In 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.
This research cluster consists of faculty members from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts is focused on transdisciplinary research with an emphasis on effecting social change. The group proposes to delve into and continue exploration of the following:
• Conflict resolution through an emphasis on process.
• Stimulus in the marketplace through creative response.
• Promote healing of social separation at personal and interpersonal levels.
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.
The purpose of this research project is to examine ways of making academic writing more meaningful for a wide public as well as for scholars and publishing artists. The main focus of this cluster is to examine examples of successful writing (including spoken/performed texts) that combine a personal voice with a more conventional scholarly voice while also creating a blend between fiction and non-fiction.
The Jenny Norton Research Cluster on Women seeks to bring faculty across the academy to deeply engage intersectionality as a feminist theory and method: 1) to further develop feminist tools that promote the intellectual mission of “making visible” the workings of power and oppression in our globalizing society; 2) to interrogate the relationship of intersectionality and gender studies to theories of globalization and globalism.
2012 is the UN International Year of the Co-Op!
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. (Please see attached flier below for more information)
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.
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 (PRL) cluster is a transdisciplinary area and a faculty research group of the humanities meeting on West Campus.
• The PRL sponsors major ASU-events that benefit a variety of disciplines. The PRL creates a new faculty space for ongoing “salons” to present work-in-progress, discuss texts, study new ideas
• The PRL is now a unique program faculty cluster and resource for students in two curricular programs (undergraduate certificate and graduate M.A. area of focus)
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.
The chief purpose of this Research Cluster is to explore the rich cultural expressions that have emerged in a variety of colonial and postcolonial intersections, including experiences of diaspora, immigration, migration and other forms of cultural encounter. We seek to participate in a global conversation on a variety of issues, including the effects of colonialism on cultural encounters, neo-colonialism, the impact of colonial legacies on postcolonial state formation and the influences (positive and negative) of Western culture generally in the postcolony.
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.
Economic collapses, natural disasters, human rights abuses, genocides, extreme hunger and suffering, political devolutions, environmental crises — these failures, hazards, crises, and disasters, whether acute or chronic, are endemic to our globalizing world. Modern bureaucratic organizations produce documents and plans that identify problems and propose solutions. These highly instrumental documents are, we argue, embedded in cultural assumptions and narratives – in a modern social imaginary.
The Alternative Imaginations (AI) Research Cluster is an intellectual space that seeks to cultivate complementary perspectives on science, technology, and policy to address inequality, marginality, and sustainability. AI’s goal is to engage scholars with backgrounds in humanities, social, and physical sciences to participate in dialogues on Alternative Imaginations focusing on issues of alternative living and sustainability. Sustainability science grapples with societal problems that are characterized by a high degree of complexity, uncertainty, and multiple legitimate viewpoints. It consid
This research cluster builds on a faculty group in PL that has been forming spontaneously for over a year out of a new sense of transdisciplinary respect for and mutual discovery of shared areas of research, teaching, and curricular-program interests. These range from critical theory (both in its broader origins within literary cultural studies and its historically specific genealogy from the Frankfurt School), rhetoric, and communication to literature and poetry to Continental philosophy and spirituality.
Questions of the nature, meaning, and implementation of human rights, and in human rights research and education will be addressed. Contributions from and differences among humanities and social science approaches to human rights texts and discourses, movements and practices, and analysis and evaluation will also be explored.
Following the great success of our first round last year, participants in this cluster will be engaged in the investigation of the relationship between women, religion, and reform within the context of social effects. In our second year, we plan to further explore how women in religious milieus articulate their ideas about positive change affecting their lives. Our discussions will continue to address how women challenge the limits imposed upon them and their moral behavior by religious and secular elites in society.