THE LIFESPAN PROJECT: STORIES OF WASTE AND MEMORY

The Lifespan Project, one of our four 2024 Proposal Development Grant teams, interrogates the concept of lifespan in things material and immaterial as it looks at the used, rotten, and obsolete; death and grief through three intersecting stories.  Composed of undergraduate students in Architecture and English, graduate students from Comparative Literature, and three faculty members from Architecture; AfroAmerican andAfrican Studies; English;…

I Walk Under the Earth; Lightly in a Cloud of 300,000 Points. A Portal to the Ancient City of Teotihuacán Through LiDAR Surveys, Digital Preservation, and Immersive Storytelling 

The center of the Mesoamerican universe lies twenty kilometers northeast of Mexico City in the ancient city of Teotihuacán. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the site receives 4.5 million visitors annually. The Aztecs called it the place where the gods were created, and it remains Mesoamerica’s cosmological and spiritual heart. As…

Nishnaabeg Team Celebrates Learning Opportunities

Two members of the From Revitalization to Reclamation: Reinforcing Nishnaabeg Language Pedagogy and Indigenous Epistemologies at the University and Beyond Proposal Development Grant team attended The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) conference in early June. Kayla Gonyon (Lecturer in American Culture, Ojibwe Language) and Skyelar Raiti (Undergraduate Research Assistant) traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, where the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC)…

Nubian Lives Animated Film Celebrates Film Festival Acceptances

Hanina/Homesick, an animated film produced by The Narrating Nubia project led by Yasmin Moll, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, has been selected by the Annecy International Animation Film Festival to compete in the Perspectives category, the Arab American National Museum’s Film Festival in Dearborn, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival. The short film follows a young Nubian girl as she embarks on a journey…

The Ambivalence Project Celebrates Launch of Guidelines

The Ambivalence Project, partnering with Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, has launched their messaging guide, “Ambivalence as an Opportunity for Social Change.” It can be downloaded for free at: http://goodwinsimon.com/ambivalence. The Ambivalence Project, led by P.I. Valerie Traub, was composed of 5 faculty, 2 graduate students, and 1 staff person located in LSA and the Medical…

Inside the Launch of the Black Washtenaw County Website

The Black Washtenaw County Team (BWC) launched their website, the Black Washtenaw County Collaboratory, in early December, marking a major achievement for the group in making their project accessible to the general public.  Meghana Tummala, a Wallenberg Fellow and recent Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning graduate, joined the team over a year ago.…

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,…

Collaboratory Project to Receive National Endowment Grant

The exhibition project, Ghana 1957: African Art After Independence—a product of the Humanities Collaboratory project, “Making African Art: From African Independence and the Peace Corps to Civil Rights and the Cold War” (September 1, 2018 – August 31, 2020) — has been awarded a Public Humanities Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support two years…

Bringing Indigenous Knowledge to Campus

As part of their work to reframe and to activate the Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan with Indigenous knowledge the ReConnect/ReCollect team held a workshop with Indigenous Philippine artists in May. The visiting culture bearers were Cathy Ekid Domigyay, a Bontoc textile artist and weaver; Johnny Bangao, Jr. a Kankana-ey basket weaver; and Ammin Achaur,…

Sprinting For Justice

The Singing Justice Team was in York, Maine June 4-10 for a Book Sprint – facilitated by Barbara Ruehling of  Book Sprint – to work on their manuscript.   While the collaborative writing process can be challenging, the team came together to complete a compelling work on Black Song: encompassing 50,000 words, 7 chapters, 9 case studies, and 11 song biographies.  The sprint…

Family Histories Being Highlighted in Upcoming Exhibit

The Black Washtenaw County Team welcomes members of the public to visit “Family Foundations: Four Stories of Black Washtenaw County Community Building ,1850-1950.” Featuring the migration stories of four historic Black families from the area, the Jewett and Asher-Aray families from Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township and the Kersey and Bass families from Ypsilanti, this interactive exhibit…

Gallery Exhibit Opens; Preparations Underway for Workshop

The Narrating Nubia team is happy to present “Narrating Nubia: The Exhibition.” The Gallery Exhibit is open for public viewing at the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus, from Tuesday October 3, to Friday October 27. Through an array of multimedia displays — from a presentation focusing on ongoing fieldwork in Sudan to an animated…

PHILIPPINE ART, ARTIFACTS TO BE SHARED AT MAY 20 PUBLIC EVENT

The ReConnect/ReCollect Project Grant team welcomes all to a public event on May 20 as they host visitors from the Cordillera region of the northern Philippines. Visiting artists and culture bearers Cathy Ekid-Domigyay, Johnny Bangao, Jr., and Ammin Achaur will present an afternoon celebrating Cordillera weaving, basket-weaving, and tattooing arts. Artifacts from the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA) will be featured.

EXHIBIT PLANNED BY PROJECT GRANT TEAM, LOCAL PARTNERS

Leveraging findings from its 2021-23 Project Grant from the Humanities Collaboratory, the Black Washtenaw County team is now preparing to connect with local public audiences. The team is developing a traveling exhibition in partnership with the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County and other partners, to be titled “Four Black Families of Washtenaw County.”

Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (2019)

The first comprehensive qualitative research initiative to study the impact of criminalizaton, confinement, and criminal justice control in the United States will involve team members “mobiliz[ing] faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, archivists, and community partners…”

Congratulations Claire Laing!

Congratulations to Claire Laing (BA, Spanish & Linguistics, 2017), who was recently accepted to study the Speech-Language Pathology major in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in the Hunter College Graduate Program (NYC). Claire had a difficult decision when it came to deciding where to pursue graduate work: she applied to the most competitive programs in NYC (where she is from), and…

Hyecho’s Journey featured at the Freer|Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian! 

This Fall saw the first project of the Humanities Collaboratory bear a range of remarkable fruit. On December 9, the entire team of Hyecho’s Journey made a trip to Washington, where the eighth-century Korean Buddhist monk Hyecho and his extraordinary journey is a focal point of a major exhibition of Buddhist art, entitled “Encountering the Buddha: Art…

Hyecho’s Journey in LSA Magazine Fall 2017

Hyecho’s Journey is one of the first projects funded by the Humanities Collaboratory.  LSA Magazine has highlighted the project in the Fall 2017 issue.  Read the story about a mysterious monk, a multi-city research project, and the future of the humanities here.  You can also enjoy Hyecho’s Journey through their app, just search on Hyecho’s…

Argentine Afrikaners Team in the News!

Our proposal development grant team, “Agentine Afrikaners Interrogating Hybridity in a Unique Diasporic Community,” with Nick Henriksen as the PI was highlighted in The Michigan Daily on June 12.