Research and Creative Collaboratives 2008-09
Creating Culturally Informed Trauma Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach
The long term goal of this collaborative is to conduct research on the effects of traumatic life events among different cultural groups, focusing on immigrant and refugee communities within the Twin Cities. This includes developing measures of trauma, coping, and symptoms appropriate to various cultural groups and culturally-relevant interventions. We are initially focusing on Somalian and Oromo refugees, who are among the largest ethnic minority groups in the Twin Cities. During this first year of our collaborative, we have analyzed existing data from 535 Somalian and Oromo refugees regarding the stressors and traumas they experienced while in their home countries, during their transit to the US, and while living in the US. We also analyzed data on the strategies they used to cope with these stressors, as well as which strategies were perceived as most effective. Our goals for Year 2 are to (1) analyze additional existing data on the symptoms experienced by these refugee groups and the cultural generalizability of the symptom measures used in this study and (2) design a qualitative study of African refugees that will be informed by our analysis of these existing data. Convener: Patricia Frazier (Psychology, CLA).
Collaborative Participants: Richard Lee (Psychology, CLA), Jean Langford (Anthropology, CLA), Joseph Westermeyer (Psychiatry, Medical School), Miriam Cameron (Center for Spirituality & Healing, AHC), David Johnson (Center for Victims of Torture), Marline Spring (VA Medical Center), Patricia Shannon (Center for Victims of Torture).
Dubai, Inc.
The collaborators propose a multi-media sculptural installation and book project as a meditation on the tension between the competing forces of global capitalism/consumerism vs. the American political narrative of the demonizing of Islam. This clash of systems and narratives is exemplified by Dubai City in the United Arab Emirates, a city-state that is building the world's tallest skyscraper, the largest shopping mall, the most luxurious hotel, the largest man-made marina and the biggest artificial island in a fantasia of the world’s most futuristic architecture. The collaborative will organize on-campus programs including an exhibition at a suitable location such as the Weisman Art Museum, open studios with the artist, and guest speakers. The work will not employ overt polemicism, instead presenting a open cultural commentary designed to raise questions among viewers rather than provide direct commentary—celebrating the excesses of Dubai while simultaneously critiquing them. Multiculturalism emphasizes a multiplicity of perspectives. The core of this artistic undertaking emphasizes many voices rather than the singular voice of didacticism. Convener: Andréa Stanislav (Art, CLA).
The Making of Global Cities
Burgeoning mega-cities across the global South are striving to become global cities, attempting to join the ranks of such places as Tokyo, New York, London, and more recently Hong Kong and Singapore. The collaborative on the Making of Global Cities will bring together scholars from the global South and North to investigate the processes that have facilitated the transfer of global North models of urban transformations across cities in the global South; the social, political, and ecological consequences and limits of such models; and alternative development models, experimentations, and innovations emerging from within global South metropolises. Our goal is not only to encourage rigorous interdisciplinary research on select mega-cities in the global South, but also to develop an agenda for conducting comparative research across cities, focusing on the transnational processes that link these cities. More generally, we seek to catalyze a new way of conducting research that brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and geographical and backgrounds. In doing so, we hope to establish a new theoretical and methodological agenda that de-centers the study and analysis of global urbanism from the global North. Conveners: Michael Goldman (Sociology, CLA), Helga Leitner (Geography, CLA), Eric Sheppard (Geography, CLA), Ragui Assaad (Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs), and Joe Allen (Asian Languages and Literatures, CLA).
Mexico-Minnesota Dialogue: Past, Present, Future
For over a year, a group of faculty and graduate students from the University of Minnesota have been working on a international collaboration with colleagues in Mexico on a series of research, teaching, and outreach questions around technology, education, history, immigration, human rights, and youth development. The particular goal of the Mexico-Minnesota Dialogue Collaborative is to enhance and broaden the participation of community organizers, and faculty and graduate students on the U of M campus in a dialogue about the interactions between Mexico and Minnesota. We will sponsor a series of group study sessions, public meetings, and site visits in which we will discuss the past, present, and future interaction between Mexico and Minnesota. Conveners: Patrick McNamara (History, CLA), Joan Dejaeghere (Educational Policy and Administration, CEHD), and Krisit Rudelius-Palmer (Human Rights Center, Law School).
Collaborative Participants: Art Harkins (Educational Policy and Administration, CEHD), Barbara Frey (Global Studies, CLA), John Cogan (Educational Policy and Administration, CEHD), Dario Menanteau (Social Work, CEHD), Byron Schneider (Minnesota Extension Services), Joanna O’Connell (Spanish and Portuguese, CLA), G. Edward Schuh (Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs), John Moravec (CEHD), M. Bianet Castellanos (American Studies and Chicano Studies, CLA), Heidi Lasley Barajas (CEHD), Martha Bigelow (Curriculum and Instruction, CEHD).
Music and Sound Studies Initiative
The Music and Sound Studies Initiative explores new possibilities for thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries in the research and pedagogy of music and sound at the University of Minnesota. Crucial to this effort is gathering information about the current state of music and sound research from experienced scholars who are presently wrestling with problems of disciplinary tracking, the expanding purview of their fields, and job placement for graduates. The members of this collaborative propose to invite esteemed scholars writing on music and sound from a variety of interrelated perspectives, both to learn about their research (as exemplars of particular tendencies within music and sound studies) and to discuss with them the prospects for music and sound studies within the Anglo-American academy in the coming years. Convener: Sumanth Gopinath (Music, CLA).
Collaborative Participants: William Beeman (Anthropology, CLA), Matthew Bribitzer-Stull (Music, CLA), Michael Cherlin (Music and Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts, CLA), Evelyn Ch’ien (English, CLA), Scott Currie (Music, CLA), Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie (Music, CLA), David Damschroder (Music, CLA), Douglas Geers (Music, CLA), David Grayson (Music, CLA), Kelley Harness (Music, CLA), Scott Lipscomb (Music, CLA), Guerino Mazzola (Music and Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts, CLA), Peter Mercer-Taylor (Music, CLA), Ali Momeni (Art and Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts, CLA), Gloria Raheja (Anthropology, CLA), Gil Rodman (Communication Studies, CLA), Anna Schultz (Music, CLA).
Performance and Social Justice
The Performance and Social justice Collaborative continues its research on environmental racism and the trauma and resistance of communities of women of color across global North and South. In this second year, the collaborative will create and produce Daak, Call to Action, a performance project investigating land rights violations in Native communities in Minnesota, in the maquiladoras of Tijuana and Suarez, Mexico, and the “Special Economic Zones” of Nandigram, India. The collaborative will also launch the research for the culminating project of this series: Ashesh Barsha, Unending Monsoon, which brings together the research foci of the previous two projects with its focus on the horrifying impact of climate change. Working through an intersection of traditional scholarly research, and improvisation-based embodied knowing, the collaborative seeks to foreground multiple epistemologies in seeking understanding and sharing knowledge about huge issues in environmental justice and how they are affecting multiple communities of color. Working with bodies and movement to both investigate and produce knowledge, these projects will emphasize in particular the materiality of these struggles and the solutions being proposed, and of their historical documentation through performance, and suggest the multiple agential ways in which women of color are approaching issues of social justice.
Conveners: Ananya Chatterjea (Theatre Arts and Dance, CLA), Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (English, CLA), and Jigna Desai (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA).
Rethinking Statehood: Sovereignty, Memory and Citizenship in Minnesota 150
The interdisciplinary collaborative Rethinking Statehood will critically examine claims to statehood, sovereignty and belonging on the occasion of the Minnesota Sesquicentennial. Based in the Department of American Indian Studies, with participation from faculty in the Departments of Art, History, Theatre Arts, and Geography as well as community leaders from across the state, the collaborative plans to organize the following events during the 2008-09 academic year: four symposia, a Tribal Leaders speaker series, four related undergraduate courses with site visits, two Twin Cities art exhibitions and a state-wide American Indian newspaper publication. Through these events, we will explore the historical, cultural and political relationships between the University of Minnesota, American Indian sovereign governments and the larger Twin Cities community. By learning from contemporary American Indian ways of living and knowing in the realms of politics, law and science, in education and community outreach, and through the performing and visual arts, we seek to understand how more just futures can be imagined, and a more vibrant University can be realized. Conveners: Brenda Child (American Indian Studies, CLA), Karen Till (Geography, CLA), Chris Baeumler (Art, CLA), and Sonja Kuftinec (Theatre Arts and Dance, CLA).
Collaborative Expert Consultants: Heid Erdrich (Director, Ancient Traders Art Gallery), Mona Smith (Dakota Multi-Media Artist and Educator), and Catherine Whipple (Editor, The Circle).
Transitional Justice and Collective Memory
This research collaborative brings together faculty and graduate students to explore at the University of Minnesota to extend our mutual research interests in the area of transitional justice and collective memory. Since the 1980s, states and non-state actors are increasingly addressing past human rights violations using multiple mechanisms including domestic and international human rights trials, truth commissions, reparations, vetting, museums and other memory sites, archives, and oral history projects, as well as many forms of artistic production, including testimonial literature, photography, and film. All these processes aim to shape collective memory: knowledge about that past that is shared and mutually reinforced by a collectivity. We propose three major types of events: 1) regular seminars in which collaborative members present their current research in progress; 2) individual visits by a small number of scholars and practitioners working in the area of transitional justice and collective memory, including a formal public presentation and informal meetings and discussions with collaborative members and community groups; and 3) a symposium on human rights trials, in conjunction with three book projects currently in progress by collaborative members. Convener: Kathryn Sikkink (Political Science, CLA).
Collaborative Participants: Barbara Frey (Global Studies, CLA), Raul Marrero-Fente (Spanish and Portuguese, CLA), Fionnuala Ni Aolain (Law School), Leigh Payne (Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Joachim Savelsberg (Sociology, CLA), and Karen Till (Geography, CLA).
Transnational Film and Media Studies
The primary aim of the Transnational Film and Media Studies Collaborative is to bring together the film scholars throughout the University of Minnesota in order to nurture a vibrant, interdepartmental academic film culture. There is currently no institutional structure for film studies at the U, but the faculty and graduate students who study cinema recognize the need to learn from each other’s various endeavors and to collaborate on common projects to promote cinema and media studies. The composition of the collaborative is transnational in our geographical areas of specialization, and we furthermore recognize that film cultures throughout the world are, and have always been, characterized by transnational flows of films, technologies, techniques, talent, and capital. We will explore these flows and increase our own transnational awareness by holding screenings, sharing our works in progress, learning from other film scholars in the region, and inviting two major filmmakers and three major film theorists to come to the U for screenings and talks. Convener: Jason McGrath (Asian Languages and Literatures, CLA).
Collaborative Participants: Christine Marran (Asian Languages and Literatures, CLA), Paula Rabinowitz (English, CLA), Lary May (American Studies, CLA), Siobhan Craig (English, CLA), Jigna Desai (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, CLA), Richard McCormick (German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, CLA), Christophe Wall-Romana (French and Italian, CLA), Cesare Casarino (Cultural Studies and Comparative Literatures, CLA), Robert Silberman (Art History, CLA), Hakim Abderrezak (French and Italian, CLA), Lynn Lukkas (Art, CLA), Mark Anderson (Asian Languages and Literatures, CLA), Christopher Scott (Asian Languages and Cultures, Macalester College), Sarah Buchanan (French, UM-Morris), Charlest Sugnet (English, CLA), Rembert Hüser (German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, CLA).