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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Summer 2024

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. The Lab will engage students in exploring 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 explore how the world’s planetary citizens will innovate new science, arts, ideas, policies, and laws to ensure the survival of the planet and planetary futures worldwide.

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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

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