News & Stories
Announcing the Spring 2021 IAS Thursdays Schedule
Join the IAS on Thursday afternoons for our eclectic, wide-ranging, discussion series designed for scholars from all walks of life.
Due to COVID-19, this season’s events will be held virtually, via Zoom. All events will take place at 3:30 p.m. CT.
UMN Receives $5M Mellon Foundation Grant for New Just Futures Initiative
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.
Preservation that Begins with People
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.
Meet an IAS Collaborative: ArTeS
Meet the IAS Research and Creative Collaborative ArTeS, an emerging, intercollegiate initiative that centers the arts in Art + Technology + Science collaborations at the University of Minnesota.
Introducing Open Rivers Issue Seventeen: Relationality
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?
Catherine Squires, Humphrey’s New Associate Dean, on Community Collaboration
This fall, Professor Catherine Squires joined the Humphrey School of Public Affairs as its new associate dean. A professor of communications studies in the College of Liberal Arts since 2007, Squires is currently a member of the IAS Advisory Board and is an alum of the IAS Residential Faculty Fellows program. Squires’s work has often been interdisciplinary, community engaged, and has focused on race, gender, politics, and civic media and history.
Announcing the Spring 2021 Spotlight Series
Register now for the Spring 2021 season of the Spotlight Series: Polarization and Identities, events inspired by both the 2020 Presidential Election and the polarization that has appeared in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. All events will be FREE and open to the public via Zoom and moderated by John Rash, an editorial writer for the Star Tribune.
Meet an IAS Collaborative: Afrofemininist Transatlantic Collaboration
Introducing Afrofeminist Sound, Touch, and Speculation in Brixton, UK and North Minneapolis: A Transatlantic Collaboration, an IAS Research and Creative Collaborative dedicated to asking how Afrofeminist collaborative artmaking serves a critical function in the formation of diaspora as both political aspiration and solidarity for feminist futures in urban settings.
IAS in the News, November 2020
Current and former IAS Residential Faculty Fellows Rachel Hardeman, Rebecca Shlafer, Catherine Squires, and Jimmy Patiño have been busy speaking with news outlets like the Washington Post, NPR, and the Star Tribune about their work, including how police violence is impacting Black mothers and their infants, developing an anti-racist curricula in medical education, how the current COVID-19 outbreak is impacting incarcerated persons at the Stillwater prison, and the addition of a required ethnic studies course in the Minneapolis Public Schools. And more!
Meet an IAS Residential Fellow: Julia Brokaw
Introducing Julia Brokaw (Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow at the IAS, 2020–2021), working a project that aims to highlight and explore pollinator-protection initiatives and policies that generate community building and how they can translate into equitable policy making.