After Janus: Worker Centers and the Future of Labor

We occupy a critical juncture concerning the future of labor. Organized labor, since the early 1980s, has faced coordinated exercises of power that have considerably weakened its influence. The currently pending US Supreme Court case Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees is expected to further limit the power of unions. What options remain available to workers to pursue their interests?

Through a study group, a community-based meeting and forum, and blog content creation, this project will explore non-traditional forms of labor organizing in the past and present, including “worker centers” in the USA and abroad.

Event: Conversation with Labor Historian & Activist Scholar Peter Cole, October 4, 2019

Intersectional Food Studies: Putting the Pieces Together

Food lies at the confluence of multiple social and political systems, particularly although not exclusively systems of gender and race. And yet, it is challenging for researchers to embed food in multiple systems, and to evaluate their importance relative to each other.

This workshop brings together scholars from multiple fields with investments in “getting it right” regarding food. We will form relationships with each other and share knowledge, as well as offer local and national public events.

Event: Bryn Mawr Visiting Professor Stephen Vider, “Mission Nutrition: Queer Foodways and Coalitional Intimacy in Response to HIV/AIDS”, February 28, 2019

Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress

The workshop on reparations, repatriation, and redress brings together multiple disciplines across CLA, colleges across UMN campuses, and local communities to think through the challenges of and the possibilities for repair, atonement, return, and/or apology as potential ways to address some of the foundational wrongs of the US that have shaped longstanding institutional structures and inequalities.

In addition, we are interested in exploring whether and to what extent the rubric of “reparations” addresses the continuing inequalities experienced by indigenous communities and multiple communities of color. Using a critical and comparative approach to reparations, repatriation and redress, and engaging with local communities, we hope to catalyze thought around potential strategies to address systemic racial inequality. 

A recent outcome that was created through a partnership between The RIGS Initiative and the University of Minnesota Libraries is the Reparations Syllabus. The Reparations Syllabus is an online working syllabus that is free and available to the public. This was an important component to the Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium because we intended for the conversation to extend past the Symposium and to be widely accessible to others.

Event: Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium, November 1, 2018

Migration and Migrants in Terrifying Times

We live in uncertain and, occasionally, terrifying times. Assumptions, myths, and misinformation about migration and migrants are routinely and increasingly manifested in daily conversations and interactions in our everyday lives.
At the same time, migration was, is, and will continue to be, an essential and vibrant part of our lived experience as individuals, communities, Minnesotans, Americans, and global citizens.

This workshop explores this tension via the theme, “Migration and Migrants in Terrifying Times.” Four semester-long reading/discussion groups and symposia modeled on the Law School’s Human Rights Lab will cover four highly relevant and timely topics will facilitate conversations and collaborations among scholars and other interested persons and parties in and outside of CLA and the University of Minnesota.

This initiative seeks to create a space where people can collectively reflect on and proactively respond to current and future events and processes that have and will have an impact on migration and migrants in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and the rest of the country.

Event: Migration & Migrants in Terrifying Times, March 25, 2019

Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Art and Science

This workshop brings together team members from the University, community, and research institutions abroad to better understand the impacts of traumatic memory upon individuals and societies and to critically engage the issues of how we come to terms with and heal from trauma, seek accountability for human rights abuses that led to severe trauma, and mitigate future traumatization.
This initiative explores the long-term effects of traumatic experiences as varied as war and dictatorship, terrorist attacks and state terrorism, genocide, captivity, and sexual abuse. The workshop explores how a more interdisciplinary understanding of memory and traumatization can illuminate the pathways between artistic production and healing. A full understanding of trauma and its implications in modern society needs to address its individual and social dimensions, and place 1) therapeutic and artistic work, 2) critical cultural analysis and scientific modelling/experimentation, and 3) sociological as well as historical study and medical practice in dialogue.

This project brings together, for the first time at the University, recognized leaders in all these fields in a sustained manner that will lead to vigorous intellectual exchange and important peer-reviewed publications, curricular development that foments co-teaching across departments, community outreach, and internationalization of the University.

Event: Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Arts and Science, October 3 &4, 2020

Effects of Parental Incarceration on Family and Child Wellbeing: Informing Best Practices Through an Investigation of Caregiver Experiences

Incarceration rates in the United States have reached unprecedented proportions. Over two million people are incarcerated in prison, jail, on probation, or on parole. This is nearly a 500% increase over the last forty years (i.e., 1976-2016).

Over one million inmates are parents of children under 18 years of age. In other words, one in twenty-eight minors in the United States has a caregiver in jail or prison. The effects of parental incarceration are devastating and vary by developmental stage. Infants may not form an attachment bond with their parent, and as a result, develop behavioral problems. Disruption of the parent-child relationship is associated with an inability to form or maintain interpersonal relationships and cognitive impairment (i.e., attention, memory, logic and reasoning, auditory processing) in young children. Internalizing (i.e., anxiety, depression) and externalizing (i.e., conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder) problems lead to poor academic achievement in school-age children. Parental incarceration also increases the likelihood of being arrested as an adult.

The purpose of this workshop is to better understand the experiences of families with an incarcerated caregiver, and in doing so, suggest future directions for research and policy.

Blackness and Disability Studies: Interrogating Anti-Black Racism and Disablement

This collaborative reading group and symposium explores new directions in Black disability justice. Beginning as a reading group in early 2018, our dialog will culminate in a symposium in April 2018, inviting national disability scholars and activists to converse about Black disability activism, resistance, and power.

According to the Ruderman Foundation, over half of people killed by police have a disability. Disabled people of color are seen as doubly “unruly” and threatening. Recent examples of disabled Black people being shot for not following police instructions include Charleena Lyles, shot by police in Seattle in 2017; Keith Lamont Scott, shot in Charlotte, Virginia, in 2016; Mario Woods, shot in San Francisco, California in 2015, and many more. Black disabled activists have responded to this crisis in policing with a call to acknowledge the role of ableism in state violence. The workshop Blackness and Disability Studies gathers activists and scholars working on responses to state violence against Black disabled people to converse with Critical Disability Studies Collaborative members and interested stakeholders across the University.

Narrative/Medicine: Personal Narrative Analysis Across the Liberal Arts and Medical Practice

This two-day Narrative/Medicine Workshop in August, 2018 will be the culmination of a longer-running research collaborative that explores the emerging field of narrative medicine, with a focus on illness narratives in particular. The summer workshop will involve local, national, and international participants who all work with personal narrative analysis from the various perspectives represented in our group – from history, the social sciences, literature, law, narrative medicine, and psychoanalysis.

Exploring the Future of Embodied Technologies

Recent development in computing has moved devices increasingly closer to our bodies; as a result, significant work with wearables and embodied technology is well underway across the University of Minnesota. This initiative strives to develop a foundational step in connecting and leveraging scholarship and artistic practice across the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Design, Education and Human Development, and Science and Engineering as a means to explore the future of embodied technologies. As interdisciplinary scholars, and together with graduate and undergraduate student scholars, this project extends existing theory and creates new frameworks. Through emergent use cases, this ICW investigates what it means to technologize ourselves through immersive and embodied devices.

Components of the proposed Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop include support for bringing scholars together to experience and collaborate within multiple studio spaces; development of an event to showcase those who are exploring the intersections and juxtapositions of embodied technologies; and support for research groups to complete grant proposals for further funding. In short, the primary goal of this mini-grant is to spur development of this signature interdisciplinary area of study at the University of Minnesota.

Sonance: Musical Performance in/of/as Cultural Research

Music scholars are increasingly adding composition and performance to their methodological toolkit. Faculty distributed across University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts have taken a lead in that movement, exploring musical questions through participant observation, ethnography, experimentation, action research, and applied work. The scholars involved in this project use musical improvisation, composition, and performance in their research and are asking interrelated questions about performativity, sound, and culture. Now we seek to exchange that knowledge via a monthly symposium, performed near campus, gain new insights into performance-based research via that exchange, and use our critical mass at the University of Minnesota to lead the national conversation around engaged musical research.

City as Commons: Municipalism in America

The Municipalism Research Group is a workshop focusing on the topic of the “City as Commons: Municipalism in America.” Municipalism is a form of political organization that has recently gained popularity across Europe, based on assemblies of neighborhoods, practicing direct democracy, which are organized into a system of municipalities, as an alternative to the centralized state. A primary goal of the workshop is to develop collaboration among academics, activists, and artists interested in urban governance and social reproduction in the Twin Cities and to put them in conversation with colleagues across North America, Europe, and South America who are studying, or experimenting with, municipalist forms of governance. This project envisions a series of monthly meetings culminating in a conference at Minnesota in June 2018, an edited book on the topic, and further identification of external funding sources to support additional activities by the collaborative.