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.

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. This project will be divided into three broad themes, each informing important questions on the making and unmaking of Islam’s roots of “monotheistic pluralism”.

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.  Underpinning this cluster is the problem of textuality in the premodern era: how texts are composed, physically produced, read, taught, copied, transmitted, interpreted, performed, censored, controlled, edited, compiled, illustrated, etc.

The proposed “Material Texts: Histories and Futures” research cluster aims to unite scholars interested in the study of material texts, broadly defined. This important transdisciplinary field of inquiry encompasses a range of methods and practices that includes (but is by no means limited to) paleography, codicology, manuscript studies, analytical and descriptive bibliography, media and communication studies, textual criticism, and digital humanities.

Never again and never before are equally powerful and problematic statements born out of the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet genocide was committed many times before and after the Nazi murder of the European Jewry. Scholars, curators and artists so far have not forged a universal understanding of the causes of mass atrocities nor have our best efforts been able to prevent prejudice, marginalization and genocide.

Critical ethnic studies seeks to create open dialogues around white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy and develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, and community engagement consistent with the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberation movements that informed the creation of ethnic studies. We ask: What might an Arizona critical ethnic studies look like in terms of both already existing scholarship, praxis, activism, and pedagogy, and future goals and emerging projects? What do we want it to be, and why? And how do we get there?

Jenny Norton Research Cluster - 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.  In this way, we intend to rigorously theorize the politics of knowledge that we research and teach beyond a primarily US-centered analysis of the relationships of women and communities of color to the nation-state but see

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.

This cluster interrogates the notion of creative activity as a form of research method in the arts and humanities. Creatively oriented, or “artistic” research, disrupts taken-for-granted notions of methodological order and efficacy. The notions of "Tricksters and Mindful Heresy"  provide the starting point for a critical examination of the orthodoxy of method and the disruption of its taken-for-granted (dis)orderings of creative inquiry.

This faculty group of scholars from the humanities and humanistic social sciences will interpret contemporary violence in Mexico-US relations from the perspective of horror as theorized by Hannah Arendt, political theorist; Adriana Cavarero, feminist theorist and political philosopher; and international relations theorists Francois Debrix and Alexander Barder. This cluster will employ the Arendt-Cavarero definition of horror viewed as the annihilation of embodiment as a means of eradicating the humanity of people.