Seed Grant Projects
In fall and spring competitions each year, projects are selected for Seed Grant awards of up to $7,500 for individual researchers or up to $12,000 per team. These grants further advance faculty research and often improve the quality of grant proposals to external funding agencies. The Institute supports those projects that best address its mission and that have strong prospects of receiving external funding.
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Altering Implicit Sterotypes through Performance: The Role of Motor Resonance in Shaping Unconscious Associations
Current vocabulary to describe the reception of the performance suggests relative passivity: we speak of the spectator (who sees) or the audience (who hears). Neither of these terms adequately describes the kinesthetic experience of performance. In theatre, we have a robust tendency to resonate with actors' behaviors, which in turn can shape our unconscious beliefs about social normalcies. This study will attempt to gather and analyze empirical data to investigate the role of live action resonance in altering implicit associations.
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Exploring Near Death
This project will investigate "Near Death" through personal research and then convene a conference of experts from both a scientific and humanistic perspective to understand and articulate the many varied points of view in the near death experience. The goals of this project are two-fold: First, write a book proposal to interest publishers to commission it.
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Humanities Behind the Walls (HBW)
Humanities Behind the Walls (HBW) draws on a genealogy of situated and subjugated knowledges that have emerged from behind prison walls to provide an opportunity for faculty and students to critically engage the humanistic and humanizing potential inherent in acts of reading and discussing literature, poetry, and drama with people incarcerated at Perryville Women's Prison, and with formerly incarcerated people at Arizona State University.
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Research System Infrastructure and Informatics Solutions for Digital Humanities
The Shakespeare Cognition Research Project: Classical Drama and Perceptions of Race investigates how contemporary American audiences respond to nontraditionally cast productions of William Shakespeare’s plays. This project aims to discover conceptual tools that can be used by scholars and theatre companies to gauge various aspects that alter audiences’ horizons of expectations.
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The Lucy's Legacy Project--Institue of Human Origins and Donald C. Johanson Collection: Linking Public Humanities with a Public Understanding of Science
This project will develop provocative humanities-based questions to share about the origins of questions of what it means to be human and questions about the collection, how the materials support certain narratives attached to paleoanthropological pursuits, and how academic rivalries punctuate practice and fire the public imagination. Moreover, this project is the first step in analyzing, cataloguing, and preserving a collection of materials from a significant scientist and research institute that tell a story of the history of anthropology during the last quarter of the 20th century.
2011
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Rising Souls, Singing Scorpions
The story of Ramon "Chunky" Sanchez is emblematic of the dramatic changes in the Chicano community within his lifetime (1951-present), as both he and his community have struggled to create a new identity within the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the face of massive demographic, economic, and political changes, Sanchez has survived and thrived, using music to challenge the sometimes deplorable forces shaping the life of his community.
Spring 2011
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Aloha Compadre: Transpacific Latina/o Migrations to the Hawaiian Islands
Aloha Compadre: Transpacific Latina/o Migrations to the Hawaiian Islands is a project that examines, educates and disseminates knowledge about the understudied presence of Latina/os in Hawai’i, their historical and cultural contributions, and how recent migrations have shifted and redefined the ethnic, political, labor and socio-cultural relationships in the state.
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American Movements: Understanding the Ideological and Institutional Basis for Japanese American and American Indian Relocations
This project explores the ideological and institutional synergy between the US federal government’s policies relating to American Indians and Japanese Americans by comparing the removal, internment, and relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II with the subsequent urban relocation of American Indians beginning in 1948 and institutionalized as Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) policy by the 1950s.
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At Home in the Desert: Youth Engagement and Place
Contemporary representations of desert life, particularly in the mainstream media, do not usually reflect the lived experiences of local residents, especially youths. At Home in the Desert: Youth Engagement and Place, the first major creative project initiated by the newly established Public Practice Research Group within the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, addresses this discrepancy through integrated use of dance, music, science, and technology. Specifically, this project brings together accomplished artists, youths from Phoenix, and ASU faculty and students to investigate
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Diabetes and Democracy in South Phoenix: Performance, Place and the Cultural Politics of Food
Awarded the 2011 Arts and Humanities Seed Grant funded jointly by the Institute for Humanities Research and the Herberger Institute Research Center in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
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Heritage & Memory: Sites of Transgenerational Trauma, Moral Reminders, and Repair
Heritage & Memory: Sites of Transgenerational Trauma, Moral Reminders, and Repair examines conflicted sites of heritage and memory in order to articulate conceptual (theory, methodology innovations) and practical (clinical, ethical, political, legal impact in applied fields) resources with potential for breaking inherited barriers to peace and conflict resolution. These resources would include critical theory, literature, aesthetics of museums, monuments, memorializations, rituals, and civic performances of memory.
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Islamism and the Crucible of Immigration
Islamism in the Crucible of Immigration is an attempt to understand through the study of the grand affair that immigration offers certain Muslim individuals and sometimes groups—in varying degrees—serious drifts toward different strands of Islamism. The dynamics of immigration and their transformative ardor could be perceived here as both complex structures and processes at work that require considerable study to grasp their deeper implications and far-reaching consequences.
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School(ing) Girls: Localizing Transnational Gender Identities in Kenya's Maasailand
This collaborative, transdisciplinary project joins the expertise of faculty from the fields of Women and Gender studies and Education Policy and Sociolinguistics to advance research on gender and education in rural East Africa. Specifically, this project explores the impact of the development driven education imperative in the form of formal schooling on identity construction and notions of girlhood in Maasai communities in Kenya. Our study takes as primary the relationships between discourse, language use, and lived experience.
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The Shakespeare Cognition Research Project: Classical Drama and Perceptions of Race
As an interdisciplinary research group (with scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and arts), the Shakespeare Cognition Research Project team seeks to gather, analyze, and theorize empirical data about audience receptions of nontraditionally cast classical performances. While many in the mainstream media claim that "Generation M[edia]"—eight to eighteen year olds who have grown up with, and on, the internet—is the post-race generation that no longer "sees" race, empirical research indicates that race remains a salient identity category for young people.
Spring 2010
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The Art of Recovery: Port-au-Prince 2010
Traumas elicit strong humanistic responses. Graphic and narrative representations and embodied performances of an aesthetic nature emerged immediately after the earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti on 12 January 2010. This study will first ground itself in a survey of humanistic aspects of past post-quake responses as well as clinical studies of post-disaster art therapy before examining the current Haitian tragedy. The result will be a stronger understanding of the role that humanistic activities play in post-catastrophe recovery as a form of place-making.