In our call for proposals, we asked for ideas for future CHCI programs that combine high-order scholarship and key intellectual issues in the humanities with the creation of models for new, tangible, and scale-able resources within CHCI. The objective of the initiative is to build on the creativity of our members toward the development of plans for projects and programs that forge new mechanisms for collaboration within our network. The initiative is specifically intended to support planning and pilot activities: the rollout of fully operational programs is not, as yet, the intended outcome, but we are hopeful that the range of program plans produced under the initiative will provide springboards for new, exciting, and fund-able opportunities for CHCI members.

The four project groups are now beginning their discussions and planning work, and representatives of each group will convene in Seattle in early 2012 for a group workshop. The intention of this session will to discover areas of mutual interest, engage in a lively group critique, and to underscore the need to develop projects that can eventually produce benefits for the widest possible range of CHCI members. The project groups will present the results of their planning work at the 2012 CHCI Annual Meeting at the Australian National University

The CHCI Project Committee and Board would like to express thanks to all members involved in developing proposals, and congratulations to the four funded project groups, which include:

Humanities for the Environment
Co-convened by Sarah Buie (Higgins School of Humanities, Clark University), Sally Kitch (Humanities Research Center, Arizona State University), and David Phillips (Institute for the Humanities, Wake Forest University), in close collaboration with Dianne Harris (Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities), Poul Holm (Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College, Dublin), E. Ann Kaplan (Center for the Humanities, Stony Brook University), Beth Levy and Carolyn de la Pena (Center for the Humanities, UC-Davis), Iain McCalman (University of Sydney), Leerom Medovoi (Portland Center for Public Humanities, Portland State University), Pauline Phemister (Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh), and Ann Waltner (Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota).

The project to be pursued by CHCI’s long-standing Humanities for the Environment group will seek to take the work of the group to a new level of engagement, pursuing themes such as global/regional, reimagining the city, and interdependence and empathy. Promising ideas for program structures – “platforms” – such as a humanities environmental observatory, an expanded website, and teams of scholars working under the construct of a humanities “greenhouse,” will be developed, among other projected program components.

IGHERT (Integrative Graduate Humanities Education and Research Training)
Co-convened by Richard Grusin (Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Nathaniel Deutsch (Institute for Humanities Research, UC-Santa Cruz) and Tyrus Miller (Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz), and Ansgar Nünning (International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany)

The IGHERT group aims to map a new role for CHCI member organizations in graduate humanities education that reflects the rationale of the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program, and Canada’s National Sciences and Engineering Research Council Collaborative Research and Training Experience program. Asserting that that the imperatives of 21st-century humanities research are strongly analogous to those that the NSF-IGERT program seeks to foster in the STEM fields—interdisciplinary innovation, collaborative exchange, and attention to social impact – the project will create a comprehensive humanities education initiative, incorporating: a holistic model for graduate humanities research, training, and financial support; a diverse funding model to provide sustainable support for graduate research initiatives; a role for CHCI members in organizing research and training of humanities graduate students; international collaboration; and a web-based platform to disseminate and archive materials, facilitate collaborative research threads, and deliver research results from the network to broader audiences.

Medical Humanities
Co-convened by Stathis Gourgouris (Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University), Brian Hurwitz (Centre for the Humanities and Health, King’s College London), and John McGowan, Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in collaboration with the Heyman Center for the Humanities (Columbia University), Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities (University of Washington), Centre for Philosophy, Justice and Health (University College London), McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics (University of Texas Medical School), and the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society (Vanderbilt University).

When several CHCI members gathered in a breakout group at the 2011 CHCI Annual Meeting to discuss the realm of possibilities for the humanities in the field of global public health, they discovered that several organizations were already working on initiatives in this area, and that many of these models could benefit from communication with others pursuing similar work. With these trends in mind, the group will undertake planning for a program that will leverage the CHCI network in the development of models for collaborative research between humanities, social sciences, and medical school faculties, along with professionals outside the academic arena. Some questions to be addressed by the group in their planning work will include: how can our research inform curriculum, and vice versa?; what are the models for collaboration between humanities departments and medical centers?; how can the CHCI membership work together to increase the international scope of our individual medical humanities initiatives?; and how can humanities research work most beneficially with governmental and corporate medical institutions?

Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging
Co-convened by Leerom Medovoi (Portland Center for Public Humanities, Portland State University), Rosi Braidotti (Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University), Raef Zreik (Minerva Center for the Humanities, Tel Aviv University), Liu Xiogan (Research Centre for Chinese Philosophy and Culture, Chinese University of Hong Kong).

This distinctly international – hailing from four world regions – and strongly interdisciplinary group will seek to jointly explore the shifting relationships between religion, secularism, and political belonging in a global context. Starting with topical vehicles such as the civilizational clashes in the post-9/11 United States, Islam in the European Union, and the place of Confucianism and Buddhism in the wake of Chinese economic expansion, the group will seek to gather CHCI member for discussions of five key topics: immigration; fundamentalism; secularism; religious language in politics; and gender and sexuality. Through modeling mechanisms for scholarly exchange and dissemination, local/global events, and digitally mediated dialogues, the group will build the basis for a multi-faceted, scale-able digital platform for research on issues in secularism, religion, and politics.

Established in 2007, centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that benefits the digital humanities and allied fields in general, and has special resources in the domain of cyberinfrastructure to offer humanities centers in particular. This initiative recognizes a strong connection that follows from CHCI’s commitment to innovative research and from centerNet’s linkage of new technologies with work in the humanities. Under the terms of the agreement, the two organizations that represent interdisciplinary humanities centers and digital humanities centers will partner to explore matters of mutual interest, including:

Digital Disciplines: how digital practices might or might not become disciplinary in themselves and/or reshape humanities disciplines.

Digital Publics: how digital scholarship engages groups of scholars within universities and colleges, between universities and colleges, and with publics beyond academia.

Questions about Digital Disciplines that will guide our initiative include:

What is the idea of the digital? What is the utility of the notion of “digital humanities”?

What is the relation between digital practices and disciplinary expertise?

How should digital practices be incorporated into the disciplinary structures of the 21st-century university?

To what extent should digital techniques and methods be granted autonomous disciplinary status in the coming university?

To what extent should we think of their impact as distributed in existing (or emergent) disciplines, i.e., disciplines otherwise constituted.

Alternatively, how are digital practices affecting research practices in the humanities and the arts? How are “traditional” disciplines and fields challenged to renew themselves?

How are newer disciplines and fields shaped and enabled? How have the relations between disciplines been transformed?

In relation to Digital Publics, there is a second set of questions:

How can digital technologies facilitate a broader engagement with a wide range of publics?

What are the implications for universities and colleges of the “democratization of knowledge” presented by the new digital media?

How do new-media artistic practices as well as new work in the humanities deploying digital technologies affect the question of what counts as knowledge and what counts as public?

And finally, the largest question: what sort of humanities will be accessible to the next generation?

The two affiliated organizations will pursue these questions with a five-year plan to support a number ofactivities:

Organizing shared events at our respective conferences

Developing proposals to funding agencies to support research and initiatives across centers from both organizations

Developing opportunities for joint inquiry into questions across the humanities, arts, and digital Technologies

Engaging discussions about how structures of the academy and disciplines are adapting appropriately to digital culture and technologies

Developing training in digital practice across centers as a way to build capacity.

The affiliation of CHCI and centerNet was developed at a series of three meetings sponsored by the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) in 2008-9. The SCI provides opportunities for leaders in scholarly disciplines, academic libraries, advanced technologies, and higher education administration to study, develop, and implement creative and innovative strategies to advance scholarly communication in the context of the ongoing digital revolution. Generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SCI events are hosted annually by the University of Virginia Library.

Our website, email address, and phone numbers remain the same. Our new mailing address is:

Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes
John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
Smith Warehouse, Bay 5
114 S. Buchanan Blvd., Box 90403
Durham, NC 27708

The new address will be included in future membership renewal letters.

If you ever find yourself on the Duke campus, the National Humanities Center, or at one of the several universities or colleges in the Research Triangle, we encourage you to pay us a visit!

Click here for complete program guidelines.

Dear Colleagues,

At the 2008 CHCI annual meeting in St. Louis, many of you expressed interest in forming a group dedicated to an exploration of humanities and the environment. One key promise of that group is about to be be realized with the development of a new website and blog for the CHCI Humanities for the Environment Initiative. This project, which we will launch later this summer, will allow us to share information about the projects and programs we are doing at individual centers and will create a greater online presence for and increased awareness of the humanities in relationship to the environment, climate change, and issues of sustainability.

We hope that you, as our charter members and other interested CHCI organizations, will collaborate with us to make this a compelling and content-rich website. By providing specific information for us, you can help us do so. Please answer the following questions as soon as you are able, with responses to chci.environment@gmail.com.

1. In what ways does your organization’s program address the broadly-defined themes of the environment, sustainability, climate change, and related issues?

Your answer (1-2 paragraphs) will be posted on the Member Profiles section of the Humanities for the Environment website. If your interest is a general one, a mission statement could suffice. If it is specific, please be more specific. An example of a somewhat specific statement of program commitment can be found on one of our members’ sites, at http://ihr.asu.edu

2. What environment-related projects or programs are you currently involved in, if any?

You should include in your response website addresses or other references, such as links to podcasts or videos, that can provide more information about your projects. One of the key purposes of our website is to publicize the environment-related activities of our members, and to provide resources, including video resources, for member centers to use in their own programming. We hope to do this by working with our members to re-post media material already on the web and to help members edit lengthy video materials to a more useful 15-20 minute format (please let us know if you would like this assistance). An example of such material can be found on another of our members’ sites, at www.ias.umn.edu/Initiatives/MississippiFlooding2011.php

3. Finally, what suggestions do you have for material we ought to include on a site devoted to humanities and the environment?

Your answer might suggest new sections that would be useful for the site, or a project, article or web resource you believe would be of interest to our members and those browsing our website.

Going forward, we hope to continue collaborating with our members in order to create a compelling, dynamic and timely web presence that will raise awareness of what we are doing, both collectively and individually. CHCI has generously provided our group with the resources to create this presence, including a student employee at Arizona State University, Michael Springer, who will be gathering and posting information, working with CHCI Program Manager Grant Samuelsen.

We look forward to learning more about your current work and future plans, and thank you for your involvement in CHCI. We will be in touch soon with more information as the launch for our web project draws closer.

Sincerely,

The Humanities for the Environment Team

Sarah Buie
Director, Higgins School of the Humanities
Clark University

Sally Kitch
Director, Institute for Humanities Research
Arizona State University

David Phillips
Faculty Executive Committee Member
Wake Forest University Humanities Institute

Founded at CHCI’s 2008 Annual Meeting, the CHCI Initiative Humanities for the Environment was our first member-driven group. H4E serves as a network and resource for centers to develop (or extend) programming, research and dialogue related to contemporary environmental challenges. Many of our CHCI centers have done substantial work in these and related areas already; humanists and artists have long engaged issues related to sustainability, climate change, and the human/environment relationship as a whole.

The webpage brings together the more than seventy CHCI centers which have expressed an interest in a collective effort in this area. You may explore relevant programming and websites of member centers through the links here. We hope this affinity group will also serve as an opportunity for further exploration of the role the humanities can and should play in these crucial areas of human concern.

The group welcomes engagement in a dialogue about the contributions that the Humanities can make to furthering our understanding of our relationship to the environment as we explore ideas and creative solutions to the environmental challenges our world currently faces. Research at the intersection of the humanities and environmental studies is proving particularly fruitful in investigating the paradigms that dictate our interaction with the environment. Our investigations aim to explore the following areas

View the new project here, and be in touch with our webmaster if you have any thoughts on content or if you would like to make any suggestions for projects to cover.

The Humanities for the Environment team will be updating the site regularly with new resources and news, and we hope to use the site to maintain an ever more useful basis for dialogue. As you will see, the site includes space for streaming video projects from our members, and among the significant uses of the site will be to disseminate information on CHCI member programs.

The site is also designed to be a forum for linking all of us to broader currents and news in the humanities and beyond. The group would love to hear from you whenever you come across a relevant topic, event, or article, or if your organization is working on projects in the broadly defined thematic area of the environment. The website provides an easy way to submit information to our webmaster, and you may also subscribe to the site’s RSS feed to receive notifications of new posts.

You can access the already content-rich website here: http://initiatives.chcinetwork.org/environment/

Click here to browse all opportunities at CHCI member organizations. Using the links below, you can share this opportunity via Facebook, Twitter, email, and other social media, or subscribe to CHCI’s RSS feed to receive directly all CHCI announcements, news, and opportunities at member organizations.