New 5×5 Team, Public Facing Studies of Religion

The Public Facing Studies of Religion team is comprised of faculty members with backgrounds in a variety of religious scholarly studies. They will meet to share and analyze techniques for disseminating public facing versions of research on religion. Topics they will discuss include the phenomena of scholarship on religion being mistaken as proselytizing and the complications of pressures inherent to religious…

Media, Technology, Geopolitics and Social Change in the BRICS+ Countries

We welcome Media, Technology, Geopolitics and Social Change in the BRICS+ Countries team to the Collaboratory with a 5×5 Incubator grant. With an interdisciplinary approach to media, this team will focus on BRICS+ countries – namely India, China, Russia and Nigeria – to assess how uses, practices, and understandings of media, art, and technology reproduce…

Documenting Endangered Languages

The team, as a recent recipient of a 5×5 Incubator grant, will focus on language documentation, especially endangered languages, which includes over 90% of the languages in the world today. The team’s goal is to create a critical mass of synergy and brainstorm on major issues in language documentation, such as a practical protocol for language…

Anti-Colonial Global South Studies: Research, Learning, and Community Engagement

A new team joins the Collaboratory with a 5×5 Incubator grant. This team will discuss alternative frameworks rooted in anti-colonial histories of the Global South to rethink mainstream knowledge production practices in the Global North drawing from different research, learning, and community engagement traditions. Motivating questions include: What does it mean to practice anti-colonial research, pedagogy,…

Critical Pedagogy in Romance Languages and German

We are happy to announce the award of a new 5×5 team. This project unites scholars in Romance Languages and Literatures and Germanic Languages and Literatures who teach upper-division, interdisciplinary courses on race, class, gender, and sexuality through literature, film, history, and critical theory. The team hopes to lay the foundation to conduct research on the topic of…

From Revitalization to Decolonization: Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies

A 5×5 Incubator Grant has been awarded to From Revitalization to Decolonization; Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies. This team’s members will engage in research to improve language pedagogy and build members awareness of issues relevant to understudied languages and more specifically for documenting and sustaining the Ojibwe dialect historically spoken in the area. They also…

Apply for Collaboratory 5×5 Grants

The Collaboratory is excited to continue funding 5×5 Incubator Grants in its new phase, and we are currently accepting applications. The 5×5 Incubator Grants are intended to encourage faculty and research specialists from a variety of fields to organize around a theme or topic of shared interest, an approach to work in the humanities, an experimental form of dissemination,…

Narrative Cartographies of Migration

A 5×5 Incubator Grant has been awarded to Narrative Cartographies of Migration. This 5×5 project, which bridges cultural studies and humanistic legal studies, will investigate new methodological approaches to the team members’ shared research interests in migration, mobility, and movement.

Environmental Activism and Minoritized Languages on Social Media

Nigerian activists gather to protest oil companies

A 5×5 Incubator Grant has been awarded to Environmental Activism and Minoritized Languages on Social Media. This 5×5 project investigates how environmental activism and marginalized languages intersect in three distinct geographic sites–Cabo Verde islands, Nigeria, and Japan.

Illuminating a Manuscript in the Age of Print

An image from the manuscript showing Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644) in a procession

A 5×5 Incubator Grant has been awarded to Illuminating a Manuscript in the Age of Print, a team which has formed to study an impressive new manuscript acquired by U-M Library.

The Art of Democracy

The Art of Democracy 5×5 grant team will “expose and critique the ways in which the arts (literature, painting, poetry, music, etc.) and performance (dance, theater, political speech, street protest, etc.) have intervened in American civic discourse.”

Translating Anti-Racism

“Translating Anti-Racism” brings together scholars…navigating anti-racist discourses in various geopolitical contexts and observing anti-racist movements’ complex relationship with critical race theory.

Making Sense of Diasporas: Pedagogy and Public Engagement

“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

“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.

Humanities and the Climate Change Crisis

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

“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

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.

The James Baldwin Archive and Interdiscipinary Digital Humanities

Outside Baldwin's study in France. Photo: M. Zaborowska, 2014.

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.