The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (ICW) program spurs new collaborations among scholars in CLA and beyond. It provides support to bring together faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students from a variety of fields to intensively study a topic. Proposed forms of workshops may include (but are not limited to) reading groups, research projects, seminars, symposia, conferences, or virtual centers.

The program originated in the college Roadmap process, an ongoing consultative process that is driven by students, staff, and faculty and our various publics. ICWs are funded by the Joan Aldous Innovation Fund, in support of the College's Roadmap goal to generate new levels of innovative research through focused investment strategies.

Now in its fourth year, the ICW program has supported 19 workshops. Workshop leadership teams have collectively brought together 216 faculty and staff members from CLA, 90 from other units at the University of Minnesota, and hundreds of scholars and professionals from outside the University. These workshops in turn actively engage hundreds of participants—students, community members, artists, policymakers—and host events drawing many more.

The following workshops are in their award periods but many of the previous workshops are still active and are described further below.

Fall 2020 Awards

• ArTeS: Catalyzing Creative Interdependence supports each collaborator’s experience of wholeness. Our process of co-creating a vision for this intercollegiate ArTeS initiative is sustained with a diverse, equitable, and inclusive network and exchange, among people, communities, and disciplines.
• Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World aims to further the interrogation of, and resistance to, the causes and consequences of disposability. Thinking alongside disability and racial justice activists, our three-year interdisciplinary workshop examines intersectional analyses, public histories, and transformative praxis as a form of counter-knowledge that contends that #NoBodyIsDisposable. 

Fall 2019 Awards

• Environmental Humanities Initiative 2.0: New Directions in Research and Outreach aims to catalyze research, foster pedagogical innovation, and enhance public outreach for humanistic approaches to environmental issues.
• Queer and Trans* Ecologies: Bodies, Social Relations, and Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene spans the arts, humanities, and sciences to explore questions in the fields of queer and trans* ecologies about new embodiments and social relations in the Anthropocene. 
• Workshop and pilot investigation of auditory behaviors of bald eagles targets the development of sound-based deterrent signals designed to reduce the mortality of bald eagles resulting from collision with wind turbines.

Spring 2019 Awards

• Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy of Death examines how bodies are trafficked in and through the Global South. 
• Collaborative Writing in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship: A Community of Practice promotes interdisciplinary inquiry into collaborative writing.

Fall 2018 Awards

• Democracy under Threat: Public Scholarship and Teaching addresses issues concerning democracy, populism, and racial nationalism as well as crime, punishment, and human rights.
• The Black Midwest Initiative is a collective committed to advocating for the lives of people of African descent as they are situated throughout the Midwest and Rust Belt regions of the United States. 
• The Many Faces of Reproducibility is an interdisciplinary exploration that works to advance cutting-edge investigation, innovate how researchers are trained, and enhance public understanding of science.

Full Grant Awards Fall 2020

Anticipated Award Term: 2021-23