Institute for Humanities Research (IHR) Research Clusters
The IHR facilitates and supports diverse Research Clusters at ASU. Our aim is to assist research and communication among scholars and to enrich the intellectual climate of the university. The Research Clusters may serve as an entry point for faculty to engage with the IHR. They should support activities related to the IHR mission to:
· foster innovative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research;
· examine today’s most important issues from humanistic perspectives;
· promote and support excellence in humanities scholarship;
· engage the university community in meaningful dialogue and exploration.
The Jenny Norton Research Cluster on Women
2008-2009 Research Clusters
The following clusters were funded for AY08-09.
Please contact the project facilitator if you would like to take part in a Research Cluster.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights and Social Justice
Facilitators: LaDawn Haglund, School of Justice and Social Inquiry; Stephen Batalden, Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies and History
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. Martin’s presentation, faculty representing a range of disciplines – political science, law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, science and technology, literature, African and African-American studies, geography, and history – engaged in a lively discussion regarding the opportunities and challenges of expanding intellectual and practical engagements with human rights, incorporating interdisciplinary scholarship into policy and practice, and creating spaces where sustained engagement among scholars and practitioners can occur.
This Human Rights Research Cluster will provide the crucial first step in creating such a space. There are significant shared concerns among ASU faculty and students that are ripe for development around a range of human rights topics, including war crimes, torture, and other serious violations; transitional justice; struggles for autonomy by Native American nations; the rights of women and gender justice; immigration debates and the relationship between citizenship and rights; the role of economic and social rights for just societies; the accountability of non-state actors for human rights abuses; and the political and institutional structures involved in addressing human rights. In addition, there is expressed interest in exploring sources of human rights knowledge and representation in varying cultural discourses and mediums, including literature, history, film and the arts.
Religion, Gender, and Reform
Facilitators: Souad Ali, School of International Letters and Cultures; Mirna Lattouf, Letters & Sciences. Recipient of the Jenny Norton Award.
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 meetings will serve a several goals: 1) to introduce our own work to the other members, share our ideas on the topic, deconstruct, debate and analyze issues that unfold. This type of interaction will help each participant to consider other perspectives and meanings, narrow research focus, and resolve unforeseen challenges. 2) to present our findings at academic conferences and consider publishing an edited volume of work, dependent on the result of our collaboration; thus making a stronger commitment to the group alliance. 3) to brainstorm ideas for the upcoming conference on “gender and secularism,” as well as propose a few suggestions on how the group can contribute to it through some participation. 4) to invite two speakers to ASU for public engagements on the topic. The choice of speakers would consider diverse views as well as diverse disciplinary approaches to the topic, within the Humanities.
Cultural Landscapes, Places, Identities, and Representations
Facilitators: Kate Duncan, School of Art; Elizabeth (Betsy) Brandt, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
This cluster will facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion using theories and practices from several disciplines (Anthropological Linguistics, Art History, Geography, and Geology) to explore the relationships between physical and cultural landscapes, and how these are encoded in language, material culture, and social units. In doing so, participants will create a new transdisciplinary understanding of the connections among landscapes and territories, the language and discourses used to talk about them, social units such as clans or moieties, and their representations in material culture. The initial focus will be on the Northern (Dena'ina) and Southern Athapaskans (Navajo and Apache).
In addition to monthly meetings to discuss readings, the group plans to invite an anthropologist from Kenai, AK who is dealing with these ideas among the Dena'ina Athapaskans and to host a symposium.
Questions to be explored include:
• Cultural landscape, place attachment, and place identity
• The role of the imaging of place in personal and cultural identity
• The interconnected roles of kinship and place in cultural and physical sustainability
• Implications of the reliance of hunter-gatherers on specificities of place
• The information embedded when place is imaged in material culture (ie. references to kinship, identity, territory, etc.)
• The relationship of language to place and discourses of place
• Cognitive theory and representations in language and culture
• How the human body is analogically or metaphorically mapped upon the landscape
• How significant physical features of the landscape are rendered in image, especially on clothing
This cluster will address the interpretation and translation of cultures across divides and testing the limits of interpretation (particularly of geometric imagery among indigenous peoples).
Gender, Language, and Visual Culture in 21st Century Comparative Literature
Facilitators: Elizabeth Horan, English; Isis McElroy, School of International Letters and Cultures; Claudia Sadowski-Smith, English. Recipient of the Jenny Norton Award.
This research cluster will address the social relevance of the Humanities as well as transdisciplinary methodologies, not only theoretically but also pragmatically, working across national traditions and in multiple languages.
Proposed activities, organized according to three main topics of discussion and reflection
- Part 1 (Fall 2008): “defining” Comparative Literature: through the decadal reports issued by the American Comparative Literature Association: the Levin Report of 1965, the Greene Report of 1975, the Bernheimer Report of 1993, and the Saussy Report of 2004; reading of recent essays in Comparative Literature by Shu-Mei Shih and Francoise Lionnet, Damrosch, others.
- Part 2 (Fall 2008): how do gender, language, and the visual inform our work within our specific institutional location, both within the Southwestern United States, and with respect to the disciplines, and national literatures within which we work? Comparative Literature develops a perspective which extends across national boundaries by acknowledging that most societies are not monolingual or monocultural. How does our work with gender, language, and visual culture, as individual scholars, respond to this premise? What forms of cross-disciplinary collaboration facilitate such acknowledgement? What can we, as scholars of comparatist training, propose within and outside of the existing disciplinary structures, both at ASU, and elsewhere?
- Part 3 (Spring 2009): cultural conjunctions: Discussions of conjunctions of the global, language, visual culture, and literature, with an emphasis on media & information technology as a meeting ground and common language, and on gender as a category of analysis for advanced studies across cultures.
Previously Funded Research Clusters