worldmaking: Redistribution and Reciprocity for a Just Transition” led by Rose Brewer, a Morse Distinguished Teaching Professor of African American and African Studies on the Twin Cities campus.

In turn, HWW has enabled professional development opportunities for graduate students through the HWW Career Diversity Workshop. Numerous University of Minnesota students have participated over the years, and in 2023, this workshop was hosted on the Twin Cities campus by the College of Liberal Arts with IAS Director Bianet Castellanos serving as PI. The series of workshops gathered twenty-five diverse graduate students together for workshops focused on demystifying career pathways, utilizing skill sets, and making space for social transformation.

Humanities Without Walls is a consortium of humanities centers at sixteen research universities throughout the Midwest and beyond. The consortium aims to create new avenues for collaborative and interdisciplinary research, publicly engaged scholarship, and professional opportunities for faculty and graduate students. The Institute for Advanced Study has served as the University of Minnesota consortial partner since its inception. HWW is funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation.

Read the full article as published by Humanities Without Walls

Recently Funded Humanities Without Walls Projects at the University of Minnesota

“Archival Repatriation and Boarding School Healing: The Morris Indian Industrial School and White Earth Nation.” Kevin Whalen, University of Minnesota, Morris. “Archival Repatriation and Boarding School Healing” will bring archival records from the Morris Indian School to White Earth Nation, where they will be used in community meetings focused on healing from historical trauma. This project is a partnership between the University of Minnesota, Morris, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Niibi Center, a White Earth-based non-profit supporting tribal people in sharing and processing stories around boarding schools, forced removal, land loss and other historical traumas.
“Environmental Justice Worldmaking: Redistribution and Reciprocity for a Just Transition.” Rose Brewer, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “Environmental Justice Worldmaking” (EJW) centers ways that the humanities and humanistic social sciences can affect the just transformation of democracy. This project is a collaboration with Environmental Justice Health Alliance and Spelman College in Atlanta, and the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. It aims to bring those communities most affected by climate crises in those cities into conversations about local solutions.
“Indigenous Art and Activism in Changing Climates: The Mississippi River Valley, Colonialism, and Environmental Change” Vicente Diaz and Chris Pexa (University of Minnesota Twin Cities) with Kelly Wisecup (Northwestern University) and Caroline Wigginton (University of Mississippi). A three-year collaborative grant involving faculty and graduate students at 5 institutions to study Indigenous art and activism responsive to the Mississippi River Valley and its changing climates. We view the Mississippi as a bellwether of changing climates and generative space for Indigenous art and activism. The River and its tributaries have long constituted rich ecological, cultural, and textual spaces. The rivers support Indigenous transnational communication networks going back millennia even as they constitute contested boundaries and resources among tribal nations and on settler colonial maps.
"Field to Media: Applied Ecomusicology for a Changing Climate." Mark Pedelty, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. This interdisciplinary project draws on the fields of ecomusicology, praxis-based applied ethnomusicology, and communication studies to create synergy between participatory research, community action, and scholarly publication. Researchers hope to understand how soundscapes can help define communities and senses of place and how local musicians creatively mobilize audiences to confront environmental problems. They will collaborate with musician-informants to create a music video and social media campaign designed to confront an environmental challenge.

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Consortial Partners Reflect on Humanities Without Walls’s Evolution

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