RIDGS Research Workshops & Critical Reading Groups
RIDGS Research Workshops & Critical Reading Groups
The Center for RIDGS Studies is accepting applications for new and renewed Research Workshops (requirements indicated by 1) and Critical Reading Groups (requirements indicated by 2).
Each year, RIDGS will sponsor student or faculty-led groups of graduate and undergraduate students (ranging in size from 4-10 participants) to:
- Pursue a concrete research question or
- Read and discuss a syllabus of texts of their choosing.
At the end of the year, students will write a short:
- Progress report outlining what research steps they have taken and what they have learned or
- A “state of the field” essay, describing how their texts have shaped the field as well as how they have and still could be used to inform political, social, and economic action in the past and future.
Groups must apply and, if accepted, will receive funding from $200-$1000, depending on the number of participants and demonstrated need, to be used for books, snacks, and relevant films, museum visits, or other activities. Additional funding may be made available for extraordinary and justifiable expenses.
For questions, please contact [email protected]
Apply Now!
Download the application here and send to [email protected]
2024-2025 Research Workshops and Critical Reading Groups
Led by: Pratiti Ketoki
Purpose: To open up thematics, discuss methodological approaches, and steer stimulating conversations in the emerging field of Global Asia(s), combining area studies, ethnic studies, digital culture, and diaspora studies. And to focus on narrative construction of identities, mobility, decoloniality, and cultural praxis as our guiding theme. We will approach questions of politics, culture, and global exchange through the registers of fiction, film, sport, and mixed media (including narratives in video games).
2023-2024 Research Workshops and Critical Reading Groups
Led by: Austin Witt, Taylor Diaz
Purpose: To invite the discussion of texts that expand our existing bodies of knowledge gleaned from theory-based seminars with canonical queer texts. We take on several foundational queer theorists (Butler, Halberstam, and Delany) and explore some of their lesser known works, with texts ranging from the late twentieth century to the present-day.
Led by: Kimberly Horner, Roma Lucarelli, Isabel Bethke, Isabella Irtifa, Mateo Frumholtz, Xochitl De Anda Arellanes, Ashley Duffey.
Purpose: To explore Hmong refugee resettlement experiences through the newly published works of two local Hmong Americans: writer Kao Kalia Yang and artist Pao Houa Her. Through engagement with the work of these two artists, the reading group centered the lived experiences of Hmong refugees resettled in Minnesota and also engaged with different forms of knowledge production and ways of knowing.
Led by: Fa'aumu Kaimana, Sally Kessler
Purpose: To conduct slow reads from chapters out of the newly published Crip Genealogies (ed. Mel Y. Chen, et. al, 2023) and Julie Avril Minich’s Radical Health (2023), both of which take an intersectional approach to disabilty interwoven with race, ethnicity, etc. Since parsing out individual aspects of our identities is itself a by-product of white supremacy, the reading group enriches conversations on disability by centering the field’s grounding in critical ethnic and feminist studies, activist roots.
Led by: Florencia Pech Cardenas
Purpose: To build and sustain a supportive community for writing. Our efforts are inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the erotic,” in which she writes that “the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” Drawing from her essay, which calls upon the unjust ways that patriarchal values have suppressed women’s emotional capacity for joy, we seek to extend Lorde’s erotic knowledge to the practice of writing.
2022-2023 Research Workshops and Critical Reading Groups
Led by: Snigdha Kumar
Purpose: To build and sustain a supportive community for writing. Our efforts are inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the erotic,” in which she writes that “the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” Drawing from her essay, which calls upon the unjust ways that patriarchal values have suppressed women’s emotional capacity for joy, we seek to extend Lorde’s erotic knowledge to the practice of writing.
Led by: Jamele Watkins, Mari Jarris
Purpose: To counter the widespread association of Western, Central, and East European culture and identity with whiteness as well as to expand the analytical tools traditionally employed within European area studies.
Led by: Kristen Reynolds, Dewitt King
Purpose: To explore key moments in Black Studies and to ground ourselves in the method and writing of scholars who have been critical to shaping the field. This study is of importance to anyone engaged in the deep study of Blackness and Black being for the purposes of building on and expanding the discipline.