This Minnesota Transform Spotlight was first published in the Minnesota Transform Special Edition Newsletter on April 28, 2022. Thank you to all of our contributing partners and student interns.
Meet our digital humanities interns!
Minnesota Transform interns are developing skills in digital media. We are excited to spotlight the work of those undergraduate and graduate interns collaborating with our community partners to create new designs, websites, digital mapping, and communications media for social justice centered public humanities.
Decolonial Mapping Project
A growing number of community-led research initiatives are working to articulate and reckon with the history of the University’s harm towards Tribal nations in Minnesota. Two Minnesota Transform graduate student interns are bringing these efforts together through the creation of a community-based digital campus tour which maps institutional complicity to settler colonialism and racism.
Fa’aumu Kaimana is a graduate student in the Anthropology department. She has been working with the Decolonial Mapping Project to create an Indigenous-focused digital campus tour. The campus tour will be available to the public, and provide an overview of the University of Minnesota’s historical and contemporary relationships with Native American communities. The digital campus map will also locate resources and spaces on the University of Minnesota campus that center the needs of Native American students.
Chris Rico is a second year masters student in the Heritage Studies and Public History Program. His work focuses on researching the institutional history of the University of Minnesota. In the last year, Chris has worked on creating a digital space for mapping narratives of community experiences at/through the University. Working with Minnesota Transform, Chris envisions a decolonial campus tour which centers the experiences and issues that matter to indigenous campus community members. Through this work, he is developing a workshop to interrogate campus history which will take place on April 29th at The Hub (rm. 120) in Pillsbury Hall. This workshop will engage the University community in envisioning a new/different narrative of the campus and to identify campus issues to expand research and awareness. Chris hopes that the decolonial campus tour will contribute to University-wide reckonings with institutional history and anti-racist/decolonial issues.
DASH / LATIS
Minnesota Transform works with incredible folks from the Digital Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (DASH) center and the Liberal Arts Technologies and Innovation Services (LATIS) center to support the digital media needs of our partners. DASH/LATIS interns Aaron Tran, Sebastian Alfonzo, and Chufue Yang are creating websites and producing new designs for arts organizations, public history exhibitions, and Minnesota Transform communications.
Creative media assistant Sebastian Alfonzo designs, edits, and manages media across Minnesota Transform projects and digital platforms. Sebastian works alongside the media team and MNT partners to produce media which shares public humanities projects, opportunities, and events. Sebastian also contributes to the design and management of the new Minnesota Transform website.
MNT Communications
We are so proud of these interns and excited to celebrate their accomplishments. Keep an eye out for news about our upcoming Spring 2022 MNT Intern Showcase!