Participants in this cluster will be engaged in the investigation of the relationship between women, religion, and social effect. For the academic year 2008-09, meetings will be held the last Friday of every month.

The idea for this Research Cluster emerged from a workshop with Dr. J. Paul Martin, co-founder and former executive director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and current director of human rights studies at Barnard College. His talk drew a large number of faculty and graduate students from across the university. Following Dr.

Comparative Literature has undergone radical transformation over the past decade, moving well past its initial formulations in the work of European émigrés in the aftermath of WWII. The foundational commitment to working with multiple languages and across national boundaries has brought in influential theorists from fields such as psychoanalysis, translation studies, and anthropology, providing a location for the rise and flourishing of “theory” in the 1970s and 1980s. Comparative Literature likewise anticipated and favored the development of post-colonial and global studies in the 1990s.

Following the great success of our first round last year, participants in this cluster will be engaged in the investigation of the relationship between women, religion, and reform within the context of social effects. In our second year, we plan to further explore how women in religious milieus articulate their ideas about positive change affecting their lives. Our discussions will continue to address how women challenge the limits imposed upon them and their moral behavior by religious and secular elites in society.

Questions of the nature, meaning, and implementation of human rights, and in human rights research and education will be addressed. Contributions from and differences among humanities and social science approaches to human rights texts and discourses, movements and practices, and analysis and evaluation will also be explored.

This research cluster builds on a faculty group in PL that has been forming spontaneously for over a year out of a new sense of transdisciplinary respect for and mutual discovery of shared areas of research, teaching, and curricular-program interests. These range from critical theory (both in its broader origins within literary cultural studies and its historically specific genealogy from the Frankfurt School), rhetoric, and communication to literature and poetry to Continental philosophy and spirituality.

The Alternative Imaginations (AI) Research Cluster is an intellectual space that seeks to cultivate complementary perspectives on science, technology, and policy to address inequality, marginality, and sustainability. AI’s goal is to engage scholars with backgrounds in humanities, social, and physical sciences to participate in dialogues on Alternative Imaginations focusing on issues of alternative living and sustainability. Sustainability science grapples with societal problems that are characterized by a high degree of complexity, uncertainty, and multiple legitimate viewpoints.

The Jenny Norton Research Cluster on Women seeks to bring faculty across the academy to deeply engage intersectionality as a feminist theory and method: 1) to further develop feminist tools that promote the intellectual mission of “making visible” the workings of power and oppression in our globalizing society; 2)  to interrogate the relationship of intersectionality and gender studies to theories of globalization and globalism.

This research cluster consists of faculty members from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts is focused on transdisciplinary research with an emphasis on effecting social change. The group proposes to delve into and continue exploration of the following:

• Conflict resolution through an emphasis on process.

• Stimulus in the marketplace through creative response.

• Promote healing of social separation at personal and interpersonal levels.

Social media permeates our world and continues to impact us as humans, citizens and scholars: from the evolution of virtual communities and its naturalization of online interpersonal exchange to the growth of progressively accessible forms of entertainment; from the proliferation of brave new frontiers for advertising and of marketing to the wellspring of resources for research (data, method and tools). This research cluster will explore this burgeoning area of study from a wide range of disciplinary approaches including literary studies, film studies, media studies and communications.