Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop Award
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.
Spring 2022 Awards
Anticipated Award Term: 2022-23
The Minnesota Center for Canon Expansion and Change (CCEC) was founded in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota in 2021 with the goal of effecting meaningful change in the way that philosophy is done, understood, organized, and – especially – taught. In particular, CCEC focuses on supporting instructors who want to teach neglected figures or a new canon of early modern philosophy but otherwise lack the resources to do so. CCEC aims to teach instructors how to create a safe and vibrant learning environment that speaks to a multitude of perspectives and allows students to learn about philosophers with voices like their own. This will put us in a position to change the face of philosophy, which remains alarmingly homogeneous.
Team Members:
- Jessica Gordon-Roth, Department of Philosophy
- Dwight K. Lewis, Jr, Department of Philosophy
- Michael Bennett McNulty, Department of Philosophy
The proposed Ethnic Studies Initiative seeks to answer the following question: How can educators and researchers collaborate to support and expand Ethnic Studies education and student-centered pedagogy in Minnesota? The Ethnic Studies Initiative proposes a new collaborative and a reciprocal model for addressing these urgent concerns. Housed in RIDGS (the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies), the Ethnic Studies Initiative will bring Ethnic Studies scholars into conversation with teachers and curriculum directors from Minnesota’s K-12 public schools in order to create a new, adaptive set of curricular resources for a transformative Ethnic Studies education.
Team Members:
- Keith Mayes, RIDGS Director, Department of African American & African Studies
- Jacob Oertel, RIDGS Program Coordinator
- Dr. Katharine Gerbner, Department of History
- Dr. Jimmy Patiño, Department of Chicano/Latino Studies
- Molly Siebert, PhD Candidate in Social Studies Education
- Brandy Siddiqui, District Program Facilitator for Social Studies and Ethnic Studies for Minneapolis Public Schools
- Muoakong Vue, Hmong-American educator and the Ethnic Studies Program Manager in St. Paul Public Schools
This project addresses this gap through an in-person workshop targeting junior scholars and a virtual learning experience targeting a broad audience. Our goal is to develop a community of quantitative climate change-population scholars who will apply their scholarship to improve people’s lives. Their interdisciplinary scientific advancements will provide knowledge, data, and learning opportunities to reduce vulnerability to climate change events in all their forms.
Team Members:
- Kathryn Grace, Geography Environment and Society, Associate Director Minnesota Population Center
- Audrey Dorelien, Humphrey School of Public Policy/Minnesota Population Center
- Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Department of Sociology, IPUMS DHS and IPUMS MICS
- Devon Kristiansen, IPUMS PMA
- Matt Gunther, IPUMS PMA
- Miriam King, IPUMS DHS
- Sula Sarkar, IPUMS International and IPUMS Global Health
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.