Beyond the Lab Projects | Humanities Lab

Chi'chil Countermapping Project

In the Spring of 2022, an interdisciplinary team of Humanities Lab –Indigenizing Food Systems students co-designed a deeply impactful outcome while forming a unique bond. From there, along with a couple of new members, the team applied for the Humanities Lab's Beyond the Lab program as well as a corresponding Seize the Moment grant fellowship, to which they were awarded both.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2023

Piipaash Language Teaching Guide

Two students from the Spring 2022 Humanities Lab Language Emergency have joined the Beyond the Lab program this fall to augment an impact outcome developed in the original Lab – teaching guides for a Piipaash storybook. During the fall semester, the team will continue to partner with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s O’odham Piipaash Language Program (OPLP) and will create customized teaching materials to enhance the storybook teaching guides.

View more information HERE.

Fall 2022, Spring 2023

ElevateAR

A group of four students from the Humanities Lab Fall 2021 – Humanizing Digital Culture Lab, inspired by their introduction to "distributed, place-based" experiences in the class, has decided to break new ground by developing a software toolkit for creating AR—augmented reality—stories that uses any elevator car as a "digital window" into another world. With funding from Seize the Moment, the group aims to ultimately publish an ElevateAR platform that any artist can use to create these immersive experiences.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

Sporks Up!

A group of four students from the Humanities Lab's Fall 2021 Food, Health, & Climate Change Lab were selected to extend their Lab's original impact outcome—a plastic reduction initiative designed to align with ASU's Zero Waste commitment—into a Beyond the Lab initiative.

More information coming soon.

Fall 2021

Disrupting Dis/Ability

The Humanities Lab Fall 2020 – Disrupting Dis/Ability Lab students decided to carry over their initiative to Spring 2021 to build upon their Lab’s original impact outcome – developing a new layer on ASU’s Interactive Campus Map. Mapping Access spans across all four of the metro Phoenix campuses and helps individuals find building entrances, accessible restrooms, etc.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2021

Rebuilding Puerto Rico

Three students from the Humanities Lab Spring 2019 – Rebuilding Puerto Rico Lab became the first students to kick-off the Lab’s inaugural Beyond the Lab program, where they created a children’s book with the aim of providing children language, tools and resources for coping with natural disasters such as Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria.

View more information HERE.

Fall 2019, Spring 2020

Decolonizing 'Madness'

How can we understand and heal the trauma in marginalized communities that experience the legacy of colonization, imperialism, and dispossession? How can ASU students contribute to community well-being? In this Lab, we will consider how social "categories" factor in our understanding of "mental health." Specifically, we will investigate how race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, and class become associated with discourses of mental health and/or pathology and how these discourses affect individual and collective life in multiple marginalized communities. Our investigations will inform our work to craft cultural interventions that both map the cumulative effects of intergenerational trauma and amplify Black, Indigenous, and People of Color's resilience and strategies of resistance.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

Narrating Global Development

This Lab investigates the concept and practice of global development as a political, economic, and social practice. Faculty and students will consider the origins of concepts like "developed" or "under-developed," First and Third World, and related global visions and global practices narrated in history, literature, theology, philosophy, film, government policies, and aid discourse. We will take a global perspective to help us explore issues of inequality, marginalization, and access to resources in Arizona, the United States and around the world. We will be driven by two essential questions: How are understandings of global development constructed and how is power derived from these narratives?

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

Sustainable Fashion

As we continue to purchase more clothes and the fashion industry continues to expand each year, what effect does it have on the environment and on textile workers? This unprecedented moment is allowing the industry to examine itself and imagine more sustainable ways of working, bringing both brands and consumers together to collaborate and openly discuss its processes and our values: how can we reimagine the future of fashion? Through the investigation of case studies, current industry journals, webinars, and discussions with industry experts and workers, we will propose solutions for creating more sustainable and equitable fashion supply chains and consumer practices.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

Language Emergency

Collaborate with Indigenous peoples of Arizona to protect their cultures and languages. In this Lab, students will work on two special tracks to get involved in multiple ways: students on the linguistic track will work on language documentation projects, most notably the emerging Piipaash and O'odham dictionaries; students on the preservation track will investigate efforts to raise awareness of the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community, upon whose ancestral lands ASU is situated. All of these activities will work toward positive social changes at ASU and in the State of Arizona.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

Intro Problem-Based Interdisciplinary Research

Students in this Lab will learn about interdisciplinary research, develop skills of collaboration, learn helpful research tools, exercise creative problem solving skills, and develop a team inquiry project focused on complex social challenges. Each session students will be working hands-on and minds-on in a workshop-like environment as we work through what the concepts & practices above mean and how to use various tools to help us meet our objectives. Students will need to be actively engaged and willing to work with each other as we learn how to conduct research and work toward interventions into some of the world's biggest problems.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

Navigating Chaos

Leonardo Lab Series: How can we make sense of an unruly world that is always outgrowing any classification or database? How can we navigate or anticipate a world that is always throwing surprises? We introduce the science and art of complex dynamical systems with rich applications from ecology, to history and urban planning, to improvisatory performance. The course invites students to bring their own complex scenarios and phenomena to discuss, represent or prototype. (Session B - i/oCourse)

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022