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]

2025-2026 Research Workshops and Critical Reading Groups

Approaching Global Asia(s) Through Text, Play, Sound and Image

Led by: Pratiti Ketoki, Alya Ansari, Monica Nuñez Salas, Vinay Brandon
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).

Abolitionist Futures: Migration, Belonging, and Resistance Critical Reading Group

Led by: Ava Roots, Isabella Irtifa, Dipakshi Sarma
Purpose: To bring together students across disciplines to explore the entwined logics of immigration enforcement and incarceration through the lens of abolition. Together, we will ask: How did immigrant detention become central to the U.S. carceral regime, and how might abolitionist frameworks reshape our approach to borders, belonging, and safety?

Join Now

Environmental Justice Roots, Webs, and Currents

Led by: Jessica Tran
Purpose: To examine Environmental Justice histories (roots), connections with other social justice movements (webs), and future trends in Environmental Justice literature (currents) to connect Environmental Justice principles to our work as doctoral students studying the environment. The group will read texts on the US Environmental Justice Movement, environmental colonialism, urban nature, treaty rights, Black agricultural practices, and more.

2024-2025 Research Workshops and Critical Reading Groups

Approaching Global Asia(s) Through Text, Play, Sound and Image

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).

Join Now!

2023-2024 Research Workshops and Critical Reading Groups

“Summer of the Queers”

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.

Hmong Refugee Resettlement: Exploring Ways of Knowing

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.

Critical Race and Disability Reading Group

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.

Critical Reading & Writing Group

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

Black Studies Then & Now

RIDGS Research Workshops & Critical Reading Groups