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 Religion and the Public University (RPUC), which began its work in June 2019 and is planning to continue through May 2021. The report outlines the collaborative’s activities and accomplishments in the past 7 months, briefly describes the upcoming Spring 2020 activities it is committed to through the initial IAS award, and explains two additional events we intend to host: a colloquium in May 2020 (for which we already have some funding) and a symposium in April 2021. Given the strong response from faculty, staff, and students that the RPUC has already elicited, it is clear that our work examining on-the-ground questions and situations related to religious freedom and accommodation, academic freedom, and church-state separation on this and other public university campuses is hitting a nerve, so-to-speak. The relevance of the topic and our research extends beyond UMN to other institutions in the upper Midwest region and through the nation, and as this proposal outlines, our objective is to expand our work across this entire range. Given our ambitious levels of interdisciplinary and reach, this work could not be done without the support and encouragement of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Conveners:
Jeanne Kilde; Religious Studies, CLA
Virajita Singh; Office of Equity and Diversity; Architecture, CDes