Diplomacy Lab: Brazil
This Humanities Lab focuses on research requested by the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, as part of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomacy Lab. Our task, working collaboratively, is to investigate current climate change challenges for Brazil that specifically affect marginalized urban communities (ex. democracy, human rights, health, energy security, economic policy, and conflict).
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Spring 2025
Printing el Pueblo: A Recovery
Faculty, museum curator, and students will collaborate to create a collection handbook to accompany an exhibition at the ASU Art Museum of the Hispanic Research Center’s art collection. This exhibition aims to elevate Latinx Printmaking and the ways it has shaped American art. The students will gain knowledge of artistic preservation and curation as well as formal and thematic elements of Latinx art. Student teams will draft, write, design, and publish a catalog for the exhibition as their course outcome.
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Spring 2025
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?
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Spring 2025
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.
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Spring 2025
Seeking Truth: Misinformation
From ancient to modern times, false narratives persist, though today they are amplified by the digital era and its numerous tools (ex. AI) and platforms (ex. TikTok). This surge has profound global to local repercussions, impacting media, politics, science, and economics while eroding trust in institutions, between communities, and affecting individual behaviors.
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Spring 2025
Educating for Democracy?
This lab investigates the state of democracy and examines the role that education plays – and could play - in strengthening it. Working individually and in small groups, students will conduct research and craft projects that interrogate the status quo, reimagine educational systems, and propose transformative breakthroughs in structures, institutions, and pedagogies that empower students and communities to participate actively and effectively in the democratic process, disrupt inequities, and pursue the promises of liberty and justice for all.
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Fall 2024
Planetizing Citizenship
Planetizing Citizenship investigates how climate change is forcing more and more human and non-human migration, biodiversity loss, and mass species extinctions. These human-induced crises cannot be solved within the boundary confines of modern nation-states, requiring planetary- scale unity and cooperation that must resituate humans as members of a shared planet. In this UNESCO BRIDGES series of Humanities Labs, students will investigate how we may shift our perspectives from citizenship to planetizenship in order to undo existing hierarchies and borders, engaging across gender, age, class, race, ability, species, machines, and matter, in order to collectively remake our planetary futures. We will reimagine how the world's planetary citizens will innovate new science, arts, ideas, policies, and laws to ensure the survival of the planet and people.
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Fall 2024
Migration, Art, Place: US/GER
This Lab will investigate migration to Germany and the United States with a focus on cultural expression, sustainable community building, and climate change. In this UNESCO BRIDGES series of Humanities Labs, we will focus on Berlin and Phoenix as places with large and diverse immigrant populations and long histories of migration/emigration to examine major forces that shape human movement and impact the formation of migrant communities and cultural expressions. There is also a separate Global Intensive Experience opportunity available that will run over Winter Break ‘24 titled GIE: Engage Berlin: Migration, Art and Place.
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Fall 2024
Families Living (Un)Documented
WHY is immigration a national issue? Why and how are undocumented front-and-center in the immigration debate? What can we learn from families with mixed status?
WHERE: Our course will be working closely with families who have mixed immigration status and organizations like Consultas y Más. In fact, our Lab is located in the ASU Chandler Innovation Center to make it easier for everyone to come together and collaborate.
WHAT: With the community we’ll investigate the “stressors” that impact them, the effect these can have on youth development, and how they navigate rites of passages or cultural rituals. We will also examine how youth today are changing immigration activist movements.
HOW: We will investigate the intersections of immigrant youth and children with mixed-status family well-being through multiple methods - qualitative methods such as storytelling, oral history, and digital archives and quantitative methods such as surveys – within a broader community-based approach.
OUTCOME: We will develop, record, and produce a podcast.
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Fall 2024
US Gun Culture and Gun Impacts
In the United States today, both those who defend an expansive vision of gun rights and those who seek to regulate firearms more stringently use the term “gun culture” as if it were a fact of life that needs no explanation. But what does this ubiquitous term – which relates a broad category of technology (“the gun”) to one of the most notoriously difficult to define categories in humanistic scholarship (“culture”) – actually mean? And what is the relation of this cultural formation to the sociological realities of gun ownership and gun violence in the United States? In this class, we will engage both humanities and sociological methodologies and scholarship to trace the legal, social, and cultural history of firearms in the United States from the pre-revolutionary period to our contemporary moment, thinking along the way about how and why we have come to understand our relationship with firearms technology as a “culture," and how that culture produces (or doesn't) our exceptional levels of gun violence.
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Fall 2024
