January 10, 2024

Research Opportunity: More-than-Human Worlds – The Poetics and Politics of Life

The Office of Undergraduate Research is pleased to announce the call for applications for the 2024 Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities (SIAH)! SIAH offers an opportunity for undergraduates to engage in scholarly research with accomplished scholars and peers while earning full-time academic credit. Student participants develop individual, original research ideas related to an interdisciplinary theme and formally present their work at a closing symposium. 

This year’s theme is More-than-Human Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of Life, developed and taught by Professors María Elena García, Richard Watts, and Annie Dwyer along with doctoral student Shelby House. Please read their description of the theme below: 

What becomes possible when we decenter the human in the arts and humanities? This course aims to cultivate an appreciation of the more-than-human-world —from plants to animals to water to rock—as agentive, animate, and inextricably entangled with human lifeworlds. To this end, the course will introduce frameworks and methods ranging from Indigenous epistemologies to critical animal studies to multispecies ethnography, while reckoning with histories and present realities of racial formation, settler colonialism, extractive industries, captivity, war, and other forms of violence. Ultimately, students in the course will be encouraged to cross disciplinary as well as species boundaries in crafting imaginative responses to the pressing problem of the differential mattering of lives.  

To learn more about the theme, teaching team, application process and to sign up for an information session, visit our website. Applications are due March 1, 2024. 

Information sessions will be held on February 6 and February 7 for those interested – RSVP here!

We hope that you consider applying for this terrific research and learning opportunity! If you have any questions, please email us at undergradresearch@uw.edu.