Current & Upcoming Labs | Humanities Lab

Avanzando Educational 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. 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.

View more information HERE.

Fall 2022

Justice through School Gardens

This course on school gardens will provide students with interdisciplinary approaches on how to make our food system more sustainable and just by connecting students to local elementary schools. Through the school gardens, Lab students will support the elementary curriculum using the school garden. Lab students will use their experiences to create a model for state policy on gardens in school. As part of our intellectual scaffolding for understanding the importance of school gardens at the intersection of food justice, environmental justice, and climate justice, students will investigate the problems with the modern food system and how it exacerbates inequalities, for example, with health outcomes and children performance in school. In this Lab, we will look at food and food systems to get at some of the fundamental justice questions raised and then how school gardens might be part of the solution to those inequities.

View more information HERE.

Fall 2022

Humanizing Digital Culture

Leonardo Lab Series: Lab participants consider how digital culture is (re)shaping human identity, and how humankind attempts to humanize digital culture. An ArtScienceTech lens offers interdisciplinary inquiry and creative platforms to engage with cutting edge initiatives in humanizing digital culture (HDC) through digital identity enterprises, XR and net-native art experiences, experimental publishing, and other innovations. Currently offered during Summer 2022 and Fall 2022 semesters.

View more information about the Summer 2022 course HERE and the Fall 2022 course HERE

Summer / Fall 2022

Embodied Healing - Self & World

Leonardo Lab Series: Students will develop multicultural practices (tools, methodologies, approaches) to investigate healing ourselves, our communities, and our world through embodiment: the physical expression of knowledge and narrative. These approaches will empower students as creators and co-creators to impact their work in healing of self and the different worlds they inhabit/enter. This will be a course of exploration, connection, and reflection guided by questions to spark curiosity, empathy, courage and connection.

View more information HERE.

Fall 2022

Indigenizing Food Systems

Through an interdisciplinary and community engaged approach, this Lab will investigate what it means to indigenize our food systems and will grapple with issues and questions regarding food sovereignty and Indigenous health. Through multiple fields and mediums (historical, cultural, scientific and creative) students will engage in different ways of thinking about food and experiment with embodying the concept of “food is medicine.” Our Lab will focus on learning about the complex and sophisticated Indigenous food systems of North America, with a focus on native nations in the Southwest, California, and Midwest, including histories of dispossession and contemporary efforts at revitalization and food justice.

View more information HERE.

Spring 2022

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