IAS Research and Creative Collaboratives represent some of the most synergistic and innovative work at the University. Collaborative funding enables interdisciplinary activity that can sometimes be challenging within departmental and collegiate structures. These self-initiated groups come together with the idea of working on a project of common interest, such as public engagement activities, the creation of a supportive intellectual community, or the exploration of a research area through different disciplines.
We are particularly interested in Collaboratives that include or feature community engaged work (i.e. collaborations with community partners), public scholarship (i.e. creative works and research intended for broad audiences), Indigenous-led Collaboratives, BIPOC-led Collaboratives; systemwide Collaboratives, or those not based solely on the Twin Cities Campus (Crookston, Duluth, Morris, Rochester campuses, and Extension projects); projects focused on institutional transformation and systemic change; and projects involving disciplines and fields beyond the humanities.
Current Collaboratives
2892 St. Paul Story Teacher Workshop
The 2892 St. Paul Story Teacher Workshop project will create an opportunity for three partners (U of M faculty and staff, Twin Cities area K12 teachers and the team from the 2892 Miles to Go project) to create a collaborative workshop to learn from each other and develop learning experiences to ensure that Minnesota students learn how systemic racism in Minnesota’s past continues to impact marginalized communities and individuals. Using the 2892 Miles to Go St. Paul Story as a focus, the project centers the stories of the Rondo community, past, present and future, as told by members of the Rondo community. The central message of the St. Paul story is the strength, resilience and powerful connection in the Rondo community that continues to the present, even in the face of brutal, deliberate destruction in the 1950s. Each of our partners bring knowledge and experiences to share, and all partners have things to learn from each other. The workshop is designed to engage the participants in dialogue, co-creation and growth as we seek to open conversation and promote learning.
Conveners:
- Shana Crosson, U-Spatial, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Adam Bledsoe, Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Jaraux Washington, 2892 Miles to Go Project
- Sarah Pawlicki, History, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
American Indian Child Removal Study: Indigenous-centered Analysis, Writing, and Sharing of Results
Entire generations of Native American children have been removed from their families and placed in boarding schools or adopted/fostered into non-Native families. The trauma of family and community separation has deeply impacted these individuals, their families, their communities, and their descendants. As a long-term partnership of six people from Indigenous community organizations and the University of Minnesota, we are conducting an anonymous survey of these populations, with over 1,000 respondents to date. Our team is rooted in a decolonizing research approach that centers Native values such as spirituality, reflection, and community-based interactions. Participation in the Research and Creative Collaboratives program allows us to convene a Council of knowledge holders and language speakers to provide guidance on the next phase of the project: producing a book and a website to share the findings of the project with survivors and their descendants, their families, and Tribal Nations, as well as other stakeholders like Tribal child welfare workers and policy makers.
Conveners:
- Sandy White Hawk, Sicangu Lakota; Executive Director of First Nations Repatriation Institute
- Samuel Torres, Mexica/Nahua; Deputy Chief Executive Officer of National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
- Carolyn Liebler, Sociology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Sara Axtell, Family Social Science, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Maggie Greenleaf, Red Lake Ojibwe; University of Minnesota Alum
- Chris Mann, University of Minnesota Alum
The Archive as Infrastructure: Multidisciplinary Practice for Challenging Disciplinary Edifice and Building Social Justice in the Humanities
Archives as Infrastructure proposes a multidisciplinary approach to the critique and exploration of historical sources. Whether institutionally collected works or conceptional collections, archives are human constructs and as such are subject to and created with biases, privilege, and preconceived notions of disciplinary relevance. We recognize that these archives and the work resulting from them can produce obfuscatory views of the past which shape our disciplines and society in ways that embolden injustices of the present. Even as archivists and curators implement practices that render physical collections more inclusive and easier to access, humanistic disciplines themselves remain siloed both in their understandings of what is a valid archive, and what approaches are most fruitful. To engage the experience of social injustice holistically, address the far-reaching impacts of problematic archival constructs, and more responsibly identify erasures and bridge archival gaps, we need teams of humanist scholars with diverse methods and expertise working together. This collaborative will build community around multidisciplinary approaches to archives of various forms and develop methods and forms of practice that can be applied in scholarly practice and coursework at various levels.
Conveners:
- Michelle Hamilton, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Juliette Cherbuliez, French & Italian, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Marguerite Ragnow, James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota
Changing the Future and Use of Solitary Confinement and Segregation in Minnesota
Solitary confinement or segregation in the carceral system is currently widespread and ubiquitous in the United States. The abuse of this practice has been described as torture and a violation of human rights. Segregation and solitary confinement in Minnesota is subject to few limitations or legal restrictions. There are no limits on duration, on who may be placed into solitary confinement, or the justifications used for segregation or solitary confinement. Our proposed collaboration aims to learn what, how and whether certain practices need to be reformed or abolished and the best strategy to do so. We seek to expand the understanding of the carceral discipline system by working directly with those who have been impacted by these systems. We hope to involve those who have been and are currently directly impacted by the use of segregation and solitary confinement in conversations on how best to change the system. The goal for this collaboration is to develop an iterative advocacy strategy that includes legal, medical, sociological disciplines along with the lived experiences of people to create needed change to an often inhuman and arbitrary system that impacts people both in and out of the carceral system.
Conveners:
- Linus Chan, Law, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Calla Brown, Medical School, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Jack DeWaard, Population Council
- Kimberly Horner, Sociology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Zeke Caligaru Caligiuri, Minnesota Justice Research Council
- Kevin Reese, Until We Are All Free
CHANT
CHANT is a collaborative of artists and community health equity leaders with a common commitment to creative interdependence that emerges from research and praxis at the nexus of Culture, Healing, Art, Nature, and Technology. CHANT centers equity and justice in an ethics that relates all living beings within an ecology of reciprocity and redistribution. As a catalyst for creative interdependence, CHANT shapes a space for individual and collective wholeness. Our research questions consider the relationships between wholeness and health, presence and connectedness, and the fluid permutations among Culture, Healing, Art, Nature, and Technology that engage art as our primary modality. Within this emerging ecology of practice we share a recognition that we each thrive in the interplay between creative and scholarly research, cultural and technical ways of knowing, and modes of participation and engagement that do not require that we parse ourselves into distinct disciplinary domains or practices. We are committed to a collaboratively led, emergent, creative process to cogenerate experiential modes of art that engage people in each of the three collaborative geographic nodes—Minneapolis, Minnesota; Columbus, Ohio; and New Orleans, Louisiana—as well as a multi-sited collaborative form that embodies our creative cycle of reciprocity and redistribution.
Conveners:
- Diane Willow, Art, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Amy Youngs, Art, Ohio State University
- Oscar Garza, University of Louisiana Monroe New Orleans Campus
- Jay Afrisando, School of Music, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Colonial Collections Across the University
The Colonial Collections Across the University collaborative seeks to engage and bring together people from across the university and in the Twin Cities who work with GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and teaching and research collections. These archival materials, specimens, artifacts, data, and material culture are used for curricular purposes; preservation and exploration of history, biological diversity, and cultural heritage; scientific research endeavors; and interpretation and display. Regardless of material type, a commonality across many of these materials is they are legacies of the colonial roots of 19th and 20th century disciplinary and collecting practices. Scholars, curators, and archivists are grappling with how to ethically manage, use, or repatriate collections under their care, and how to reach out to and build relationships with affected communities or Nations. These conversations are taking place across the university, though usually within the confines of particular disciplines, despite the similarities among questions. This collaborative seeks to build our collective knowledge and understanding across disciplinary boundaries, both in terms of decolonizing ethics and praxis and with respect to the material and historical connections between collections. Our aim is to envision a platform enabling restorative collections practice through knowledge, resource, and data sharing.
Conveners:
- Ellen Holt-Werle, University Archives, Archives and Special Collections
- Kat Hayes, Anthropology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Duluth/Onigamiinsing Queer, Trans & Intersex Black, Indigenous & People of Color Collective
The Duluth/Onigamiinsing Queer, Trans, & Intersex Black Indigenous & People of Color (QTIBIPOC) Collective is the reimagining of a student-led project that launched in Fall 2018, when there was combined motivation and activation around forming a dedicated space for “students of color identifying as a shade of LGBTQ+ at the University of Minnesota Duluth and in the Duluth community.” Honoring this legacy, the Duluth/Onigamiinsing QTIBIPOC Collective aims to address the double bind of experiences faced by queer, trans and intersex BIPOC folks on college campuses and explore pathways for creating affirming spaces and culturally-relevant opportunities where QTIBIPOC folks are embraced and celebrated in their fullness. Through meaningful kinship networks, pleasurable programming, and intentional connections with Duluth proponents, the Duluth/Onigamiinsing QTIBIPOC Collective makes legible the dynamic needs, stories, and knowledge ways of queer, trans, and intersex Black, Indigenous and people of color communities at UMD and Duluth/Onigamiinsing.
Conveners:
- Roze Brooks, Office of Diversity & Inclusion, University of Minnesota Duluth
- Iris Carufel, American Indian Learning Resource Center, University of Minnesota Duluth
- Azrin Awal, Office of Diversity & Inclusion, University of Minnesota Duluth
Fostering Connections through Creative Arts Programs for At-Risk Youth and College Students
Collaborating with the Rochester Alternative Learning Center (ALC) is a new initiative led by a interdisciplinary team of instructors from the University of Minnesota Rochester to develop a mentorship program for at-risk youth through a community engaged course entitled Contemplation of Creativity and Mental Health through Qualitative Analysis. This course provides opportunities for Bachelor of Science Health Sciences (BSHS) students to interact with youth who struggle with mental health challenges through creative activities. In addition, the BSHS students assess the impact of the creative activities on ALC students through qualitative analysis. This initiative includes a series of public exhibitions, highlighting the artwork produced by ALC and BSHS students. The exhibitions present all participants as artists and recognize their creative talent. This program focuses on the mutual interests of both BSHS students, who become mentors by providing their consistent and compassionate presence, and of ALC students, who may expand the vision of their future by interacting with college students. The hope is to turn this initiative into community-based action research of both institutions, collaboratively attending to the needs of at-risk youth in Rochester and growth of health sciences students.
Conveners:
- Yuko Taniguchi, Center for Learning Innovation, University of Minnesota Rochester
- Jered Bright, Center for Learning Innovation, University of Minnesota Rochester
- Jennifer Wacek, Center for Learning Innovation, University of Minnesota Rochester
- Lida Casper, Rochester Public Schools
- Sweta Petal, Rochester Public Schools
- Alexis Zaccariello, Rochester Public Schools
Globalizing Medical History through East Asian Materials in Special Collections
The history of modern science and medicine has tended to be written and taught as fundamentally Western. In reality, the development of medical practices were global in the early modern and modern period, with western intellectuals drawing on Asian medical practices, and East Asian physicians grappling with Dutch, Jesuit, Chinese, and Western medicine in configuring their medical practices. In an effort to enable the teaching and research of a more global history of health at the University of Minnesota, this Collaborative aims to make the numerous East Asian medical sources at the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine (WHL) more accessible to members of the UMN academic and medical community as well as interested members of the public. We seek funding to hire a language specialist to translate representative sections of WHL East Asian collection materials, to facilitate the creation of a community of UMN and local faculty and instructors to ideate how to use the materials in instruction, and to host a pop-up exhibition to create public awareness of the materials.
Conveners:
- Wayne Soon: Program in the History of Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Emily Beck: Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Lois Hendrickson: Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Health Care Under Crisis: Investigating Minnesota’s “Safe Haven” Status Through Community Storytelling
With abortion and gender-affirming healthcare under sustained attack across the United States, Minnesota has been publicly framed as a site of refuge for these essential health services. Through interdisciplinary collaboration and community-focused outcomes, we bring critical reflexivity to the public discourses that exhort Minnesota as a “safe haven” or “sanctuary.” Our proposed collaborative expands upon the existing Minnesota Reproductive Health Oral History Project to consider how to prioritize community-based collaboration and mutual benefit in the production of archival material. To do so, we will platform the experiences and perspectives of health care providers and community members in Minnesota striving to increase access to basic health services like abortion and gender-affirming care. This two-pronged project has both archival and public outcomes: First, we will gather provider experiences through oral history interviews. Second, by producing a zine and facilitating a community event where participants can share their joys, fears, and critical wisdom, we will ensure that these experiences are available to the communities that have produced them. Taken together, our project serves the tenets of reproductive justice as outlined by Sistersong—”the right to not have children, the right to have children, and the right to parent children in safe, sustainable communities.”
Conveners:
- Emily Winderman, Communication Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Lauren Ruhrold, History of Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Adam Negri, History of Medicine, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Care for the Healthcare Providers
With an interdisciplinary team of UMD faculty and members of nonprofit Wilderness Health, our goal is to examine precursors of burnout among health care personnel and collaboratively plot a course of action to address burnout in rural hospitals. Wilderness Health is a collaborative of independent providers working together to improve health care in rural Northeast Minnesota and Northwest Wisconsin, from Ely to Grand Marais to Cloquet. Informal surveys of Wilderness’ providers indicate that symptoms of burnout such as emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue are prevalent. These data also suggest that those feelings stem from workload challenges, the perception that leaders are not supportive of those feelings, and personal stressors. This collaborative project will leverage the complementary skills of our university team in the medical humanities, alternative medicine, the measurement of burnout, needs assessment, intervention planning and evaluation, in addition to Wilderness’ support and commitment, to address this issue. We will assess needs through quantitative instruments and qualitative listening sessions. We will work collaboratively with health professionals for the design and implementation of individual interventions, delivered as CME, CE, and CEU in partnership with St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth. We will also design and present systemic interventions to leadership.
Conveners:
- David Beard, English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies; University of Minnesota Duluth
- Kim Dauner, Economics and Health Care Management, University of Minnesota Duluth
- Julie Slowiak, Psychology, University of Minnesota Duluth
- Kathryn Van Wert, English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies; University of Minnesota Duluth
Listening to Oral Histories of West Central Minnesota
Oral testimony offers one of the most promising methods for documenting idiosyncratic and quotidian stories of the past, especially in places where the understanding of difference can be flattened by rural stereotypes. By its very nature, there is always an urgency to preserving oral history, because there is always an elder generation whose memories might be lost without these methods. After a year of learning about the methods and ethics of oral history through reading groups, planning sessions, and presentations by visiting experts, this Collaborative is ready to launch new projects in the 2024–25 academic year. Potential themes include memories of climate change, Main Street, the Apostolic Church, the West Central School for Agriculture, Latinx migration stories, and college experiences of COVID-19. We look forward to further development of collaboration with community partners and scholars across campuses and disciplines interested in oral history methods.
Conveners:
- Emily Bruce, History, University of Minnesota Morris
- Naomi Skulan, Briggs Library, University of Minnesota Morris
Oshkiigin Noojimo'iwe
Our project, Oshkiigan Noojimo’iwe, is an effort to build and expand the messages and collective voice first developed the TRUTH Project, which set forth an historic and powerful counter narrative by using a unique model for action-oriented research that responds to community and takes cues from the land itself. Oshkiigan Noojimo’iwe is an initiative for the core research team to continue to develop their own voices and bring forth this message in a deeper and broader way. The core research team bring their specific backgrounds, training and skill set to the project to show leadership and push for the areas of inquiry that most mattered to each of them. Each member of our collaborative is uniquely positioned and can speak from different vantage points to record and produce a short podcast series which seeks to discuss our efforts and draw connections to other efforts happening in other places on Turtle Island. As demonstrated through our original research, the issue of Tribal-University relations gains richness when considered through the prism and expressed through the collective voice of an all native team.
Resources:
- TRUTH Project website
- Read the TRUTH Report via the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council
- TRUTH Project on the Red Nation Podcast
Conveners:
- An Garagiola, American Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Audrianna Goodwin
Project for Advancing Healthcare Stewardship
The Project for Advancing Healthcare Stewardship (PAHS) facilitates public forums about health and healthcare stewardship. It seeks to disseminate the results of those forums through conventional academic publications, alongside our website, newsletter, digital forums, possible podcasting, and an eventual book project. Our project began prior to COVID-19, but the pandemic highlighted and escalated many of the systemic healthcare challenges that we seek to explore and address, including the need for an intentional antiracism focus in our work. Entrenched healthcare problems exacerbated by COVID-19 include cost escalation, insurance frustration, treatment uncertainty, clinician burnout, and patient distrust. Our collaborative facilitates interactive social discourse and story-making to help people process stress and grief related to the pandemic, and to recognize and communicate long-term about the care they want within the constraints of what is available and potentially effective (all while providing tools and resources to help them do so). Our community-driven, human-first focus is unique, engaging individuals first as active participants in the healthcare system, and second through their roles as providers or patients. Our team incorporates perspectives from evidence-based practice, narrative medicine, behavioral health, sustainability, and community engagement.
Conveners:
- Mary Butler, Health Policy & Management, Public Health, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Tai Mendenhall, Family Social Science, College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Jeannine Ouellette, Health Policy & Management, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Mary Lagaard, Nursing Practice, St. Catherine University
RIDGS SPPS Critical Ethnic Studies Evaluation: Promotion and Publication
The “RIDGS SPPS Critical Ethnic Studies Evaluation: Programming, Promotion, Publication” Creative Collaborative Project would bring together scholars and community practitioners from the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality (RIDGS) Studies, the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), and St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) to generate and implement informative programming and publication around a jointly researched evaluation of SPPS’s Critical Ethnic Studies Course. These activities would take the form of: creating spaces for SPPS stakeholders such as students, teachers, administrators, and parents, to make sense of the research findings on their own terms, presenting research findings at conferences, and publishing original research in academic journals. Additionally, the Collective would strategize and design the next phase of the evaluation of the Critical Ethnic Studies program via a longitudinal study. This would involve hosting workshops with impacted community members to design a study that addresses their needs and questions, collecting additional data, and seeking out and applying for external grant funding. Since this work is very important but takes place during the interim space between two larger, formal research projects, it would be difficult to secure funding outside of the IAS Research and Creative Collaborative Grant.
Conveners:
- Jacob Oertel, Center for RIDGS Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Keith Mayes, Center for RIDGS Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Alyssa Parr, Center For Applied Research and Educational Improvement, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Molly Illes, Center For Applied Research and Educational Improvement, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Mouakong Vue, St. Paul Public Schools
- Xue Xiong, St. Paul Public Schools
Theatrical Jazz
This proposal is the brainchild of several artists, scholars, educators and administrators (from both inside and outside the University of Minnesota) committed to honoring and continuing the legacy of radical practitioners of theatrical jazz. Culminating in a Theatrical Jazz Conference in June 2024, the conversations and conference planning undertaken within the IAS collaborative will build dialogue among collaborators in dance, theater, creative writing, Black studies, music, heritage studies, the University libraries and archives. The collaborative will also be intellectually generative, raising questions for theatre history, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, critical university studies, creative writing, and Black history. The IAS Collaborative would not only assist us in the planning of the conference, but would lay the foundations for an ongoing effort to create an archive of Theatrical Jazz. Above all, through involving student interns from within and outside UMN, it would raise awareness of the histories, practices, and local resonances of Theatrical Jazz for an emerging generation of performing artists.
Conveners:
- Cindy Garcia, Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Margaret Werry, Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Djola Branner, School of Theatre, George Mason University
- Signe Harriday, Pillsbury House Theatre
- Priscilla Page, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Tree Tapestries: New Tools for Ecological Education and Engagement
A tree is habitat, food, medicine. It is timber, shelter, paper, shade. It is an ecological record, a hydrologic system, a hazard. People have relationships with particular trees: trees are storytellers, record keepers, sentinels.
This project weaves together a network including people who have worked together for many years and people who have never been in a room together. The commonality is that our research, work, or artistic practices center trees, and we share the desire to explore the subject in new transdisciplinary ways.
Our questions include, what new methods for ecological education and engagement can we create together using trees as a point of entry? How can our scientific and creative processes inform and re-form each other’s work?
Through knowledge sharing, combining and borrowing from each other's practices, we will design new tools for connecting people with the trees around them. We will develop a citizen science project and activities that investigate history, water, and climate resilience through trees.
Conveners:
- Bridget Mendel, Saint Anthony Falls Lab, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Xiating Chen, Saint Anthony Falls Lab and Civil, Environmental, and Geo-engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Daniel Griffin, Saint Anthony Falls Lab and Geography, University of Minnesota Twin Citie
- Josh Muñoz, Como Park Senior High School
- Molly Sturges, Center for Spirituality and Healing, Biomedical Engineering Sonic Lab, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Anne Turnham, Bee and Pollinator Research Lab, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Two-Eyed Seeing and Third Spaces
What does having a relationship with the earth mean to each of us? How have our life experiences, cultural traditions, educational systems, and other ways of knowing created the relationship we each have with the earth? What would happen with each of our lives, work, and teaching if that relationship was seen more clearly, changed, or deepened? Our proposal’s intention is to explore this together through “Two-Eyed Seeing” and a “third space.”
Etuaptmumk or “Two-Eyed Seeing” means to see from both an indigenous perspective and from the perspective of Western science. A "third place" isn’t our home or workplace, but another kind of space for something else to happen. We propose to find/make a third space together at the University’s Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. We are settlers and Native, in academia, and not. We work with the earth in different ways for our jobs, and many of us have found that it is rare to speak as people together about how our earth relationships were formed, have deepened, or gone dormant. Given the inter-related crises our planet is facing, these conversations are imperative. This is a process-oriented proposal, and we are excited to see what emerges.
Conveners:
- Rebecca Krinke, Landscape Architecture, CDes, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Caitlin Potter, CBS/Assistant Director, Cedar Creek Ecosystem Reserve
- Dan Shaw, Landscape Architecture, CDes, University of Minnesota Twin Cities & State of MN Soil/Water
Writing Puppetry: A Workshop Intensive for K-12 Teachers of Color in Minnesota
Writing Puppetry: A Workshop Intensive for K-12 Teachers of Color in Minnesota is a five-day workshop that provides practicing K-12 teachers of color an opportunity to use the artistic practices of puppetry, story-writing, and performance as a way to think deeply and imaginatively about their relation to the schools they work in, as well as the communities, histories, and identities they may bring to their work. Engaging in arts-based professional development combined with writing pedagogies, this program furthers the goals of interdisciplinary collaboration by inviting teachers from a number of disciplines, grade levels, and school districts. Writing Puppetry is a collaboration between the Minnesota Writing Project, the UMN Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, and Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop.
Conveners:
- Jasmine Kar Tang, Writing Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Lee Fisher, Writing Studies, University of Minnesota Twin Cities
- Amanda Steepleton, Liberal Arts Engagement Hub
- Chamindika Wanduragala, Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop
Past Collaboratives
Please note: A full list of past collaboratives is coming soon!
For a text list of all past IAS Research and Creative Collaborative conveners, please click here.
Research and Creative Collaboratives 2021–2022
Big River Continuum
Conveners:
Rebecca Dallinger, Itasca Biological Station, CBA
Boris Oicherman, Weisman Art Museum
Jonathan Schilling, Plant & Microbial Biology; Itasca Biological Station & Labs, CBS
Monique Verdin, Artist Bvlbuncha (St. Bernard Parish), Louisiana
Solutions to environmental problems are as social and political as they are scientific, requiring collaboration between the public, the science community and policy makers. We spend significant effort in environmental science, however, focusing on regulation rather than on civic engagement and assuming public science illiteracy (deficit model). This may further polarize people, particularly across a growing rural-urban divide. To address this, our collaborative aims (1) to engage rural communities, artists, and scientists together in creative experiences, and (2) to study the shared process of cohort development. Our Mississippi-long program is based at the Itasca Biological Station at the Mississippi River headwaters and is linked through the Twin Cities to Tulane University at the Mississippi delta. The Collaborative involves co-creation that combines Indigenous perspectives with sciences, arts, policy, planning, and organizing. This river engagement ‘platform’ can be the foundation for future, larger cross-sector environmental initiatives, and it will help establish a rural cohort with an equitable and active link to our University.
Fostering Understanding and Promoting Inclusion for Individuals with Disabilities
Conveners:
Yue Wu, Rehabilitation Medicine, Medical School
Philip Shorey, Composer
We envision a future that embraces the diversity and inclusion of people with disabilities in society, whether they are in school, working or simply living in the community. The goal is to develop a performance piece illuminating the experience of people with disabilities in a model centered in art. The collaborative team includes colleagues from the University of Minnesota Medical School, Center for Allied Health Programs, Institute on Community Integration, School of Music, and other community stakeholders from Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare and MacPhail Center for Music. This interdisciplinary collaboration between the University departments and community organizations will explore how embracing individuals with disabilities can enrich the learning and research environment within the University and the community at large. As an interdisciplinary collaborative, this project will investigate new ways to capture the nuanced stories of the emotional journey of families who have children with disabilities. Our Collaborative is grounded in three unique factors: the rich foundation of research and advocacy from the Institute on Community Integration, the power of storytelling through music and creative arts, and the potential long-term partnership between the University and community.
Gender and Violence: Korea and Beyond
Conveners:
Insil Jeon, Curriculum and Instruction, CEHD
Eunice Kim, History, CLA
Tanner Rogers, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Travis Workman, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Hiromi Mizuno, History, CLA
Gender and Violence: Korea and Beyond (GVKab) examines how hyper-developmentalism, the capitalist labor market, gender-based oppression, and racialized anti-immigrant sentiment are represented in academia and popular culture as a result of Cold War geopolitics in East Asia. Through interdisciplinary engagement, GVKab aims to critically interrogate how the Korean Peninsula came to be a significant spatial and temporal space for investigating such oppressive legacies. By bringing in scholars and researchers from various fields such as Sociology, History, Journalism, and Korean Studies, combined with regular literary and film discussions, GVKab will unpack the complexities of Cold War ideologies and their specific relations to the hierarchical violence and oppression that continue to manifest in cultural, economic and political systems on the Korean Peninsula.
Indigenous Good Birth Project
Conveners:
Bridget Basile Ibrahim, University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center, Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health
Lou Clark, Academic Clinical Affairs & Division of General Internal Medicine, Medical School
Katy Backes Kozhimannil, University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center, Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health
The purpose of this creative-research collaborative is to describe what makes “a good birth” for Indigenous women in rural Minnesota and to contribute toward improving birth equity. This project will conduct original research and translate the findings of this research into a creative dramatic performance and a set of training materials to train maternity care clinicians in culturally-centered care. Semi-structured interviews will take place in two rural Indigenous communities where we have identified community partners. Thorne’s interpretive description approach will guide the qualitative data analysis. Anne Lyerly’s A Good Birth will serve as a conceptual framework for data interpretation. Utilizing healthcare simulation methodology, UMN’s M Simulation team will adapt the data to design and implement human simulation training scenarios for learners to role play with standardized/simulated patients (SPs). Additionally, participant narratives will be curated and crafted into an educational script produced for public performances featuring the SPs as actors. This exploratory and descriptive creative-research collaboration aims to improve scientific knowledge and clinical practice by filling knowledge gaps related to Indigenous maternal health equity and to train maternity care clinicians to provide culturally-centered care.
Interpreting collards greens, soil and cultural histories through the lens of the Black experience: a visual art exhibit
Conveners:
Tiffany LaShae, Soil, Water, and Climate, CFANS
Terresa Moses, Graphic Design, College of Design
Nic Jelinski, Soil, Water, and Climate, CFANS
This project will integrate a scientific study on the effects of different soil types and soil amendments on collard greens with cultural perspectives on collard greens, soil management, land, natural history, and racial justice, through the development of a visual arts exhibit. Because collard greens connect people of African descent born in America to a stolen history, social identity, triumph, survival, and freedom, it is critical to conduct scientific studies on collard greens through a cultural lens. This integration will be facilitated by producing a visual art exhibit from the documentation of a journey of soil collection (soil materials which will be subsequently used in the research study) placed in the historical context of enslaved people through interviews, photos, videos, and narrative stories of Black history and land and soil stewardship on a trip from Virginia to Texas. This journey will include connections to faculty and staff at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Black-owned farms. The visual art exhibit will weave together cultural and environmental narratives of collard greens, soil and land management, and natural history by displaying soil profiles and their natural histories alongside images and videos relevant to cultural histories and the Black experience in America.
Just Education: Addressing the Ripple Effect of Incarceration in Minnesota
Conveners:
Perry L. Moriearty; Law School
Rebecca Shlafer; Pediatrics, Medical School
Daniel McCarthy Clifford; Visual Artist
Ingrid Nuttall; Office of the Registrar
Incarceration affects the lives of millions through exploitative and discriminatory practices in various forms of carceral control and its “collateral damage” extends to families and communities. The goal of this collaboration is to identify what the University of Minnesota, as a major and influential academic institution, can do to address the crisis. Over the last two years, leaders from the Law School, Academic Health Center, Weisman Art Museum, and other University stakeholders have explored how the University can reverse the ripple effect of incarceration by creating a more just approach to supporting citizens with criminal records and their communities. In the third year of our collaboration, we aim to define how the University can transform the collateral consequences of incarceration into opportunities for economic mobility, individual growth, and societal change through research, teaching, and collaboration with scholars, advocates, state and county officials, and those currently impacted. In 2021–22, a key effort of Just Education will be our continued work with University faculty, leadership, and the Department of Corrections to develop and deliver a baccalaureate degree program to currently incarcerated scholars.
Kerala Project
Conveners:
Sumanth Gopinath, Music, CLA
Jenny Norman, Curriculum & Instruction, CEHD
Yuichiro Onishi, African American & African Studies, CLA
Siddhant Pusdekar, Ecology, CBS
Our project is an exploratory research collaboration that seeks to critically reframe science communication and science practices for the purpose of co-constructing imaginative, relational, and actionable solutions towards environmental and climate justice. The majority of current attempts to address climate emergencies in the United States are focused on technocratic solutions that fail to mobilize collective action and often distance the communities who will be most impacted by effects of climate change. In order to tackle the climate crisis, we need radically different approaches that are accessible and motivating to all people, especially young people. When looking for successful examples of people-centered solutions, Kerala People’s Science Movement (KSSP) in the Indian state of Kerala stands out for their novel approaches of decades-long bottom-up governance by engaging people in science as a tool for liberation. Our goal is to investigate how KSSP’s strategies can catalyze the existing work of two local environmental justice organizations—the Minnesota Environmental & Climate Justice Table and Science for the People. From our research, we hope to build a model that is representative of collective concerns and visions that can effectively work towards liberatory climate justice solutions.
Latinx Visual Arts Collaborative: exploring an infrastructure for artistic opportunity and professional development of Minnesota Latinx artists
Conveners:
Karen Mary Davalos, Chicano and Latino Studies, CLA
Maria Cristina Tavera, Artist & Independent Curator, Serpentina Arts
Christina Martinez, Chicano and Latino Studies, CLA
Contemporary movements including Me Too!, Black Lives Matter, and Decolonize the Museum have increased attention to equity, inclusion, and accountability within the U.S. art world. This interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaborative is informed by such phenomena and the methodologies of Chicana/o/x studies which maximize reciprocity with and outcomes for historically marginalized populations. The Collaborative challenges the status quo and existing academic structures by creating innovative practices to strengthen the self-determined professional advancement of Minnesota Latinx artists. We propose two types of activities to determine an infrastructure that suits the needs and agency of Minnesota Latinx artists: (1) works-in-progress discussions with an artist planning group and, (2) workshops with arts experts. Following Paulo Freire, the Collaborative positions the artist planning group as the decision-makers who will determine the specific topics of the workshops and the infrastructure of their future collective action that advances their artistry and professional development. Notably, the budget also challenges existing structures in academia by funding the artist planning group for their knowledge and time away from their studios. Finally, the Collaborative mitigates exclusionary practices of the U.S. art world by hosting workshops designed by and for Minnesota Latinx artists.
Memory, Movement, Montage
Conveners:
Nida Sajid; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Pawan Sharma; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Rituparna Rana; Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier III
Memory, Movement, Montage began in early 2020 with the objective of building an inclusive platform for diverse perspectives on migration and creating an innovative curriculum for global engagement. We specifically focus on alternative mediums for narrating migration stories and histories to engage critically with material memory and memorialization. Our Collaborative challenges conventional methodologies and explores creative venues for both academic research and public outreach. We started by reaching out to academic, artistic, and migrant communities both within the university and outside to form a transnational collective. These vibrant interactions led us to conceptualize digital projects in six different locations across the globe: Amsterdam, Berlin, Goa, Minnesota, Punjab, and Zanzibar. We have initiated three film documentation projects, three photo-essay exhibitions, and two visual story-mapping projects through our collaboration with academic institutions and community organizations. We plan to complete our ongoing projects and move forward thematically by introducing new initiatives in the coming year on migrant cultures of food, music, and dress. As a multimedia project, this Collaborative will continue to examine the racialization of migrant communities, the concepts of borders and boundaries, and the meaning of political citizenship in a transnational world.
Transdisciplinary Engagements with Contemporary Indigenous Thinkers
Conveners:
David Syring, Studies in Justice, Culture and Social Change, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, U of M Duluth
Jennifer Liang, Biology, Swenson College of Science & Engineering, U of M Duluth
Peter Murdock Levin, Institute on the Environment
Katy Chapman, Math, Science & Technology, U of M Crookston
This project focuses on engaging contemporary Indigenous thinkers to explore how Indigenous thought can be made more central to education and research. The goal is to make this inclusive of diverse perspectives, and to influence thinking on a wide range of topics, from how research and education are carried out to who benefits and participates. Since these are central questions, we expect that this project will engage and impact a broad range of programs and disciplines within the UMN system. The project includes virtual and in-person (as possible) events featuring thinkers who cross conventional interdisciplinary boundaries, including: Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Linda Hogan; Ojibwe/Odawa education scholar Dr. Roxanne Gould; local Anishinaabe artists such as Vern Northrup, Wendy Savage, and Moira Villiard; as well as other Indigenous thinkers yet to be identified. Events will include classroom visits, student engagements, gatherings with faculty and staff, and public events. The project will be central to the ongoing, interdisciplinary creation of a Learning Community composed of faculty, staff, and graduate and undergraduate students from multiple programs located across system campuses. The project will culminate in an “Action Plan for Strengthening the Presence of Indigenous Knowledge Perspectives in our Teaching and Research.”
Research and Creative Collaboratives 2020–2021
Afrofeminist Sound, Touch, and Speculation in Brixton, UK and North Minneapolis: A Transatlantic Collaboration
This project explores Afrofeminist forms of cultural organization and knowledge-making in London and the Twin Cities. This project magnifies and gives center stage to the visual, material, and performative characteristics of arts-centered, transatlantic collaboration. In this project we ask, how does Afrofeminist collaborative artmaking serve a critical function in the formation of diaspora as both political aspiration and solidarity for feminist futures in urban settings? Following in the onto-epistemic footsteps of Toni Cade Bambara: our goal is to shift attention away Afrofeminist artists who have achieved national and international acclaim, instead we seek to create the intimacies necessary to gain access to the “back closet” of Afrofuturist feminist artists/activists who are unacknowledged and under-curated works archive contemporary protest histories of the black diasporic metropolis.
Conveners:
Zenzele Isoke; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA
Sayge Carroll; Department of Art, CLA
Ego Ahaiwe; Chelsea College of Art and Design, Tate—Britain
ArTeS
ArTeS is an emerging, intercollegiate initiative that centers the Arts in Art + Technology + Science collaborations at the University of Minnesota. We affirm, as our core value, systematically creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive network and exchange among disciplines essential to the foundation of ArTeS. While continuing to cultivate alliances across the Twin Cities campus our next collaborative goal is to envision and generate multiple, experimental, forms designed to activate ArTeS as a university-wide initiative. We will direct our process towards the development of a planning grant. Securing these funds will provide the necessary support to implement multiple models which exemplify the potential of ArTeS to be a catalyst linking research, learning, and teaching that centers the arts in art, technology, and science collaborations. Guest artists and imaginative leaders in collaborative research at the nexus of art, technology, and science will visit campus to share their work and to think with us. These activities will be complemented by a series of experimental, interdisciplinary, and participatory engagements designed to activate graduate student, undergraduate student, and community youth participation in ArTeS.
Conveners:
Diane Willow; Art, CLA
Jennifer Newsom; Architecture, CDes
Daniel Keefe; Computer Science and Engineering, CSE
Vicente Diaz; American Indian Studies, CLA
Critical Disability Studies Research Colloquium
We propose a model of intersecting, interdependent, and flexible leadership to continue to explore and expand capacity for critical disability studies (CDS) at the University of Minnesota. In organizing an intercampus research colloquium showcasing established and emerging scholars, the co-conveners envision a growing interdisciplinary, intercampus, intellectual community that can support new partnerships and share in imagining system-wide curricular innovation, program building, and ultimately institutional transformation. Building on the momentum of two key initiatives intended to advance CDS, the Collective (est. 2015) and Imagine Chair in Arts, Design, and Humanities (CY 2020-2021), this Collaborative will connect and build community among scholars currently at the U of M (UMTC and Morris) whose research contributes to the field of CDS. The Collaborative aims to bridge past work and future aspirations. Whereas the Critical Disability Studies Collective welcomed disability studies scholars from across the U.S.—prioritizing the work of scholar-activists of color—and the Imagine Chair project is dedicated to building the future of CDS at the UofM, the proposed research colloquium will highlight the intellectual richness of scholarly work currently being produced here and strengthen our internal capacity to lead nationally and internationally in the creation of knowledge that foregrounds and centers critical disability perspectives.
Conveners:
Gail Dubrow; Architecture and Landscape Architecture, CDes; Public Affairs & Planning, HHH; History, CLA
Erin L. Durban; Anthropology, CLA
Jessica Horvath Williams; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, CLA
Liz Thomson; Equity, Diversity & Intercultural Programs, UM-Morris
Gender and Violence: South Korea and Beyond
Gender and Violence: South Korea and Beyond takes a multimedia and cross-disciplinary approach to issues of gender, violence, and area studies, and has hosted many public-facing events, including film screenings, lectures, and workshops. By organizing events that include academic and non-academic participants and audiences, we aim to build solidarity between diverse communities at and beyond UMN. This collective, consisting of graduate students and faculty members working in area studies, is formed motivated by its concern about the Korean Studies’ disciplinary limitation in addressing gendered violence and about the issues of colonial legacies that have shaped the area studies in the U.S. academia at large. This project underlines that the lack of institutional and academic efforts to identify the singularity of gender issues in modern Korea, while acknowledging its close connectivity to the Cold War system, corresponds to the way area studies on the whole has been confined, stereotyped, and isolated in U.S. academia. We challenge this view by connecting Korean studies with various disciplines that would help examine Korean culture and media in a transnational context (such as film studies, literary criticism, art history, cultural studies, and media studies), and by having emphasis on (post)colonial and gender violence. We seek to collaborate with scholars, artists, and activists of varying backgrounds through the organization of various activities: a reading group, film screenings, roundtables with film directors and experimental performance artists, and a conference.
Conveners:
Hiromi Mizuno; History, CLA
Travis Workman; Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Soo Hyun Jackelen; Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Soyi Kim; Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, CLA
Just Education: Addressing the Ripple Effect of Incarceration in Minnesota
Incarceration affects the lives of millions through exploitative and discriminatory practices in various forms of carceral control and its “collateral damage” extends to families and communities. The goal of this collaboration is to identify what the University of Minnesota, as a major and influential academic institution, can do to address the crisis. Over the last year, leaders from the Law School, Academic Health Center, Weisman Art Museum, and other University stakeholders have explored how the University can reverse the ripple effect of incarceration by creating a more just approach to supporting citizens with criminal records and their communities. In the second year of our collaboration, we aim to define how the University can transform the collateral consequences of incarceration into opportunities for economic mobility, individual growth, and societal change, through teaching (including offering a Grand Challenges course for UMN students and exploring course-offerings inside prisons) and research, and collaboration with scholars, advocates, state and county officials, and those currently impacted.
Conveners:
Perry L. Moriearty; Law School
Rebecca Shlafer; Pediatrics, Medical School
Daniel McCarthy Clifford; Visual Artist
Ingrid Nuttall; Office of Information Technology
Memory, Movement, Montage
Memory, Movement, Montage is a collaborative forum for exploring diverse perspectives on the term ‘Migration’ in academic and creative spaces on three continents—North America, Europe and Asia. As an interdisciplinary multimedia project, this initiative addresses various aspects of contemporary migrant identity, differing concepts of borders and boundaries, and many meanings of belonging in the present global context. To cover multiple dimensions of migration, we bring together artists, researchers, activists and scholars from disciplines such as literature, visual art, film, theater, history and environmental studies. The different approaches of these disciplines—historical, political, social, cultural and ecological—will introduce an interdisciplinary lens to study global patterns of migration and understand their impact on both human and non-human worlds. In addition, this Collaborative focuses on alternative mediums for narrating migration stories and histories in order to engage with local communities in Minnesota and also create an innovative curriculum for public engagement at the university. We aim to build an interactive community to critically examine and redefine movement, memory and memorialization through oral recordings, digital archives and photo/film series. Individuals and collectives with different experiences related to migration will also work together to organize talks, seminars, public exhibitions, creative workshops, literary festivals, live performances, and film production.
Conveners:
Nida Sajid; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Pawan Sharma; Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, CLA
Rituparna Rana; MOVES, Paul Valery University, Montpellier, France
Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Art and Science
This Collaborative is part of a broader project that brings together 32 team members (up from 19 when we first began) from the University, community, and research institutions abroad to better understand the impacts of traumatic memory upon individuals and societies. Our project critically engages the issues of how we come to terms with and heal from trauma, seek accountability for human rights abuses that led to severe trauma, and mitigate future traumatization. Together we have been exploring how an interdisciplinary understanding of memory and traumatization can illuminate pathways between artistic production and healing. A full understanding of trauma and its implications in modern society must address its individual and social dimensions, and place (1) therapeutic and artistic work, (2) critical cultural analysis and scientific modeling/experimentation, (3) sociological/historical study and medical practice in dialogue. Our team has done this through public lectures with internationally recognized scholars, workshops with team members, new undergraduate courses in which the PIs have collaborated, a major international conference, community outreach, and creating a web page. IAS funds will allow us to continue this work by inviting to campus four major scholars that will broaden our disciplinary reach, and preparing an edited volume for publication.
Visit Collaborative Web Site ▸
Conveners:
Ofelia Ferrán; Spanish and Portuguese Studies, CLA
Ana Forcinito; Spanish and Portuguese Studies, CLA
Brian Engdahl; Neuroscience, Medical School
Moving Image & Media Studies Graduate Group
From its founding in 2016, the Moving Image & Media Studies Graduate Group has served as a collaboratively-run nexus for students, faculty, and production professionals working in film and audiovisual media across the University of Minnesota and the Twin Cities community at large. MIMSGG is open to and inclusive of all scholars of cinema and media, particularly those who find themselves in departments without established focuses on cinema and media. Our objective is to generate new approaches to the study of cinema and media through cross-disciplinary encounter and dialogue. Founded as a student group by individuals in the Moving Image and Media Studies graduate minor—itself comprised of students from myriad academic departments—MIMSGG unites scattered film and media scholars across the University, creating a space to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship. Presently, the group reaches 16 academic departments and 7 associated student groups at the University. We also engage a wider Twin Cities community through our partnerships with local organizations such as the Trylon Cinema and the Walker Art Center. The group’s interdisciplinarity thus extends beyond the purely academic as we engage practical considerations of production alongside theory-based research approaches to cinema and media.
Conveners:
Alya Ansari; Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, CLA
Nicholas Henderson; Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, CLA
Devon Moore; Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, CLA
Maggie Hennefeld; Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, CLA
Graeme Stout; Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, CLA
Matthew Tchepikova-Treon; American Studies, CLA
Preparing for Our Future Museums: Museum Studies in the 21st Century
The UMN Museum Studies Graduate Minor is over 30 years old. Students from across the University take MST courses in addition to their majors, to prepare for entry into the multi-faceted museum field. However, many students are looking for additional content to address the specific challenges of today’s museums. Preparing for Our Future Museums Collaborative will address this need through a study of the state of museum studies programs nationally combined with a series of dialogues exploring the evolving challenges facing today’s museums. The Collaborative will convene scholars and professionals from across the University and the museum community in leadership, economics, nonprofits, decolonization, accessibility, and aging in addition to art history, collection management, archaeology, historic preservation, public history, natural resources, living collections, and other areas related to museums in communities. The examination of national museum studies curricula plus this breadth of expertise will be used to shape proposed pedagogy for the University's Museum Studies program and practice for future museum professionals.
Conveners:
Lin Nelson Mayson; Goldstein Museum, CDes
Diane Mullin; Weisman Art Museum
Project for Advancing Health Care Stewardship
Our creative collaborative, the Project for Advancing Healthcare Stewardship (PAHS), will facilitate social conversations about health and health care stewardship. While our project was conceived before the current global pandemic emerged, COVID-19 has shined a bright light on and escalated many of the same systemic healthcare challenges that PAHS seeks to explore and address. The persistent information asymmetry between clinicians and patients demands immediate attention, as it puts undue strain on already overburdened providers and underprepared patients. Other entrenched healthcare problems exacerbated by COVID-19 include cost escalation, insurance frustration, treatment uncertainty, clinician burnout, and patient distrust. Now, more than ever, careful stewardship of health and health care is needed in order to rebuild and maintain an efficient, effective, and sustainable system. Our proposed collaborative will facilitate interactive social discourse and storymaking to help people process not only the particular stress and grief related to the pandemic, but also to recognize and communicate long-term about the care they want within the constraints of what is available and potentially effective, while providing tools and resources to help them do so. Our community-driven focus is unique, engaging individuals first as active participants in the healthcare system, and second through their roles as providers or patients. Our team incorporates perspectives from evidence-based practice, narrative medicine, behavioral health, sustainability, and community engagement.
Conveners:
Mary Butler; Health Policy and Management, SPH
Jeannine Ouellette; SPH
Tai Mendenhall; Family Social Science, CEHD
Religion and the Public University
The role of religion on public university campuses has changed significantly in the 21st century as religious identity has been afforded increasing significance in the intersectional selves of students, faculty, and staff. While this is a positive development for many, changing attitudes toward religion have also spurred conflict and raised challenges that in some cases administrators are at a loss to address. The Religion and the Public University collaborative will bring together faculty, staff, and graduate students from several Twin Cities and coordinate campus units of the University of Minnesota to research the historical, legal, and sociological scholarship on the religion/public university relationship and to use that material to provide context for discussions and deliberations that it will host, aimed at disseminating information.
Conveners:
Jeanne Kilde; Religious Studies, CLA
Virajita Singh; Office of Equity and Diversity; Architecture, CDes
Research and Creative Collaboratives 2019–2020
Anthropocene Collaborative Team
CONVENERS:
- Aaron R. Boyson, Department of Communication, CLA, Duluth
- Michael Pfau, Department of Communication, CLA, Duluth
New research specifies how climate change is predicted to disproportionately affect the Duluth-Superior community, but not for the same reasons many others will be affected. Work by Dr. Jesse Keenan from Harvard predicts that the Duluth/Superior area will be one of the most felicitous locations for people displaced by the negative effects of climate change, owing in part to its cooler climate, abundant fresh water, existing infrastructure, including a strong education system, and well-educated population. Communicating in advance about the implications of the dislocation and relocation of national “refugees” is critical across economic, environmental, social, and social psychological lines. An interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaboration of scholars that has been meeting together for more than three years to study the Anthropocene seeks to consider fully this expectation. The collaboration this year spans across three colleges within the University of Minnesota Duluth and will include scholars from three institutions in our area (UMD, University of Wisconsin-Superior, and Lake Superior College). We intend to capitalize on a spring campus visit this semester to UMD by Dr. Keenan, extend previous community engagement efforts, and advance on an emerging framework for an edited volume on the climate refugee crisis.
Gender and Violence: South Korea and Beyond
CONVENERS:
- Soo Hyun Jackelen, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, CLA, TC
- Soyi Kim, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, CLA, TC
- Travis Workman, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, CLA, TC
- Hiromi Mizuno, History, CLA, TC
Area studies has been deeply entwined with the Cold War politics, and Korean studies is one of the most exemplary cases. Despite area studies’ emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach, the central focus of Korean studies has long been ensnared in the politically focused issues. This collective attempts to develop its concern about Korean studies’ limited validation into a structural question of U.S. area studies, by expanding the scope of research of Korean studies to more diversified areas concerning culture and media, with emphasis on the issues of gender and violence. This project underlines the fact that sexual violence and institutional violence in modern Korean history are closely entangled in the way Korean studies has been confined, stereotyped, and isolated in the hegemonic view derived from the Cold War system, as with many other branches of area studies that share a colonial memory. We challenge this view through organizing various activities, including a reading group and film screenings, which will be open to the public.
Just Education: Addressing the Ripple Effect of Incarceration in Minnesota
CONVENERS:
- Perry L. Moriearty, Law School, TC
- Rebecca Shlafer, Department of Pediatrics, AHC, TC
- Daniel McCarthy Clifford, Visual Artist, Weisman Art Museum
Incarceration affects the lives of millions through exploitative and discriminatory practices in various forms of carceral control, and its “collateral damage” extends to families and communities. The goal of this collaboration is to identify what the University of Minnesota, as a major and influential academic institution, can do to address the crisis. Leaders from the Law School, Academic Health Center, Weisman Art Museum, and other University stakeholders will explore how the University can reverse the ripple effect of incarceration by creating a more just approach to supporting citizens with criminal records and their communities. Through research, and collaboration with scholars, advocates, state and county officials, and those currently impacted, we will define how the University can transform the collateral consequences of incarceration into opportunities for economic mobility, individual growth, and societal change.
Minnesota Youth Story Squad: Critical Youth Work in Urban Public Schools
CONVENERS:
- Kari Smalkoski, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, TC
- Jigna Desai, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, TC
- Vernon Rowe, Northeast Middle School
- Nicole Ramos, Parkway Montessori Middle School
As an interdisciplinary collaborative, we are investigating new ways to tell the nuanced stories behind educational benchmark statistics about Twin Cities urban public school students. This praxis begins with an imperative need to understand the experiences of youth from their own perspectives. Since 2016, our inter-collegiate, community collaboration has integrated interdisciplinary digital humanities with community engagement as we harness the power of storytelling as a process and product to amplify youths’ voices. Firmly grounded in feminist, LGBTQ, and ethnic studies, our program creates opportunities for youth to express themselves through art, movement, and spoken word workshops to address questions of identity, inequality, and representation. Our collaborative is grounded in four unique factors: a critical race and feminist studies curriculum, the power of storytelling, enhancement of digital skills, and furthering college-positive culture through establishing relationships with underrepresented middle school and undergraduate mentors. As an initiative that grows and sustains relationships with entire schools, we have collaborated for three years with a St. Paul public school and one year with a Minneapolis public school. A core goal of our collaborative is to impact individual and institutional change through youth advocacy. Click here to visit their website, learn more about the project, and read stories!
Moving Image & Media Studies Graduate Group
CONVENERS:
- Matthew Tchepikova-Treon, American Studies, CLA, TC
- Dzmitry Tsapkou, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, TC
- Maggie Hennefeld, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, TC
- Olga Tchepikova-Treon, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, TC
- Graeme Stout, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, TC
The Moving Image & Media Studies Graduate Group (MIMSGG) is a student-operated collective working in film and audiovisual media with membership drawing from numerous UMN departments. In collaboration with faculty, production professionals, and other academic groups, we have built an active scholarly community, created research opportunities for graduate students, and organized public events throughout the Twin Cities, including an academic conference, the MIMSGG Film Screening Series, film projection workshops, reading groups, collaborative research on audiovisual technologies, and the production of original work in a multitude of disciplines. Operating at a university with no central department dedicated to graduate-level film and audiovisual media studies/production, yet where such work thrives within many distinct areas across campus, including departments outside the humanities, MIMSGG exists as an active resource for students and faculty to organize events, share research, and work collaboratively. Additionally, as an organization operating within a land-grant institution, MIMSGG steadily works to create opportunities for connecting with communities beyond our campus. We are renewing with the IAS Collaborative Program to continue expanding our group as well as our collective efforts to engage with film and media as both an object of study and a tool for interdisciplinary scholarship.
Narrative/Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis
CONVENERS:
- Mary Jo MaynesHistory, CLA, TC
- Leslie Morris, German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, CLA, TC
Scholars from a range of disciplines, along with practitioners in medicine, psychology, and other forms of healing or therapy, have turned their attention in recent years to intersections between experiences pain or trauma and the creation of narratives to describe and grapple with these experiences. More broadly, scholars in the humanities, and increasingly the social sciences as well, are engaging with personal narratives (such as memoirs, diaries, and oral histories) as objects of study or sources of evidence. Personal narratives are of interest as literary genres and as sources of insight into the relationship between the individual and the social. Our research collaborative centers on interdisciplinary work with such narratives, specifically on the production and analysis of personal narratives of illness and trauma. Our scope has broadened somewhat as a result of our first year of presentations and discussions. Along with our examination of narratives recounting experiences of illness, we are now also engaging with narratives that recount the experiences of medical practitioners and educators, historically and in the present. Some participants have also workshopped works of fiction, literature and art at the intersection of narrative and medicine.
North Minneapolis Clean Energy Engagement Project
CONVENERS:
- Ellen Anderson, Energy Transition Lab, IonE, TC
- Jamez Staples, Renewable Energy Partners
- Akisha Everett, Energy Transition Lab, IonE, TC
The North Minneapolis Clean Energy Engagement Project is a collaboration with the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment’s Energy Transition Lab; Renewable Energy Partners (REP), a minority-owned renewable energy company in North Minneapolis; and community-based organizing partners. The Neighborhood Hub organizing partners will engage community members in exploring opportunities in clean-energy deployment and career-track technical training, through public meetings and events, connecting with clean-energy experts, and interacting with state, local, and federal elected decision-makers. An emerging cohort of local clean-energy leaders will be developed and coached to be “champions” for beneficial community energy solutions, developing capacity among local residents of color, black, Latino, native, and other underrepresented groups, so they are well positioned to understand and advance clean energy opportunities in North Minneapolis. The Energy Transition Lab and REP’s goals for a community-scale microgrid and advanced energy training center will gain valuable momentum through this capacity-building.
Religion and the Public University
CONVENERS:
- Jeanne Kilde, Religious Studies Program, CLA, TC
- Virajita Singh, Office of Equity and Diversity, TC
The role of religion on public university campuses has changed significantly in the 21st century as religious identity has been afforded increasing significance in the intersectional selves of students, faculty, and staff. While this is a positive development for many, changing attitudes toward religion have also spurred conflict and raised challenges that in some cases administrators are at a loss to address. The Religion and the Public University collaborative will bring together faculty, staff, and graduate students from several Twin Cities and coordinate campus units of the University of Minnesota to research the historical, legal, and sociological scholarship on the religion/public university relationship and to use that material to provide context for discussions and deliberations that it will host, aimed at disseminating information.
Ways of Knowing Water
CONVENERS:
- Boris Oicherman, Weisman Art Museum
- Shanai Matteson, Water Bar and Public Studio
The Institute on the Environment (IonE), Weisman Art Museum, and Water Bar and Public Studio collaborate on establishing a community of artists, scientists, healing practitioners, poets, architects, scholars of culture, thinkers, craftsmen and others to learn together how to feel, think, know, read, and taste water. In a series of regular study sessions we are exploring the environmental, the indigenous, the experiential, the scientific, the poetic, the communal, and other aspects of water. The knowledge gained in the process will lay the foundation of a collaborative study (research and pedagogy) model that yields critical changes to educational curricula as well as new paradigms for research, artistic development, and public engagement. The communal experience of learning will be the foundation of future collaborations between the participating practitioners of all professions as the participants discover shared interests across disciplines and sectors. The documentation of the process and the transcribed conversations will provide materials for a book, shared in academic settings, as well as in art, public and community forums.
Research and Creative Collaboratives 2018-2019
Building Collaborative Capacity in Equity and Diversity
Conveners:
- Tammy Berberi, Equity, Diversity & Intercultural Programs; French Discipline, Morris
- Adrienne Conley, Student Life and LGBTQIA2S+ Programs, Morris
We aim to continue developing our capacities (individual and collective) in becoming more intersectional in our research and perspectives as teacher-scholars, mentors, and colleagues working in rural Minnesota. We will dedicate a year to researching identities, practices, and skills that are not exclusively white, Western, European, ableist, and normative, but rather inclusive of indigenous, disabled, queer and trans of color, in the interests of sustaining and strengthening relationships and developing holistic and universally-designed support for campus and local communities that are increasingly diverse. We think of ourselves as a generative learning and idea lab for new possibility in equity and diversity that is grown here and is deeply rooted in an evolving sense of Morris’ history, its place, and its future.
Minnesota Youth Story Squad
Conveners:
- Jigna Desai, Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Vernon Rowe, Northeast Middle School, Minneapolis
- Kari Smalkoski, Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
Storytelling can be transformative. It increases self-esteem and self-advocacy, especially for those who are underrepresented; it also creates empathy across differences. We seek to harness the power of storytelling as a process and a product to empower youth in underserved public K-12 schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. We collaborate to imagine and create new models of education-based community-engaged practice with middle school youth. Firmly grounded in feminist, GLBTQ, and ethnic studies, this collaborative uses art, narrative, and storytelling workshops to discuss questions of identity, inequality, and advocacy with urban youth. Storytelling is empowering and transformative for both the story tellers and the story listeners. We work with public school youth to facilitate self-awareness, empathy, and advocacy for issues important to them. Engaged collaboration with youth and educators takes time as trust and change must be fostered over time. We have worked for two years with a St. Paul public school and have expanded to add a new Minneapolis public school partner beginning in 2018.
Food Sovereignty and Student Success
Conveners:
- Mary Jo Forbord, Morris Healthy Eating Initiative, Morris
- Alex Kmett, Student Affairs, Morris
- Amy Mondloch, Center for Small Towns, Morris
- Ryan Pesch, MNEXT Community Vitality, Extension, Twin Cities
The Center for Small Towns at UM Morris is pleased to establish a research collaborative among the faculty and staff of UM Morris, UM Extension, nonprofit and tribal college partners. The goals of the collaborative is to increase understanding of Native food sovereignty and build access, skills, and partnerships supporting physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. The right of indigenous nations to define their own diets and shape food systems that are congruent with their spiritual and cultural values goes hand in hand with physical, mental, and emotional health. Increased understanding of Native food sovereignty, including seed saving, food preparation and storage, gardening, and the socio-cultural and historical importance of food harvest and preparation methods provides a stronger sense of place and wellbeing for both Native and non-Native students and provides tools to support physical, mental, and emotional health. The collaborative will provide three field trips for students, faculty, and staff to exchange ideas and experiences with partners with the Dakota and Ojibwe Nations, as well as four opportunities to host public presentations on the UMM campus.
Historical Injustices: The Working Group
Conveners:
- Ezekiel Joubert, Curriculum and Instruction, CEHD, Twin Cities
- Hana Maruyama, American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- John Matsunaga, Asian American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Yuichiro Onishi, African American & African Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Catherine Squires Communications Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
The centennial history of the University of Minnesota casts its founders, all white men with power, as champions of liberal education. “Stubbornly inspired by what seems almost like a paranoid delusion of grandeur,” James Gray wrote in The University of Minnesota, 1851-1951, “they talked of a place of learning so richly endowed ‘that it would put Harvard in the shade’.” These men, he added, “reappear again and again on lists of candidates for high office, on boards of the major enterprises, and on the roster of university regents” (14). This so-called “paranoid delusion of grandeur,” of course, catalyzed settler colonialism toward Dakota people and their land. Gray acknowledged: “In February 1851, when the legislature thoughtfully stroked its collective beard and created the university... [a]ll but a small eastern triangle of its lands belonged to the Indians” (13). In our collaborative’s second year, we set out to write a counter-history—in the form of short biographies—to unsettle this narrative of becoming, the fraternity of white manhood that sits at the core of state and university formations.
Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Art and Science
Conveners:
- Brian Engdahl, Neuroscience, Medical School, Twin Cities
- Ofelia Ferran, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Ana Forcinito, Spanish and Portuguese Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
This research collaborative is part of a broader project that brings together 19 team members from the University, community, and research institutions abroad to better understand the impacts of traumatic memory upon individuals and societies and to critically engage the issues of how we come to terms with and heal from trauma, seek accountability for human rights abuses that led to severe trauma, and mitigate future traumatization. Together we will explore how a more interdisciplinary understanding of memory and traumatization can illuminate pathways between artistic production and healing. A full understanding of trauma and its implications in modern society needs to address its individual and social dimensions, and place therapeutic and artistic work, critical cultural analysis and scientific modelling/experimentation, sociological/historical study, and medical practice in dialogue. Our project brings together, for the first time at the University, recognized leaders in all these fields in a sustained manner that will lead to vigorous intellectual exchange and important peer-reviewed publications, curricular development that foments co-teaching across departments, and community outreach. Our plan this year is to invite two major scholars and one artist to present their work at our workshop and begin a sustained engagement with our project.
Moving Image & Media Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Group
Conveners:
- Jana Gierden, German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, CLA, Twin Cities
- Margaret Hennefeld, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, Twin Cities
- Jen Hughes, Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities
- Olga Tchepikova, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, Twin Cities
- Matthew Treon, American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
The Moving Image and Media Studies Graduate Group provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty with shared interests in the scholarship, technologies, artistic practices, critical theory, and teaching central to the study and production of moving images and media. Over two years of rapidly growing membership, we have developed a group that serves as an active resource for bringing together many individuals and energies already dedicated to working with moving images and media across the Twin Cities campus. Moving forward as an IAS Collaborative, we aim to create more opportunities for graduate student involvement in the organization of special events, recurring activities, and research collaborations that speak to current trends and questions in a diverse range of related fields associated with our group, as well as our members’ own work. Moreover, in our drive to further connect our campus and our community, we also plan to expand our active involvement with local, non-academic film and media resources. For this, we propose a variety of activities that support our members’ research and further our diverse interests through closer associations with both academic and non-academic experts, institutions, and spaces.
Narrative/Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis across the Liberal Arts and Medical Practice
Conveners:
- MJ Maynes, History, CLA, Twin Cities
- Leslie Morris, German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, CLA, Twin Cities
The IAS Research Collaborative “Narrative/Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis across the Liberal Arts and Medical Practice,” launched in Fall 2017. Cultural critics, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars and practitioners of medicine have all turned their attention in recent years to intersections between experiences of bodily pain, trauma, and illness and the creation of narratives to describe and grapple with these experiences. More broadly, scholars in the humanities, and increasingly the social sciences as well, are engaging with personal narratives (such as memoirs, diaries, letters, and oral histories) as objects of study or sources of evidence. Personal narratives are of interest as particular literary genres but are also sources of privileged insight into the relationship between the individual and the social. Our research collaborative centers on interdisciplinary work on personal narrative and brings it to bear specifically on the production and analysis of personal narratives of illness and trauma. However, our scope has broadened somewhat as a result of our first semester of presentations and discussions. We are now also engaging with narratives that recount the experiences of medical practitioners and educators, in addition to narratives recounting experiences of illness.
Queer Forms
Conveners:
- Howard Oransky, Art, CLA, Twin Cities
- Christina Schmid, Art, CLA, Twin Cities
In May 1969 students at the University of Minnesota offered a class titled “The Homosexual Revolution” at the nearby Free University. The class then reconfigured itself as FREE (Fight Repression of Erotic Expression)—the first GLBT university student organization in the country. In June 1969 the New York City Police Department was met with six days of open resistance and protests when they raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. These events helped galvanize the struggle for GLBTQ liberation. Fifty years later the University of Minnesota will present Queer Forms, a multi-disciplinary collaboration that includes exhibitions and artistic projects, academic and intellectual programs, performance, outreach, community health, and a research-based publication. These activities investigate and celebrate the history, politics and culture of GLBTQ liberation across a range of artistic forms and intellectual perspectives. Convened in 2015, the collaborative planning team currently includes the American Studies Department, Art Department, Boynton Health Service, Chicano and Latino Studies Department, Communication Studies Department, Heritage Studies and Public History, History Department, Minnesota AIDS Project, Office for Public Engagement, Playwright’s Center, Theatre Arts and Dance Department, Twin Cities Pride, University Libraries, Walker Art Center and consultants in Indiana, Minnesota and New York.
Reviving the Gendered Ethics Debate: The Case of Agonism
Conveners:
- Max Hui Bai, Psychology, CLA, Twin Cities
- Daniel Demetriou, Philosophy, Humanities, Morris
- Alexander Kachan, Psychology, Education and Human Service Professions, Duluth
This IAS Collaborative spans three U of M campuses and two disciplines to facilitate collaborative research on gender, agonism, and moral psychology. Since Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), psychologists have debated the reality and nature of gender differences in moral reasoning. Whereas most studies have tested for gender differences on the dimensions of “justice” and “care,” we introduce competitive (or “agonistic”) norms into the discussion. Agonistic norms, which stress competitiveness but also prohibit bullying, unfair play, and disrespecting opponents, are increasingly recognized as “moral” norms by ethicists. This new development in ethics hasn’t yet been accounted for by empirical psychologists studying gender differences in “moral” reasoning, and we—one philosopher and two psychologists—wish to close that gap. This collaborative brings us together to workshop reports of our findings and present our work to faculty and students at UMTC, UMD, and UMM. It also will afford us the opportunity to bring in a notable moral psychologist who will advise us on our research and give a public talk on a related topic.
Research and Creative Collaboratives 2017-2018
Backyard Phenology: Perceiving Cycles and Seasons in a Changing Climate
(Phaino—Greek φαίνω (phainō), “to show, to bring to light, make to appear”)
This IAS collaborative catalyzes a diverse array of faculty, students, and community members from gardeners to ice fishers to observe how changes in our own neighborhoods, backyards, parks, workplaces, commuter routes, and vacation spots reflect the effects of global climate change. These collective observations, publicly shared, provide important insights into how to mitigate, ameliorate and adapt to its consequences. Through this ambitious, arts-focused, phenological approach to climate change that sees past, present, and future through careful observation of seasons and cycles, we hope to include diverse narratives of place that contribute to our scientific understanding of climate-induced shifts in our world. Many people, animals, plants, and even the landscape itself have been experiencing climate changes long before many of us have had to face those consequences. As witnesses to our neighborhood backyard climate change, we will engage in critical dialogues about local and global consequences.
Conveners and Participants
- Christine Baeumler: Art, CLA
- Steve Dietz: Northern Lights
- Beth Mercer-Taylor: Institute on the Evironment
- Rebecca Montgomery: Forest Resources, CFANS
10,000 Stories: Minnesota Youth Make Media
Minnesota currently has one of the largest educational achievement gaps and currently ranks last in the U.S. for racial integration. Many conversations about disparity and opportunity emphasize prevention techniques, reform, grit and resilience, and interventions that are imbued in social and cultural deficits. We collaborate to imagine and create new models of education-based community engaged practice with youth. Firmly grounded in feminist, GLBTQ, and ethnic studies, this collaborative uses digital storytelling to empower youth as social change agents. We use narrative, digital media-making, and art to engage youth. We believe that having youth tell their stories, make arguments, and advocate for issues important to them frames youth as knowers, rather than deficits, and engages them more deeply in their own education and active participation in society. Additionally, we understand that there is no silver bullet that will solve the achievement gap or the vast disparities in Minnesota that have created it. Engaged collaboration with youth and educators takes time as trust and change must be fostered over time. We completed a pilot in Spring 2016 and will complete year one in Spring 2017; we are invested in continued work with our community partners and building relationships in 2018-9.
Conveners
- Kari Smalkoski: Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Jigna Desai: Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
ArTe [Art+Technology]
ArTe is focused on the articulation of an intercollegiate initiative that would situate the arts at the center of an art and technology initiative at the University of Minnesota. Our collaborative goal is to cultivate alliances across the Twin Cities campus and to engage participants in conversations about the dynamic potential for the arts to have a catalytic and collaborative role in creative research and curricula relationships with digital technologies in the sciences and engineering as well as design and architecture. Through a series of themed monthly conversations that convene faculty, staff and student participants we will propose and iterate on a series of conceptual and logistical forms that could be implemented on campus. To better leverage and expand the existing potentials for this initiative, ArTe, we will invite several guests, including funders, to talk with us about existing national initiatives. Complimenting this series of conversations, we would initiate a concurrent series of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Residencies. These would partner students from diverse disciplinary perspectives together to focus on single semester, project specific residencies in the eStudio.
Conveners
- Diane Willow: Art, CLA, Twin Cities
- Lana Yarosh: Computer Science and Engineering, CSE, Twin Cities
Film Arts and Culture in West Central Minnesota: Building a Regional, Cultural Community through a Town and Gown Collaboration
Despite the availability of entertainment on a variety of personal devices, collective film viewing in a theatre remains a popular pastime, a way to build collective culture, a method of creative expression for artists and storytellers, and a possible way to develop regional tourism in smaller Minnesota communities. This collaborative explores and attempts to understand and expand the influence of films and movies in West Central Minnesota and the surrounding areas, served by small theatres and other venues showing film. The collaborative will involve several community participants, and will be especially timely because the summer of 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the formation of the Morris Theatre Cooperative, run by a group of community members/volunteers who are maintaining the local Art Nouveau movie house (and only movie theatre in the county).
Conveners
- Barbara Burke: Communication, Media, & Rhetoric, UMN-Morris
- David Ericksen: English, UMN-Morris
- Anne Hennen-Barber: Morris Public Library Director
Focus on Greater Minnesota
The Center for Small Towns at UM Morris seeks to establish a research collaborative among the faculty and staff of UM Morris and that of UM Extension and the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (RSDPs). The goal of the collaborative will be to bring the applied expertise of the RSDPs and UM Extension to the Morris campus to discuss research opportunities on pressing rural and regional issues. The collaborative is expected to produce specific projects and an ongoing working group on rural needs and voices. During the 2017-8 year, the collaborative will feature four “dinner dialogues” on pressing issues within four broad subject areas—likely to be food systems and sustainability, rural economic development, rural health and well-being and building social capital—followed by a specific evening talk, delivered by guest speakers and open to the campus and the public. In addition, the collaborative will host follow-up luncheons for members to discuss and develop specific research initiatives and projects as well as a session on grant funding opportunities. Beyond the formation of an ongoing research group at UMM, we expect this collaborative will generate research projects that will both benefit and engage communities and organizations from West Central MN.
Conveners
- Roger Rose: Center for Small Towns, UMN-Morris
- Kelly Asche: Center for Small Towns, UMN-Morris
- Benjamin Winchester: Community Vitality, College of Extension, Morris
- David Fluegel: Regional Partnerships, College of Extension, Morris
From Page to Stage: Spring Awakening
This IAS Collaborative seeks to use a contemporary piece of musical theater, the 2006 rock musical Spring Awakening, that is based on a seminal piece of modern dramatic literature, Frank Wedekind’s 1891 play of the same name, as a springboard to allow for conversations that explore the intersection of various disciplines and subjects. What makes this Collaborative significant is not only the choice of this particular musical, but also how Spring Awakening will serve as the cornerstone for interdisciplinary collaborations and activities that will encompass scholarly, artistic, and curricular spheres. Theatre—and particularly musical theatre—represents a particularly fertile locus for interdisciplinary collaboration and the intersections of arts and letters and beyond.
Conveners
- Ray Schultz: Theatre Arts, UMN-Morris
- Stephen Carey: German, UMN-Morris
- Stephanie Ferrian: Dance, UMN-Morris
- Katie Rowles-Perich: Theatre Arts, UMN-Morris
Historical Injustices: The Working Group
Our Collaborative engages with the theme of historical injustices in the context of the state of Minnesota. It features two components that are interrelated: (1) the University of Minnesota’s ties to slavery and (2) wartime Japanese American history in Minnesota in the context of settler colonialism and incarceration. The conveners and participants will bring a sense of settler colonial and racial histories to our institutional home through collaborative research, creative practice, curriculum development, and community engagement. We operate with the proposition that an inquiry into historical injustices matters. We are living in new times, where key political challenges still unmet, namely decolonization and racial justice, are being brought into the fold as vectors of resistance. Under these circumstances, we will do well to hone the perspective of longue durée. We propose to rework our historical groundings from this place and learn how to reckon with deeply colonial/racial pasts still living in the present. This work is not about assigning guilt, nor fostering victimization and resentment. It has everything to do with working through matters concerning justice and responsibility. For this, our Collaborative, Historical Injustices, defines itself as The Working Group.
Conveners
- Yuichiro Onishi: African American & African Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Catherine Squires: Communication Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Hana Maruyama: American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Ezekiel Joubert: Curriculum and Instruction, CEHD, Twin Cities
- John Matsunaga: Asian American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
Music and Sound Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Student Group
The Music and Sound Studies (MSS) group, an interdisciplinary collaborative, works to explore sound and music as acoustic phenomena and practices affecting humans and our environment. We support our members’ work through reading groups on topics ranging from Music Theory to Sound Technologies, bringing in speakers to present on their work, and collaborating with groups such as the MIMS graduate student organization on their Halloween film series. Our membership draws on multiple disciplines and departments that include Music Composition, Musicology, Music Theory, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, and we regularly collaborate with other departments in supporting events that expand the increasingly vital subject of Sound Studies. Besides the activities of our working groups, we held two colloquia in the fall and spring where students presented their research, hosting keynote speakers who offered feedback on student projects. In 2017-18 we will hold our first conference, and seek to expand both our reading groups and collaborative activities, including film screenings and tours of our recording studio.
Conveners
- Joseph Nelson, School of Music, CLA, Twin Cities
- Mikkel Vad, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, CLA, Twin Cities
- Matthew Treon, American Studies, CLA, Twin Cities
- Sumanth Gopinath, School of Music, CLA, Twin Cities
Narrative/Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis across the Liberal Arts and Medical Practice
This collaborative will explore the emerging field of narrative medicine, with a focus on illness narratives in particular. Philosophers, cultural critics, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars and practitioners of medicine have all turned their attention in recent years to exploring the intersections between experiences of bodily pain, trauma, and illness and the creation of narratives to describe and grapple with these experiences. More broadly, scholars in liberal arts fields, and increasingly the social sciences as well, are engaging with personal narratives (such as memoirs, diaries, letters, and oral histories) as objects of study or sources of evidence. Personal narratives are of interest as particular literary genres but are also sources of privileged insight into the relationship between the individual and the social. Our research collaborative will continue this foundational interdisciplinary work on personal narrative and bring it to bear specifically on the production and analysis of personal narratives of illness and trauma.
Conveners
- MJ Maynes: History, CLA, Twin Cities
- Leslie Morris: German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, CLA, Twin Cities
States of Incarceration
The States of Incarceration Collaborative is engaged in public-history programming around the enormous problem of mass incarceration in the United States. As a founding member of the Humanities Action Lab based at the New School in New York (composed of twenty universities across the U.S.), the University of Minnesota team investigates the problem of Native American incarceration in historical and contemporary contexts to enrich a national dialogue and traveling exhibition on mass incarceration produced by the HAL collective. We will support the installation of the exhibition at the Hennepin History Museum in June 2018 and develop programming around it, including featuring prominent Native artists whose creative work takes up the larger themes of incarceration in historical and contemporary contexts.
Conveners
- Kevin Murphy: History, CLA, Twin Cities
- Jean O’Brien: History, CLA, Twin Cities
- Katherine Hayes: Anthropology, CLA, Twin Cities
Thinking and Organizing at the Margins of Traditional Housing
This collaborative produces a unique space from which scholars, activists, policy makers, and engaged citizens will consider the struggle for the right to housing from multiple geographic and political locations. Homelessness, eviction, squatters’ rights, and the right to land all find their way into fruitful interdisciplinary scholarship, much of which links these struggles to broader questions of belonging, governance, and exclusion. Meanwhile, housing activists around the globe address many of these same root problems, but from a grounded space of community organizing, in which organizers deploy popular education to help those immediately affected by the exclusions which occur at the margins of traditional housing situate themselves in broader fights for justice. Much of the work around these intertwined topics from those within and outside of the academy runs along parallel tracks; this collaborative aims to bring them closer together. Through regular meetings, public events/workshops, and a conference, the collaborative will create a crucial space for producing new knowledge at a specific site, one which has only grown in importance with the rise of fascist politics which disproportionately affect those already marginalized away from traditional housing.
Conveners
- Eric Goldfischer: Geography, Environment, and Society, CLA, Twin Cities
- Teresa Gowan: Sociology, CLA, Twin Cities
Research and Creative Collaboratives 2016-2017
Physical Computing and the Internet of Things
Conveners and Participants:
- Lucy Dunne: Design, Housing, and Apparel, CDES
- Barry Kudrowitz: Product Design, CDES
- Loren Terveen: Computer Science and Engineering, CSE
- Diane Willow: Art, CLA
- Lana Yarosh: Computer Science and Engineering, CSE
Backyard Phenology: Perceiving Cycles and Seasons in a Changing Climate
Conveners and Participants:
- Christine Baeumler: Art, CLA
- Beth Mercer-Taylor: Institute on the Environment
- Rebecca Montgomery: Forest Resources, CFANS
- Steve Dietz: Northern Lights
Clean Energy Access
Conveners and Participants:
- Massoud Amin: Technological Leadership Institute, CSE
- Cameran Bailey: Public Affairs
- Thomas Fisher: Metropolitan Design, CDES
- Hari Osofsky: Law, Twin Cities
Digital Games and Learning
Conveners and Participants:
- Edward Downs: Communications, CLA (Duluth)
- NIcolaas VanMeerten: Educational Psychology, CEHD
- Keisha Varma: Educational Psychology, CEHD
- Lana Yarosh: Computer Science, CSE
Digital Storytelling for Youth Empowerment
Conveners and Participants:
- Jigna Desai: GWSS, CLA
- Kari Smolkoski: GWSS, CLA
Fused Realities II
Conveners and Participants:
- David Gore: Communication, CLA, Duluth
- Randy Hanson: GUESS, CLA, Duluth
- Kathryn Milun: Anthropology, CLA, Duluth
Inclusive Game Design
Conveners and Participants:
- David Beard: Writing Studies, CLA, Duluth
- Elizabeth LaPensee: U Mich.
- Nicolaas VanMeerten: Educational Psychology, CEHD
Mapping Inquiries into Mind and Consciousness Across the Academy
Conveners and Participants:
- Michael Maratsos: Child Psychology, CEHD
- Thomas Wolfe: History, CLA
The Pharmaceutical Nexus: Interdisciplinary Conversations and Methodologies
Conveners and Participants:
- Margaret (Macey) Flood: History of Medicine, Medical School
- Sophia Strosberg: Geography, Environment, and Society, CLA
- Dominique Tobbell: History of Medicine, Medical School
Philosophies of Life
Conveners and Participants:
- Suvadip Sinha: Asian Languages and Literature, CLA
- Travis Workman: Asian Languages and Literature, CLA
Researching for Indigenous Community Health
Conveners and Participants:
- Derek Jennings: Pharmacy Practice and Pharmaceutical Science, CoP, Duluth
- Michelle Johnson-Jennings: RICH/PPPS, CoP, Duluth