Global Humanities Institutes Overview
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With the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CHCI launched, in 2017, the Global Humanities Institutes (GHIs), a program for a second generation of international collaboration. Since then, CHCI has funded eight different projects on a broad range of themes, involving 25 centers and more than 200 participants from all continents. Those Institutes, past and ongoing, are outlined below.
Design Justice AI
DESIGN JUSTICE AI will cross disciplinary divides and reach out to affected communities as we foster creative thinking, model new forms of research, and produce resources for scholars and the general public. As commercial technologies aim to simulate and mediate human expression and creativity at an unprecedented scale, our Global Humanities Institute will seek interdisciplinary standpoints and fertile alliances that produce knowledge “from below”: through creative collaborations between researchers, students, and community partners. Our goal is not only to “critique” these fast-developing technologies, but also to envision ML systems that work in the public interest: i.e., safe, accountable, and inclusive systems that are receptive to many voices.
Collaborating Institutions
The Center for Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria
The Humanities Research Centre at Australia National University
Institute
The pre-institute meeting is tentatively scheduled for July 7-11, 2023 in Canberra at the campus of Australia National University. The main institute meeting, DESIGN JUSTICE AI, will be held at the University of Pretoria, with anticipated dates of July 7-21, 2024 and will include collaborators from all four centers along with the scholars chosen through the application process. A post-meeting event will be scheduled for Fall 2024 and will likely take the form of a hybrid event on the Rutgers campus.
More information can be found on this GHI's CHCI website.
Global Racisms, Cold War Humanism, and the Imagination of Just Futures
The overarching goal of this Global Humanities Institute is to draw on the strong transnational resonance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the compelling responses of global communities across distinct demographics and colonial histories to reflect more broadly on the global reach and relevance of humanistic scholarship on the study of subaltern pasts. We draw on the current conjuncture to develop critical studies of race and racism that extend beyond the historical experience of the North Atlantic, and North America in particular. Our focus on philosophies of difference would link scholarship that tends to privilege the racial politics of post-emancipation societies of the New World, on the one hand, with concerns with postcolonial sovereignty and the politics of culture in the aftermath of European imperialism across “Asia” and “Africa” on the other. To do so, we adopt Cold War humanism as a mode of historicization alert to the constitutive contradiction between race/racism and ideas of “the human” as the organizing rubric of modern global thought and imperial governance. Our inquiry will be organized according to three strands: Thought Worlds, with a focus on the relationship between worldmaking and concept-formation; Redress and Reparations, which asks how states and communities have approached the problem of righting (historic) wrongs; and attention to questions of Aesthetics and Politics as these enable projects of public activism and engagement by focusing on the poetic, the experimental, and the fragmentary as generative sites of insurgent thought essential to remaking everyday life. Early career scholars whose research fit into one or more of the themes are invited to submit an application.
Collaborating Institutions
- Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in the City of New York (USA)
- The Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape (South Africa)
- Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi)
- Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Study, Tsinghua University (Beijing)
Institute
The main institute meeting will be from December 10-22, 2023 at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India with limited option for Hyflex.
More information can be found on this GHI's CHCI website.
Post-Extractivist Legacies and Landscapes: Humanities, Artistic and Activist Responses
“Post-extractivist legacies and landscapes: Humanities, artistic and activist responses,” takes a humanities-centred, transdisciplinary, and transregional approach to analysing the complex legacies and entanglements arising from mining as an extractivist process with massive environmental and socio-political impacts. The longevity and adaptability of historical extractivist and colonialist logics underpin neo-extractivist development in all corners of the world and require, therefore, the kind of transdisciplinary critical response that our project forges. Drawing on methodological frameworks from anthropology, history, literary studies, environmental studies, bio-archaeology and activist art practice to investigate significant sites of extractivism in Ireland, Germany, Estonia, South Africa, Oceania and the Gulf Coast of the United States, the focus of our project is the comparative exploration of creative arts practices and local activism in the transition from mining to post-mining and in the mobilisation of opposition to new practices of extractivism.
Collaborating Institutions
- UCD Humanities Institute (University College Dublin, Ireland)
- The Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies (Tallinn University, Estonia)
- The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa)
- The School of Culture, History and Language (Australian National University)
- The Humanities Research Center at Rice University (U.S.A.)
Institute
The pre-Institute meeting will be hosted by the Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies at
Tallinn University (Estonia) in May-August 2022. The main Institute meeting will be hosted by the University College Dublin Humanities Institute in May-August 2023. The post-Institute meeting will be hosted by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of Witwatersrand.
Climate Justice and Problems of Scale
The Global Humanities Institute on “Climate Justice and Problems of Scale” will explore climate change as a social, historical, and cultural force that transforms all lives but does so in an uneven and often unequal fashion. Underpinning the Institute is the premise that problems of scale make it difficult to understand the differing ways in which climate change affects individual lives, specific communities, and the earth. Participants in this Institute will address a number of key questions: How do matters of scale fundamentally shape understandings of climate change and its effects at specific times and places? How can we build scale literacy to identify the sources and attributes of climate injustice? What new narratives, activist frameworks, and planning strategies might promote collective action to mitigate climate change, uproot the sociocultural sources of climate injustice, more evenly distribute the impacts of climate disruption, and work towards climate justice?
Collaborating Institutions
- Humanities Institute (University of Texas at Austin, U.S.A.)
- Center for American Studies and Research, (American University of Beirut, Lebanon)
- Institute for Humanities Research (Arizona State University, U.S.A.)
- Humanities Center (Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A.)
- Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (University of Pretoria, South Africa)
- Sydney Environmental Institute (University of Sydney, Australia)
Institute
Following an online pre-meeting in June 2020, the institute was held from July 29 to August 7, 2022, with a core, in-person workshop in Pretoria, South Africa. More information is found on the GHI website.
Chronic Conditions: Childhood and Social Suffering in Global Africa
Through a focus on communities that share African roots, Institute members will trace how legacies of slavery and colonialism render young black bodies particularly vulnerable to oppression and exploitation in health and development initiatives. Participants will address the ways in which anti-black racism and symbolic violence combine with structural inequalities to predispose children and youth to embodied experiences of trauma, addiction, and other chronic afflictions. The enduring effects of these social forces and shared histories are seen in epidemiological data; however, the GHI humanistic approach will detail the relations of power, systems of meanings, and specific narratives that create and reproduce them.
Collaborating Institutions
- The Hall Center for the Humanities, (University of Kansas)
- Instituteo de Humanidades, Artes e Ciências (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil)
- College of Humanities (University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania)
- Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (Université Cheikh Anta Diop De Dakar, Senegal)
Institute
The Instituteo de Humanidades, Artes e Ciências hosted an online pre-meeting between August 26 and 29, 2020. Participants discussed the research overlaps of the groups and commenced a dialogue on theoretical, technical and operational issues to launch a joint Global Humanities Institute. The Institute took place from August 1 to 6, 2022, on the campus of the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The organizers have also established a few key planned outcomes: a continuation of the institutional collaboration via an alternative sponsorship post-GHI, the publication of papers in edited volumes and special journal issues in multiple languages, and the construction of an open archive disseminating videos, podcasts, and other multi-sensorial representations of the GHI’s work. More information on this GHI can be found on its website.
Migrant Workers, Global Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context
The Global Humanities Institute on “Migration, Logistics and Unequal Citizens in Contemporary Global Context” aims to offer an interdisciplinary and participative approach to understanding and addressing contemporary migration, logistics, and unequal citizens in the global context.
Participants have conducted various forms of innovative knowledge production to explore the issues through academic papers, artistic works, and digital approaches. Activities in the institute include lectures, workshops, fieldwork, group discussions, exercises, and site-specific productions, including occasions for sharing knowledge and experiences among migrants, activists, NGOs, and other stakeholders.
Collaborating Institutions
- The International Center for Cultural Studies (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)
- The Institute for Culture and Society (Western Sydney University, Australia)
- The Institute for Population and Social Research & Mahidol Migration Center (Mahidol University, Thailand)
- The Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences (University of Malaya, Malaysia)
- Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (Polish Academia of Sciences, Poland)
- The Group for Inquiries and Social Theory (Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam) In addition to the six core partners above, seven affiliate organizations have collaborated in the project: VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Department of Sociology at Vietnam National University, the Global China Social Research Hub (Hong Kong University, China), the Center for Cultural Studies (Chinese University of Hong Kong, China), the Department of Sociology at Chung-Ang University (CAU, Seoul, Korea), the Law School at Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea) and the School of Education in Applied Art Education at Hanyang University (Seoul, Korea).
Institute Highlights
Institute
The organizers held two pre-meetings in 2019, first in April, in Hanoi, Vietnam, where the group established lines of research and topics and then in Kuala Lumpur in December where the organizers produced a list of courses and thematic clusters and selected participants. The COVID-19 outbreak forced the organizers to turn the in-person institute originally planned for June 2020, into a series of online forums and webinars, a number of which addressed the impact of the pandemic on topics central to the GHI (for instance, “Pandemic, Border Politics, Xenophobia, and Auto-immunity Mechanism,” “New Migrant Worker Precarity under COVID-19, Repatriation,” “NGOs Forum on Global Pandemic and Migrant Rights”). Online collaboration also happened via an active Facebook group.
Activities are ongoing and aim to generate a number of outcomes: an online open syllabus of the Institute, an online database of links of NGOs, activist groups, multiple forms of knowledge production to address related problems in different countries, knowledge and skills transfer in an interdisciplinary and multi-media environment, audio-visual materials edited from the planning meetings and GHI working sessions, the publication of edited volume(s) and journal issues, and the establishment a long-term consortium for the transnational joint research center for “Migration, Logistics, and Cultural Intervention.”
Translation’s Theoretical Issues, Practical Densities: Violence, Memory, and the Untranslatable
Collaborating Institutions
- Center of Studies on Philosophy, Humanities, and the Arts (CEFHA, University of Chile)
- Humanities Commons (UC Irvine)
- Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT-TORCH, Oxford University)
- Centre for Humanities Research (University of the Western Cape)
Institute Highlights
Institute
Faculty members and early-career scholars convened in Santiago, Chile, from July 15 to 26, 2019. This core group was joined by special guests including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Beatriz Sarlo, Jacques Lezra, and Yala Kisukidi. The program was structured around thematically organized “work sessions” in which groups of participants presented aspects of their scholarship for open discussion. These work sessions were punctuated on alternate days by recitals of poetry in translation and the keynote addresses. Work sessions, recitals, and keynotes were themselves organized over the course of the two weeks by four consecutively posed lines of research referred to as “moments.”
The organizers are now focused on a publication, in print and online, with a planned release by the end of 2021.
Crises of Democracy through the Prism of Cultural Trauma
This Global Humanities Institutes built upon a previous collaboration among the organizers, which was supported by a European-Union-funded Marie Curie program, and brought together a consortium of 40 faculty and early career researchers travelling from 5 continents and representing over 30 disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Using past events, experiences, responses and influences—contributing factors in the contemporary crises of democracy—alongside case studies of positive forms of resistance, this group of researchers developed a collaborative and interdisciplinary research framework to understand and respond to the challenges we face today.
Collaborating Institutions
- Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
- Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Citizenship and Migration (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
- Institute of Advanced Study (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
- The Society and Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, (Columbia University, U.S.A.)
- Jawaharlal Nehru University (India)
Institute Highlights
Institute
The Institute took place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from July 15 to 24, 2019. The program consisted of lectures, panels, practical skills workshops, film screenings, and early-career researcher presentations. Participants were also taken on a 2-day field trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, the group visited relevant sites of cultural trauma including Mostar, Sarajevo, and Srebrenica.
The final phase of the GHI reconvened the representatives from the partner institutions at the Columbia Global Center in Rio de Janeiro in December 2019, to explore how the knowledge and skills developed over the course of the GHI can be embedded in their institutions and disseminated in wider society.
In addition to creating an intellectual community of early-career scholars, which is now active independently of the GHI and its organizers, key outcomes of the Institute include a documentary using footage and interviews filmed in Dubrovnik and
an open syllabus on the crises of democracy.
Post-institute, organizers worked to expand the scope of the project and the research networks. This includes a 'Rethinking Democracy in an Age of Pandemic' webinar series (April-May 2020) and three 'Rethinking Democracy' episodes (December 2020) organized by the Trinity Long Room Hub and the SOF/Heyman in response to Covid-19. Building on the success of the GHI, a 'Rethinking Democracy' curriculum was launched in December 2020. Although the consortium's application to the European Union's Research and Innovation program Horizon 2020 was unsuccessful, there are now plans for an application under the Horizon Europe scheme. Led by the University of São Paulo, an essay collection compiling the wide range of discussions mobilized during the GHI is forthcoming.
The Trinity Long Room Hub is now embarking on a new initiative, the Schuler Forum for Democracy. This three-year programme will embed an Arts and Humanities approach to the crisis of democracy at its core. It draws upon the institute's ongoing commitment to improving collaboration between the Arts and Humanities and civil society organizations on democracy initiatives, most recently through the Irish Research Council-funded project 'CEPRAH'. The Hub will continue to collaborate with its GHI partners on the Forum.