This research cluster will seek out possible common ground between America and China in the 21st century. Promoting dialogue at ASU and seeking mutual understanding should help build a firmer foundation for intellectual and cultural collaboration that might benefit ASU's research cooperation with Chinese institutions.

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.

This research cluster will meet monthly to develop core concepts of the trandisciplinary study of "space, place, society, and culture". Members will draw on work in history, geography, environmental studies, planning, philosophy, religion, sociology, cultural studies, and other disciplines. When presenting our findings and the work of seminal scholars, we will begin a sustained transdiciplinary investigation into the relationship of human beings to their physical environment throughout history.

This research cluster plans to meet once a month to discuss articles and/or books relating to questions of language, identities, and ideology. We will also read each other's work on this topic, providing feedback prior to presentation at scholarly meetings and or publication. At the end of the spring semester this cluster will present a public symposium with the hope of attracting the general public, K-12 teachers, as well as university students and faculty.

This group will gather together researchers from across the various humanistic, social science, and biological science disciplines that contribute to the many ways women's health is defined, investigated, and pursues. Internationally, women's health movements began as mechanisms to focus more attention on women's healthcare issues; a key component of this effort was to broaden the definition of "women's health" from simple issues of reproduction to health of woman as whole beings across the life span.

Participants in "Race in All Its Formations" will meet monthy for provocative discussion about how racial formations in the United States inform and have been informed by discourses about science, health, policy, history, culture, and globalization. United States continues to be understood as a black and white binary.

This Research Group will provide an interdisciplinary forum at ASU for scholars interested in the themes of migration, displacement, and borders. Its interests will extend from domestic migration, to international migration, to refugees and displaced persons. The group will meet approximately once a month to hear a presentation of a forthcoming professional paper by one of the participants. There will be a featured presentation by a scholar from another university on the final spring semester public forum, with comments and discussion by members of the group.

This Research Cluster's initial focus will be the variety of ways in which "Europe" has been defined and delimited over the past two millennia.

This Research Cluster plans to meet monthly to read current scholarly literature on the relationship between religious conversion and globalization, discuss these issues, and prepare grant appropriate grant proposals to major granting agencies, including the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchange Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

This research cluster is devoted to investigating the interactions between urban values, urban systems and spaces, and inhabitants of the city by focusing on the cultural dimensions of urban planning, urban systems, and the experiences of urban life. This cluster will investigate the cultural dimensions of urban systems and spaces by bringing together scholars from history, anthropology and religious studies working on cities in the United States, Germany, France, Russia and the Philippines.