INTERSECT
2013 INTERSECT Groups
Global Indigenous Studies: The State of Play
This innovative and multidisciplinary initiative launches the institutional frameworks necessary for robust graduate training in Indigenous studies. Along with shared commitments to the development of Native and Indigenous studies, the six-faculty-member team brings together expertise in history, literary studies, religion and theology, gender and sexuality studies, political science, and the history of consciousness. The team also enables access to an extensive network of scholars in the Indigenous world.Envisioning global Indigenous studies as a field at and in play, this program will consider how indigeneity troubles and transforms disciplinarity at the site of technological invention and embodied performance. It will prepare students to navigate the interdisciplinary, transnational, and cross-cultural demands of inclusive global Indigenous studies. In addition to providing students with the necessary critical, methodological, and technical skills to address the most pressing needs of Indigenous peoples, this group will innovate new approaches in the field to theorize how Indigenous peoples figure within the edu-tainment domains of museums, sports, performance, and digital games. At the same time, students and faculty will consider how traditional embodied knowledge manifests in such sites of play and performance.
Students will learn how to develop research projects responsive to the needs of Indigenous peoples and will gain experience in working within and across disciplines to activate global indigeneity as an analytic frame.
Participating faculty/staff include - Back row: Vicente M. Diaz (Pohnpeian), American Indian Studies, Anthropology, Asian American Studies (LAS); LeAnne Howe (Choctaw Nation), American Indian StudiesCreative Writing/English, Theater (LAS & FAA); Robert Warrior (Osage Nation), American Indian Studies, English, History (LAS). Front row: Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Hopi Nation), American Indian Studies, History (LAS); Christine Taitano DeLisle (Chamorro), American Indian Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies (LAS); Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw Nation), American Indian Studies, English (LAS)
Learning to See Systems
This curricular initiative will address our campus' growing need for an area of concentration in Technology Studies. We will address the role of vision in new technologies through the production of texts as well as images, interfaces, and software.
The question of vision is central to the study of new technologies not only because of the role of images in these systems, but also of sight itself, and the act of seeing. To address and understand the role of vision in technological systems is to expose their underlying value systems, the ways in which they mediate visibility for others. As evidenced by rising interest in Media Studies among International and Area Studies disciplines, scholars of the experience of underrepresented groups must increasingly grapple with the technological and visual.
We will equip students to be effective critics of not only their chosen subjects of study, but of their own increasingly digital scholarly spaces. Outcomes will include scholarly publications and presentations in traditional and experimental forms, a new digital tool made available to the public for use in scholarly research and publication, and a concluding symposium on the rise of the "Humanities Lab" as a space of experimentation for scholarly form, method and audience.
Participating faculty/staff include - Back row: Sally Jackson, Communication (LAS); Safiya Noble, African American Studies; Anita Chan, Media & Cinema Studies (MDIA). Front row: Ned O'Gorman, Communication (LAS); Prita Meier, Art History (FAA); Kevin Hamilton, Art and Design I FAA Not shown: Terri Weissman, Art History (FAA)
2012 INTERSECT Groups
Cultures of Law in Global Contexts
Cultures of Law in Global Contexts will establish an institutional framework for collaboration between the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Economics, English, Gender and Women’s Studies, History, and Law. This team of faculty conducts multi-lingual, cross-disciplinary, and transnational research on the Middle East, China, Russia, the European Union, the United States, and Latin America. Through their relationships with the Illinois Program on Law, Behavior, and Social Science, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Law and Globalization, and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, this group will forge new teaching and research methodologies to explore culture as a regulative force of practices and norms in law, and examine the ways law constitutes perceptions of justice, security, and development.
Participating faculty/staff include: (l to r) Nuno Garoupa, Dan Shao, Siobhan Somerville, Feisal Mohamed, and Eugene Avrutin; (not shown) Daniel Hamilton, Charlotte Ku, and Elizabeth Oyler
Graduate Student Fellows include: Lauren Anaya (Anthropology), Peter Campell (Communication), Jin Gong (East Asian Languages and Cultures), Emily Metzner (Anthropology), T.J. Tallie (History), Kate Walkiewicz (English)
The Network for Neuro-Cultures
The Network for Neuro-Cultures brings together a team of faculty to investigate the processes by which neuroscientific methodologies weave humanistic modes of expression into research and scholarship. This group will prepare graduate students to mediate flows of knowledge between and within academic disciplines in order to create reflexive, inclusive neuroscholarship. The group is represented by faculty from English, Gender and Women’s Studies, History, Political Science, Religion, Cultural Kinesiology, Art + Design, and Neuroscience. Building upon extended networks of scholars in the United States and abroad, this group will train students to communicate across disciplines, become more self-reflexive in their own research approaches and claims, and learn how to build transdisciplinary collaborative research agendas.
Participating faculty include: (l to r) Bruce Michelson, Melissa Littlefield, Sharra Vostral, Synthia Sydnor, Bruce Rosenstock, and Andrew Gaedtke; (not shown) Neal Cohen, Arthur Kramer, and Deke Weaver