UMN Liberal Arts Engagement Hub Residencies for 2022-23 Announced

Motorists do not see the injustices of freeways as they drive through a city. The construction of interstate highways in Minneapolis and St. Paul destroyed and divided Black communities, while white communities reaped the benefits, a pattern played out in cities across the United States. In Minneapolis alone, one in twenty city residents was displaced by freeway construction between 1960 and 1968.

This residency will serve as physical and intellectual infrastructure for the production of Human Tolls: Public Histories and Community Responses to Twin Cities’ Freeways, a community-engaged book project with essays contributed by multiple authors to be edited by Associate Professor Greg Donofrio and his community collaborator Dr. Ernest Lloyd. It will provide space for collaborators and authors to host public events to present, discuss, and receive feedback on the content and design of each chapter in draft form.

The Juneteenth Project will bring together the dramatic arts with local and national histories of Black communities to give youth a holistic perspective on the last two centuries of Black history.

Youth actors will be selected to participate in a rendition of Rose McGee's play Kumbayah: A Juneteenth Story, which envisions the advent of Juneteenth in Texas. As part of their preparation to enact the play, students will participate in a series of field trips and study circles that reflect on histories of Black struggle in the Twin Cities and wider United States. This project will offer a multifaceted reflection on Black history as a local and national phenomenon.

This residency expands the relationship of the Minnesota Urban Debate League (MNUDL), a program of Augsburg University and the University of Minnesota, to allow more Twin Cities middle and high school students the opportunity to engage in dialogue about critical current issues.

Building upon a strong foundation of their partnership with the UMN Policy Debate Team, this residency will allow MNUDL to increase their outreach and build capacity for their debate programming. The Hub will host multiple debate tournaments, volunteer judge training, and coach recruitment events. Through this residency, MNUDL will recruit more fluent Spanish speakers to serve as Spanish Debate League judges, members of the East African community to serve as judges for East African Debate, and women pursuing careers in finance to serve as judges for our Financial Literacy Leadership Debates program, as well as engage more deeply with student groups, language departments, and Greek Life.

We are an independent community of practice, made up of activist-educators dedicated to transformative community-based teaching. Like the founders of The Hub, we believe renewed civic imagination and transformative change can result from leveraging the resources of the University toward collaborative, community-led action.

Through convening a series of talking circles combining community members and students, we aim to imagine new possibilities for a “multi-versity” at the University of Minnesota where co-learning is integrated within civic life locally and globally.

The Voice to Vision collaborative project captures the extraordinary experiences of individuals who experienced human rights abuses or genocide, through the making-of-art process. Memories are revealed and shared through the decision-making of images related to their stories. The storytellers from diverse communities work with a team of artists to create works of art that express their memories; the results are sometimes painful, often poignant, and always profound.

Voice to Vision is directed by David Feinberg in cooperation with the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.