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Research Cluster Projects

Research Clusters Funding OpportunitiesIn an informal yet supportive atmosphere that encourages networking across disciplines, groups of ASU scholars meet regularly to explore a theme for further research. They share readings and ideas, and also develop collaborative projects and conferences. In addition to the five or six open-topic clusters (totaling approximately 50 scholars) that receive funding, the recently established Jenny Norton Research Cluster on Women provides supplemental financial support for gender-focused research in any field and on any topic.

Participants present public lectures, roundtables, or symposia that highlight their work. Participation often leads to seed grant proposals, publications, or other ongoing collaborations.

  • A Jenny Norton Research Cluster: Latina Feminisms

    This research cluster, supported in part by a gift from the Reverend Jenny Norton, is designed to re-familiarize the participants with some of the classic works of Latina feminist theory, and to also read important new works with an ultimate goal of invigorating our scholarship and to develop research collaborations across Schools, Colleges, and disciplines at ASU. The collaborative nature of the research cluster format will enable lively discussion about some important texts, and also to develop deeper understanding of Latina feminist theory. 

  • Beyond Tolerance: Pluralism's History in Islam

    This project aims to spend the 2012-13 academic year undertaking intensive historical and ethnographic readings on how Muslims negotiate pluralism through postcolonial disruptions, nation-state formations, and emergent urban cosmopolitanisms.

  • Integrating Personal Narrative with Scholarly Writing: Exploring Strategies in Creative Non-Fiction

     

    The purpose of this research cluster is to examine ways of making academic writing more meaningful for a wide public as well as for ourselves as scholars and publishing artists.

    Within many disciplines in the humanities there remains a strong expectation to produce academic writing that is presented in a detached manner, making extensive reference to existing theories as a means for justification, and often using esoteric jargon of the field. Such writing is expected for tenure purposes, and is believed to be of a higher order than other modes of communication.

  • Latin America Issues: Material Conditions, Violence, Human Rights, and Cultural Productions

    This research cluster provides a forum to disseminate groundbreaking research and cultural production, but more importantly, a venue to network across schools, colleges, and campuses, in an attempt to engage in more focused inter and transdisciplinary proposals which may become seed grants.

  • Lived Democracy: Inventing Alternative Public Discourses in a Quintessential Postmodern City

    In this research cluster, colleagues from the Department of English and the School of Public Affairs/ Public Administration will consider together how international scholarship and ASU’s design aspirations as a New American University can speak to this significant challenge posed by diverse groups naming, framing and deliberating over common concerns.

  • Local and Global Feminisms and the Politics of Knowledge

    During the upcoming academic year, the research cluster will continue to focus on theories of intersectionality and feminist knowledge within a global and transnational framework as well as those that acknowledge the continuing importance of the nation-state in the construction of identities, desires, and culture.

  • Premodern Text East and West

    This research cluster represents the first time that ASU scholars of premodern literature and culture in the European and Asian languages will come together as a group to discuss their respective fields in a comparative manner.

  • Theories of Immigration: Policymaking, Transnationalism, Return

    Through trans- and interdisciplinary dialogue, participants in this cluster seek to explore the complexities of contemporary U.S. migration and its connections to earlier histories as well as to international developments by engaging the diverse theories and fields that have dealt with this phenomenon.

2011 to 2012

  • Social Innovation and Community Development

    This cluster will focus on cooperatives as innovative ways to foster community development in their efforts in 2012. You are invited to attend a seminar on February 7, where Victor Pestoff, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Civil Society Studies at Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm, Sweden, will present on the topic.

  • The Anticipated Journey: Transdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Understood Through a River Metaphor

    This research cluster will inquire into the circumstances that make “reciprocal interdisciplinary scholarship” possible. As a result of our work together, we will gain new knowledge about how a specific landscape can offer occasion for social, cultural, technological and scientific learning. More importantly, we will know how that landscape, and a journey through it, can be a focal point, a place on which learners can utilize many lenses to understand a whole.

  • Imaginaires of Islamic Modernity

    Diverse manifestations of modernity, from the experience of colonial subjugation, the struggles for the formation of independent nation-states, and the rise of modern-day global networks, shaped and reshaped the Muslim world.

  • Local and Global Feminisms and the Politics of Knowledge

    During the upcoming academic year, this research cluster will focus on theories of intersectionality and feminist knowledge within a global and transnational framework as well as those that acknowledge the continuing importance of the nation-state in the construction of identities, desires, and culture.

  • Creative Inquiry Research & Practice: Catalyst for Social Change

    This year the goal of this Reseach Cluster is to continue to establish connections between the diverse areas of our investigation and practice, thereby building upon common areas of exploration. The purpose is to gather together in order to experience each other’s creative processes, share philosophical and theoretical resources, and lines of questioning in-practice, thereby growing our understanding of each others’ creative inquiry, its impact and stimulus for social change, and furthering transdisciplinary research possibilities.

2010 to 2011

  • Interdisciplinary Approaches to Emotions

    The academic study of emotions has developed since the 1980’s in different disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, literature, law and religious studies. It therefore appears as an ideal topic to consider from an interdisciplinary perspective, especially after about three decades of research in independent fields with few intersections between them. In this cluster, our main goal is to study different approaches to emotions, and see how different perspectives, when crossed, can deepen each other and provide a broader and more accurate background.

  • Borders and Migration: Historical Memory and Human Rights

    Recent events in the state of Arizona and reactions across the country have once again catapulted the issue of immigration to the forefront of the national consciousness and prompted statements and resolutions from local, national, and international bodies, including university officials and faculty bodies.

  • The Philosophy, Rhetoric and Literature Research Cluster

    The Philosophy, Rhetoric and Literature (PRL) cluster is a transdisciplinary area and a faculty research group of the humanities meeting on West Campus.

  • Friending Facebook: Social Media and the [Re]construction of Self and Other

    Social media permeates our world and continues to impact us as humans, citizens and scholars: from the evolution of virtual communities and its naturalization of online interpersonal exchange to the growth of progressively accessible forms of entertainment.

2010 to 2012

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