When Dorothy Gale utters the last line of The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home,” there seems little doubt that she speaks out of her joy at being safely ensconced on her family’s farm in America’s Heartland. However, Dorothy’s simple phrase is open to a wide variety of interpretations because of one word—home—that can connote security, belonging, memory, and comfort, or arouse feelings of dread, alienation, and pain.
Humanists have been central to reconsidering the active role that emotions play in the constructions of reason, truth, subjectivity and narrative.
The word ‘monster’ derives from the Latin monstrum, meaning “something marvelous;” and ultimately from the verb monere, “to show and to warn.” In coordination with the multi-year celebration of the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the IHR fellows program for the 2015-2016 academic year will investigate what the eruption or suppression of the monstrous shows us about ourselves and our possibilities as humans, and what the warnings, disruptions, and abjections of the monstrous show us about our restless cultural imaginary.
Art and research are gaining increasing popularity among humanities scholars and social scientists. Moreover, art has always been a way for immigrants to communicate with each other, as well as to build, develop and communicate identity.
The primary function of this research cluster is to unpack complex questions connected to hip-hop and urban cultural production in framing and reframing Phoenix and the US/American Southwest. The consortium of ASU faculty, scholars, artists, students, and community members connect monthly in the Sonoran Desert around a series of themes that deeply investigate some of the ethical implications of urban arts knowledges and culture as a research and educational framework in relationship to the humanities, performing arts, liberal arts and sciences.
The Citizen-Diplomacy research cluster will bring together researchers, librarians, archivists and community members around a multi-method, and multi-scale history of citizen-to-citizen diplomacy during and after the Cold War. We will focus on the role of civic associations established in response to President Eisenhower’s 1956 “People to people” initiative, and trace their changing forms, programming and status through significant geopolitical, socio-economic and technological change.
The IHR has awarded us another ($1,000) grant for our research cluster, The Colonial, the Postcolonial and the Decolonial. This cluster aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the production of research across historical, ideological, cultural, material, geographical, and epistemological dimensions. We invite the participation of those interested in any sites and forms of colonial conquest, resistance, complicity, and aftermaths.
The Food and well-being in the Anthropocene research cluster will bring together environmental historians, philosophers, and food systems scientists in order to develop new research on the relationship between human well-being and global food systems. The participants will consider recent research in history of industrial agriculture and related food systems, the ethics of various food systems over time, the changing role of local food, and what constitutes a sustainable food system today.
For this research cluster, we seek to bring together colleagues from across the university who share an interest in mindfulness and social justice to engage in collective dialogue on how to bridge these two realms in our intellectual thinking, critical engagement with the world, and personal, everyday practices. Our proposed research cluster has two foci: