The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop (ICW) program is intended to spur 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.

ICWs are meant to convene scholars from within the college and beyond, and as such, 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 third year, the ICW program has supported 16 workshops. Workshop leadership teams have collectively brought together 157 faculty and staff members from CLA, 70 from other units at the University of Minnesota, and 99 scholars and professionals from outside the University. These workshops in turn actively engage dozens of participants—students, community members, artists, policy makers—and host events drawing hundreds more.

Mini Grant Awards Spring 2019

Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy of Death

This project interrogates what cannot be contained by current framings of how bodies are trafficked in and through the Global South. The project proposes to convene an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars, students, and artists to rethink methodologies of apprehending the global traffic in black and brown death. How does centering questions of value and desire change how we visualize, remember, and employ the dead? With what consequence for racialized life? Drawing scholars and artists from across disciplines, this collaborative workshop, culminating in a convening and collective writing project, excavates the aesthetic and ghostly forces that shape the global political economy of death. 

Collaborative Writing in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship: A Community of Practice

The goal of this learning community is to promote interdisciplinary inquiry into collaborative writing. This project will advance opportunities for scholarship and teaching and help to create bridges between intentions, objectives and achievement in collaborative writing projects. Participants will have the opportunity to work on their own projects while learning from peers, as well as engaging in practices of authentic collaboration. Our interdisciplinary group will be exposed to new strategies for collaborative writing and learn about available campus resources. The learning community is open to faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students at the Twin Cities campus. The learning community is a two-semester program beginning in the fall of 2019.