This Research Cluster's initial focus will be the variety of ways in which "Europe" has been defined and delimited over the past two millennia.

This Research Cluster plans to meet monthly to read current scholarly literature on the relationship between religious conversion and globalization, discuss these issues, and prepare grant appropriate grant proposals to major granting agencies, including the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchange Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

This research cluster is devoted to investigating the interactions between urban values, urban systems and spaces, and inhabitants of the city by focusing on the cultural dimensions of urban planning, urban systems, and the experiences of urban life. This cluster will investigate the cultural dimensions of urban systems and spaces by bringing together scholars from history, anthropology and religious studies working on cities in the United States, Germany, France, Russia and the Philippines.

The goal of this Research Cluster is to bridge the growing bioengineering and bioethics communities on campus and in the Valley. The topic of focus will be the science and ethics of neural prosthetics in three domains: cochlear implants, motor control prosthetics, and deep-brain stimulation. The group will meet monthly to discuss ethical and societal aspects of research, development, regulations, and clinical application and integration of neural prosthetics.

The initial aim of this Research Cluster will be to study the experience of peoples of African Ancestry. However, the main focus will be to engage interested faculty with various debates concerning the African Diaspora and its various definitions. We propose to use these discussions as a bridge into a consideration of the changing role of Africa in the global world. Furthermore, this Research Cluster aims to use their discussions as a bridge into a consideration of changing the global world.

Speaking Arizona is a project designed to address major gaps in our understanding of the role of speaking and language in creating and reinventing the identities of different communities in Arizona. The Phoenix metropolitan area is rapidly changing multicultural area with shifting demographic patterns, and the state itself represents a unique mosaic of language communities. It is our plan to meet regularly during the 2006-2007 academic year, reading and discussing Arizona and styles of speaking associated with different communities of practice such as mining or ranching in Arizona.

American culture is frequently reconstituted as new populations continue to arrive to U.S. destinations with the intentions of staying. To claim that this experience is uniquely American, or even contemporary, is to close to our eyes to the historical, social, and global realities of migration that have constituted the diverse communities that have truly always been our human legacy.

Controversies over public art and community deliberation processes behind them are rife for analysis--both as expert participants in process or critics after the social explosion. Whether it's a monument to a tragedy, historical marker or freeway art, public art is a source of tension within communities as the memory over the events and persons are negotiated. This cluster will bring together scholars in the discussionof situated controversies and their transdisciplinary roots.

This cluster will look backward from present debates to discussions of the African Diaspora as they occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. These discussions usually took place in the context of the articulation of ideas of Pan Africanism. Thus the title of series of the sessions for next year is Pan Africanism and the African Diaspora: Some Connections, Some Departures. The idea will be to read some of the original thought of Pan Aficanists such as Martin Delany, E.W. Blyden, W.E.B.