The purpose of this research cluster is to examine ways of making academic writing more meaningful for a wide public as well as for ourselves as scholars and publishing artists.

Within many disciplines in the humanities there remains a strong expectation to produce academic writing that is presented in a detached manner, making extensive reference to existing theories as a means for justification, and often using esoteric jargon of the field. Such writing is expected for tenure purposes, and is believed to be of a higher order than other modes of communication.

This research cluster, supported in part by a gift from the Reverend Jenny Norton, is designed to re-familiarize the participants with some of the classic works of Latina feminist theory, and to also read important new works with an ultimate goal of invigorating our scholarship and to develop research collaborations across Schools, Colleges, and disciplines at ASU. The collaborative nature of the research cluster format will enable lively discussion about some important texts, and also to develop deeper understanding of Latina feminist theory. 

Since the Center of Latin American Studies was disestablished in 2005, researchers focusing on Latin America have become, for the most part, isolated in their respective units. This research cluster provides a forum to disseminate groundbreaking research and cultural production, but more importantly, a venue to network across schools, colleges, and campuses, in an attempt to engage in more focused inter and transdisciplinary proposals which may become seed grants.

A significant challenge in contemporary life is how to deal with the volatile presence of diversity when people from different social, cultural, and economic positions come together to deliberate issues of shared concern. To move past scripted institutional alignments that cast conflict as a problem to be avoided, sponsors of inclusive public deliberation must learn to create a “collective We.” But here’s the catch.

Through trans- and interdisciplinary dialogue, participants in this cluster seek to explore the complexities of contemporary U.S. migration and its connections to earlier histories as well as to international developments by engaging the diverse theories and fields that have dealt with this phenomenon.

This project aims to spend the 2012-13 academic year undertaking intensive historical and ethnographic readings on how Muslims negotiate pluralism through postcolonial disruptions, nation-state formations, and emergent urban cosmopolitanisms. This project will be divided into three broad themes, each informing important questions on the making and unmaking of Islam’s roots of “monotheistic pluralism”.

This research cluster represents the first time that ASU scholars of premodern literature and culture in the European and Asian languages will come together as a group to discuss their respective fields in a comparative manner.  Underpinning this cluster is the problem of textuality in the premodern era: how texts are composed, physically produced, read, taught, copied, transmitted, interpreted, performed, censored, controlled, edited, compiled, illustrated, etc.

The proposed “Material Texts: Histories and Futures” research cluster aims to unite scholars interested in the study of material texts, broadly defined. This important transdisciplinary field of inquiry encompasses a range of methods and practices that includes (but is by no means limited to) paleography, codicology, manuscript studies, analytical and descriptive bibliography, media and communication studies, textual criticism, and digital humanities.

Never again and never before are equally powerful and problematic statements born out of the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet genocide was committed many times before and after the Nazi murder of the European Jewry. Scholars, curators and artists so far have not forged a universal understanding of the causes of mass atrocities nor have our best efforts been able to prevent prejudice, marginalization and genocide.

Critical ethnic studies seeks to create open dialogues around white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy and develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, and community engagement consistent with the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberation movements that informed the creation of ethnic studies. We ask: What might an Arizona critical ethnic studies look like in terms of both already existing scholarship, praxis, activism, and pedagogy, and future goals and emerging projects? What do we want it to be, and why? And how do we get there?