Diplomacy Lab Brazil
In this Humanities Lab, students will collaboratively investigate the meaning of diplomacy and uncover its relationship to climate, health, societal, and economic issues in Brazil. Students will be organized into small teams based on interests to work on a project identified by the U.S. State Department. Students will consult with State Department representatives throughout the semester, and at the end of the course, present their projects via Zoom to personnel in the U.S. Embassy in Brazil. There is also a separate Global Intensive Experience opportunity available that will run over Spring Break titled Global Future of Brazil.
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Spring 2024
Ethics of Language Testing
How might testing for language proficiency have (un)intended consequences? In this Humanities Lab, students will devote equal attention to examining the role of language testing in promoting literacy and multilingualism and to the question of such testing being unjust and discriminatory. In teams, students will engage in critical analysis of testing practices and design language assessment objects, and explore opportunities for creating more reliable and equitable examinations. Students will collaborate with a group of language specialists in Serbia who are attempting to establish assessment practices in that country to learn about the implications for this work worldwide.
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Spring 2024
Guns, Art-making, and Truth
Together, we will dig deeper into the values held by Americans who are most affected by guns - the gun-owning community, gun law supporters, and (anti-)Second Amendment activists - along with the embodied experiences of victims of gun violence. We will explore and utilize a “fourth responder” approach interweaving humanities and arts-based praxis as we seek to understand, interpret, express, and engage the human experience of trauma and conflict. You will learn how to navigate controversial claims and carry out meaningful, non-extractive research with multiple publics in order to create critical and meaningful installations/performances that open dialogue on this issue with the Phoenix community.
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Spring 2024
Intro to 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..
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Spring 2024
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.
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Spring 2024
Avanzando: Education Pathways
This course, Avanzando - Moving Forward, in partnership with the diverse community of Maryvale, aims to establish clear educational opportunities and career development support for Phoenix youth. Through an interdisciplinary and intersectional investigation into educational practices (formal and informal), student teams will produce research-based, actionable responses to educational disparities and community challenges related to conflicting cultural norms and values. With faculty mentorship, students will identify cultural and systemic barriers that inhibit student educational empowerment and produce research-based, hands-on solutions that incorporate the nuances of a humanistic perspective and consider relevant historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts of Maryvale.
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Fall 2023
Cripping Technology
In this Leonardo Series of Humanities Lab students will reimagine enshrined notions of how a body-mind can move, look, and communicate. Through arts-integrated research into disability justice, students will engage and remake creative technologies through the lens of accessibility.
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Fall 2023
Energy, Justice and Action
In this UNESCO BRIDGES series of Humanities Labs, we will focus on the principles outlined in UNESCO's Guidelines for Sustainability Science in Research and Education. This Lab, in particular, will focus on unjust extraction and just energy transitions, with a focus on actions leading to transition away from coal and towards clean energy.
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Fall 2023
Humanizing Digital Culture
Working together, Lab participants consider how digital culture is (re)shaping human identity and investigate the dual power of humankind's relationship to technology to create empathy while also causing real-world harm. What does it mean to be human in a digital world? How does digital identity determine how we relate to each other and the planet? How do we define and demonstrate human identity now and in the future? Working in teams, create original responses to humanize digital technologies.
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Fall 2023
Mediating Ocean Futures
In this UNESCO BRIDGES series of Humanities Labs, we will focus on the principles outlined in UNESCO's Guidelines for Sustainability Science in Research and Education. As issues such as climate change, sea-level rise, pollution, and extraction have increasingly threatened our oceans, humanities scholars and ocean activists have turned their attentions to humanity’s relationship to the oceans, past, present, and future. Mediating Ocean Futures investigates how ocean users, storytellers, scientists, policymakers, and activists have imagined, mediated, and regulated the seas. Beyond dominant understandings of blue economy, student teams will do expansive research into how diverse communities care for and create knowledge about ocean ecosystems. In particular, we will reflect on the role of different kinds of ocean storytelling in helping to build a just and sustainable planetary future.
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Fall 2023
Narratives of School Shootings
Students in this Humanities Lab will investigate the ways that youth interface with the gun violence narrative, from being victims of school shootings, to advocacy, to school-based prevention efforts. Due to differences in the distribution of gun violence by gender, race/ethnicity, and geographic location, it is impossible to have these conversations without acknowledging the historical and contextual determinants of gun violence.
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Fall 2023
