Announcing our 2025-26 Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residencies

The work of the College of Liberal Arts extends far beyond campus. As the heart of Minnesota’s flagship university, we’re deeply rooted in communities—those who learn with us, collaborate with us, and imagine new possibilities alongside us. Explore our 2025–26 Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residencies and discover how these meaningful partnerships are advancing a culture of connection, creativity, and community engagement.

Aragti Wadaag: A Framework for Arts Organization-University Collaboration 

“Aragti Wadaag” is a collaborative initiative between Soomaal House of Art and the University of Minnesota’s Art Department to reimagine how institutions and communities partner. Through workshops, dialogues, and a public symposium, Somali artists and the Department’s faculty/students will co-create a framework for ethical collaboration—centering diaspora voices in decision-making. Outcomes include a public toolkit, advocacy pathways for Somali artists, and policy reforms to address historic inequities. Hosted at The Hub, this project leverages its hybrid space and anti-racist mission to foster reciprocity, ensuring Somali narratives shape institutional futures.

Funding for this residency is supported in part by the Art Department.

Envisioning Our Liberation: Youth Forums for Advocacy, Kinship, & Storytelling

In partnership with the University of Minnesota’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Program, StoryArk’s Youth Executive Board (YEB) will host a series of three youth-centered forums during the 2025–2026 academic year. These gatherings will bring together high school youth, college students, and their affiliated programs and organizations to build relationships, engage in meaningful dialogue, navigate challenging experiences, and collaborate on storytelling-based advocacy to amplify youth voices to inspire change. Rooted in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the forums will empower participants to reflect critically, engage in collective action, and explore storytelling—including podcasting, creative writing, and visual arts—as a powerful tool for social justice.

This initiative aims to cultivate youth leadership, foster cross-community collaboration, and create a brave, inclusive space for addressing systemic inequities. The culminating exhibition will showcase the creative projects and insights developed throughout the year. Hosted at the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, this residency will amplify youth voices and strengthen connections between high school youth, university students, and community groups, ensuring that young people are equipped—and supported—to lead change in their communities.

Glendale’s Resistance: Home, History, and Power of Section 9 Public Housing

“Glendale’s Resistance” seeks to preserve the history, contributions, and social justice activism of the Glendale Townhomes community. Glendale is Minneapolis's last remaining Section 9 public housing community for families. Amid persistent threats of demolition, displacement, and gentrification, the project will engage the University of Minnesota community in a critical dialogue about the value of Section 9 public housing. We will conduct a series of public programming events, including workshops, an exhibition showing, and a panel discussion with national scholars of public housing, housing justice activists, and tenant organizers. The goal is to use the resistance from tenants as a teaching tool to protect and advocate for building more Section 9 public housing that can address Minneapolis's current housing crisis. This project is a collaboration between Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition and the Heritage Studies & Public History Graduate Program.

Memories of Abundance: The Diasporic Journey of Southeast Asians in Minnesota

This Hub residency presents a series of grassroots storytelling events commemorating 50 years of the diasporic journey of Southeast Asians in Minnesota, uniting our Southeast Asian communities and the broader Minnesota region through firsthand narratives and key historical moments. This storytelling series will center the personal experiences of Southeast Asian communities, capturing accounts of migration, adaptation, and renewal since families’ first arrival here, and investigating how individual experiences have shaped community identities and contributed to Minnesota's culture and historical landscape.

Project Partners:

• Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (The SEAD Project)
• Dr. Palita Chunsaengchan, Assistant Professor, Asian & Middle Eastern Studies

Funding for this residency is supported in part by the Immigration History Research Center.

Phillips Community Oral History Project

The Phillips Community Oral History project is a joint effort by Alley Communications and the United Phillips Coalition, including Phillips West Neighborhood Organization (PWNO), East Phillips Improvement Coalition (EPIC), and Midtown Phillips Neighborhood Association, Inc. (MPNAI).

For over 75 years, The Phillips Community’s four Neighborhoods (made up of Phillips West, Midtown Phillips, East Phillips, and Ventura Village) have had a rich history of advocating for environmental, social, and cultural justice, making it one of the oldest organized Communities in the City. Phillips has been and continues to be a cultural epicenter of Minneapolis, providing a home to waves of immigrant and refugee populations. Named after prominent slavery abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the Phillips Community is the ancestral land of the Dakota and home to one of the largest urban Indigenous populations in the country, in addition to being a settling location for formerly enslaved people and Scandinavian, Jewish, Southeast Asian, Latino/a/e/x, and East African populations.

The Phillips Community Oral History Project was born out of recognition that these histories have rarely been told by the people who lived them. Rather, Phillips has been subjected to narratives written about it, often by people who have little to no connection to the Community. While many negative narratives exist about Phillips, the voices of those who call the Neighborhoods home have often been overlooked, and much of their accounts have yet to be widely documented. The Phillips Community Oral History Project aims to document, amplify, and empower the multicultural and multi-generational voices of those in the Phillips Community to tell their own stories on their own terms.

Project Partners:

• J Randolph, Executive Director, Phillips West Neighborhood Organization
• Luke Gannon, Program Director, East Phillips Improvement Coalition & Midtown Phillips Neighborhood Association, Inc.
• Susan Gust, Board of Directors, Alley Communications
• Ella Kampelman, Community Organizer, Phillips West Neighborhood Organization
• Jarumi Hernandez, Director of Neighborhood Outreach, East Phillips Improvement Coalition & Midtown Phillips Neighborhood Association, Inc.
• Daemeah Karbeah, Communications Manager, East Phillips Improvement Coalition & Midtown Phillips Neighborhood Association, Inc.
• Michael Hessel-Mial, Lecturer, Writing Studies

Rooted in Culture, Connected Through Community: A Fellowship for Asian Language Educators

“Rooted in Culture, Connected Through Community” is a fellowship initiative led by We As One Education in collaboration with Dr. Yao Tu (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies). Among the first of its kind in Minnesota, this fellowship brings together Asian language educators—representing Chinese, Hmong, Karen, and Korean—and leaders from local Asian cultural organizations to co-create high-quality heritage language reading materials and a culturally responsive, community-centered curriculum.

During the residency period, participating teacher fellows will create a series of K-12 curriculum units that incorporate diverse heritage language texts, historical and cultural perspectives, and real-world learning opportunities—including guest speakers, site visits and field trips, and community partnerships. All curriculum materials developed during the residency will be made publicly available through We As One Education’s online platform, expanding access and impact across Minnesota’s world language teaching community. By connecting classroom instruction with lived cultural experiences, this initiative seeks to strengthen the ties between Asian language education and Minnesota’s diverse Asian communities.

Project Partners:

• Johanna Huang, Founder and Executive Director of We As One Education
• Dr. Yao Tu, Associate Director of the Chinese Flagship Program, Lecturer in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies