Past Residencies
The following projects received Hub residencies in past years.
2025-26 Hub Residencies
“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.
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.
Youth-Led and Future-Focused: The Movement Behind “Envisioning Our Liberation”
“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.
Glendale’s Resistance: Home, History, and Power of Section 9 Housing
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. This project is a collaboration between the Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (The SEAD Project) and the Asian & Middle Eastern Studies.
The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project honors 50 years of history through archival storytelling
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). This 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.
Philips Community Oral History Project: Documenting and Amplifying a Community
“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. 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.
Asian language educators launch fellowship to connect classrooms with Minnesota communities
2024-25 Hub Residencies
The University of Minnesota's Department of Chicano & Latino Studies (CLS) and NewPrensa, a leading Twin Cities media outlet focusing on BIPOC and immigrant communities, are collaborating on a program for high school students. The CLS High School Leadership Certificate Program empowers 20 Latino students from El Colegio High School and the Latinos Unidos program of the White Bear Lake Area School District.
“The Long Fire at Lake and Minnehaha'' is a collaborative, community-based public history project which explores the longer, queerer, history of the intersection surrounding the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct, at the corner of Lake Street and Minnehaha. The intersection came to widespread public attention when the Third Precinct burned during the 2020 Uprising following the police murder of George Floyd, and its future remains a site of contentious community debate and activism.
This project is a collaboration between the University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Program and nonprofit Children of Incarcerated Caregivers. It will consist of a two-semester University of Minnesota seminar, interactive monthly workshops, and a symposium to be held in May 2025. The workshops will convene community partners, people with lived experience, and academic experts to explore proposals and ideas. Throughout the year, students will develop policy alternatives to parental incarceration and will present these alternatives to local decision-makers—potentially bringing real change to Minnesota.
Doing Time on the Outside: Parental Incarceration and the Rights of the Child
“Quilting Stories” nurtures two new strands in a broader “Truth Telling” initiative crafted by Million Artist Movement (MAM) and Speaking Out Collective (SOC). The project expands on oral histories shared by local Black elders and on storytelling workshops with Indigenous Ecuadorian elementary school students. We bring together personal stories with broader scholarly framings to make Black Twin Cities history more visible and to nuance polarizing migration narratives. Both initiatives remap Twin Cities histories from the perspectives of underrepresented BIPOC communities and build on SOC’s prior Truth Telling initiative with local Dakota and Anishinaabe partners to develop K-12 curriculum rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing.
Justice-impacted artists face an array of obstacles to participation in a range of social spheres and activities even after they are released from prison. The ReEntry Lab – an organization designed to explore opportunities for connection between justice-impacted artists and the thriving network of literary organizations and institutions in Minnesota – will use their Hub residency to create an intentional, supportive space for justice-impacted artists to convene with one another and with members of the University of Minnesota community in order to help them navigate the difficult experience of post-incarceration.
ReEntry Lab Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residency Concludes with Public Reading
The UMN Hmong Corpus project is building an open-source, web-based resource in the form of a searchable, annotated Hmong language corpus (database) to support linguistic research and the teaching and learning of the Hmong language. The corpus will support efforts to describe and analyze the Hmong language and provide valuable materials that language teachers and learners can utilize to improve education efforts.
Listen Up Youth Radio is a social enterprise nonprofit led by youth-adult partnership, empowering youth to create their own media, develop production skills, and learn critical media literacy. Through our residency at The Hub, our Youth Media Collective (YMC) Member Producers, in collaboration with Dr. Laura Garbes (Sociology), will make use of the University's expertise and resources to partner with students and faculty on a special season of our podcast YouthSoup. This season, called “Voicing Resistance,” will be an in-depth exploration of how communities voice resistance through poetry, song, and other forms of vocal expression.
Voicing Resistance: Turning Up the Volume on Youth-led Storytelling
“Women’s Voices” explores how single narratives about a people, nation, or group creates such a narrow perception of cultures. This project, led by Sima Shahriar and Dr. Ana Forcinito (Spanish and Portuguese studies), seeks to break such simple narratives by showing five or more films made by Iranian women. Since its inception, film has been one of the most powerful mediums in shaping our thoughts, and it remains an art form that is accessible to most people. In a short period of time, the audience can be offered new insights into complex subjects and be challenged to examine their own “well-formed thoughts” based on their limited knowledge.