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 184 faculty and staff members from CLA, 82 from other units at the University of Minnesota, and 101 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 hundreds more.

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 2019

Anticipated Award Term: 2020-2023