Designed to spark compelling conversations, 5×5 Incubator Grants bring together small groups of faculty, lecturers, research scientists, librarians, curators, post-docs and other university scholars from a range of fields for a short-term engagement in exploring common interests.
“Making Sense of Diasporas: Pedagogy and Public Engagement” formed to “[tackle] the question of how to combine teaching, research, and public engagement in a collaborative environment.” Shared interests led the team to consider ways to conceptualize diasporas, diasporic identities, and issues of migration.
“Trends in Premodern Media Studies” has formed to explore an emerging field which addresses questions about how scribalism, oral transmission, visual culture, and embodied performance interacted in the formation of traditions in the premodern period.
The task that “Humanities and the Climate Change Crisis” has set for itself is to “engage in conversations about the role that the humanities can play in addressing [climate change] challenges and the responsibilities that academia should undertake in dealing with the worst crisis humanity has ever faced.”
“Thinking on a New Model of Mentorship and Advising” formed to contend with “challenges posed by dominant models of student advising in doctoral education” and to “[begin] a collective reckoning with individual narratives—the underlying etiology of harassment and other forms of power abuse within graduate programs.”
The Carceral State Project launched an initiative at the University of Michigan to encourage and increase collaboration among U-M scholars who are investigating the historical roots, contemporary manifestations, and legal and political debates surrounding mass incarceration, policing, and criminalization broadly defined.
This 5×5 Incubator Grant team came together to discuss various implementations of widely-conceived humanities literacy, and specifically its intersections with social space, race, class, gender, queer sexuality, activism, and national identity.
Disability, Space, and Surveillance explores substantive connections, prepares future collaborations, and generates new insights for scholarly trajectories on a range of topics including technologies of surveillance, mental illness, psychiatric incarceration, reproductive injustice, and disability culture.
How do publics participate in shaping the future of the city? How do museums, in particular, contribute to the possibility for this participation and re-envisioning? To what extent does the curation of established museums, often in the city center, contribute to the appearance of inaccessibility? How might other kinds of museums contribute to a re thinking?