By Jessica Salvador, Graduate Staff Assistant, Undergraduate Research Program, Center for Experiential Learning
The theme for the 2007 Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, which will run from June 18th to August 17th, is: "New Directions in Cultural Research: Community Collaboration Practice." It will be taught as an intensive, site-based practicum in emerging methods and practices of engaged cultural studies research. These emerging practices combine interpretive, ethnographic, and performance-based methods, and open avenues for scholars to participate as creative producers as well as critical interpreters of culture and cultural artifacts.
Where the academic humanities have traditionally focused on textual and archival researches, new social and technological developments have recently pushed the humanities to new engagements with everything from new media to new community partnerships. Research and teaching agendas in the humanities are consequently adapting to develop collaborative and community-based orientations. These new orientations have on the one-hand led the humanities into productive exchange with the qualitative social sciences (which have deeper and longer histories of practical, community engagement and development) and the arts (which focus on creative production and have become increasingly central to discussions of community development). These engagements in turn have illuminated the strength of community-based arts and culture projects as a site for humanistic research, but also highlighted arts and culture as methods that can renew community-based research within the social sciences.
While the field sites for the faculty and students' individual and collaborative investigations will focus on particular themes and media (including youth experience, immigrant experience, democracy and social movements, explored through theater performance, TV production and video documentary), the emphasis of the course will be on providing students with the flexible skills needed to frame and engage cultural investigations and collaborations at multiple sites of possible or future research. Possible community site partners under discussion for the 2007 Summer Institute include 911 Media Arts, African Immigrant Television (with SCAN-TV), Reel Girls, and/or Children's Youth Theatre.
The Institute will be led by the following faculty: Craig Jeffrey (Assistant Professor, Geography and Jackson School of International Studies, UW Seattle); Ron Krabill (Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Bothell); and Kari Lerum (Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Bothell).
Participants in the 2007 Summer Institute will be selected through an open, competitive application process. The application is due by Monday, April 2nd, 2007, and applications from students currently pending UW admission will be considered.
Students who are interested in the Summer Institute are reminded that the Institute theme changes annually. Previous Institute themes include, "Nature Matters: On the Varieties of Environmental Experience," "Culture and Globalization," "Trauma, Time, and Memory," and "Becoming Strangers." Institute themes and student applications are released at the beginning of every Winter Quarter.
Should you have any questions about the Summer Institute, please do not hesitate to e-mail the Undergraduate Research Program at urp@u.washington.edu.
