Introducing the 2020-21 DHI HumArts and Transcollege Research Clusters

From care webs using the postal system, to an undergraduate course on the role of fermentation practices in Native food sovereignty, to virtual symposia and physically distanced performances, each of the innovative activities planned by this year’s DHI-sponsored research clusters is a reminder of the resilience of humanities scholarship and its importance during difficult times. 

Since 1997, HumArts Clusters have served as a platform for research and collaboration not easily accomplished in a single department or program. In 2018 the DHI introduced new funding for Transcollege Clusters, which are designed to build collaborations between the humanities and arts and other colleges and professional schools at UC Davis. 

Scholars involved in the ten 2020-2021 HumArts and Transcollege Clusters represent a wide range of disciplines and fields, including anthropology, classics, earth and planetary science, English, ethnic studies, food science and technology, German, history, law, medicine, music, Native American studies, theatre and dance, and more.

Seven of the ten HumArts and Transcollege Clusters awarded funding this year are new for 2020-2021. They are: 

New Transcollege Clusters:

• DNA, Race, and Reproduction. Faculty coordinators: Emily Merchant (Assistant Professor, Science and Technology Studies) and Meaghan O’Keefe (Associate Professor, Religious Studies).
• Free People of Color: Law, History, and Race in the Shaping of Freedom in the United States. Faculty coordinator: Gregory Downs (Professor, History).
• GeoArchaelogy Working Group. Faculty coordinators: Teresa Steele (Professor, Anthropology), Ken Verosub (Distinguished Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences), Isabel Montañez (Distinguished Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences), and Nicolas Zwyns (Associate Professor, Anthropology).
• Radical and Relational Approaches to Food Fermentation and Food Sovereignty. Faculty coordinators: Jessica Bissett Perea (Assistant Professor, Native American Studies) and Maria Marco (Professor, Food Science and Technology).

New HumArts Clusters:

• Disability and Social Injustice. Faculty coordinator: Ryan Lee Cartwright (Assistant Professor, American Studies).
• Migration and Aesthetics. Faculty coordinators: Chunjie Zhang (Associate Professor, German) and Linn Normand (Program Director, Global Migration Center).
• Racial Justice Policy Cluster. Faculty coordinator: Robyn Rodriguez (Professor, Asian American Studies).

Three of this year’s HumArts clusters will carry over their activities from previous years. Those clusters are:

• Critical Militarization, Policing, and Security Studies (CRTMIL). Faculty coordinators: Anjali Nath (Assistant Professor, American Studies) and Javier Arbona (Assistant Professor, Design and American Studies).
• Early Science Workshop. Faculty coordinators: Colin Webster (Assistant Professor, Classics) and Daniel Stolzenberg (Associate Professor, History).
• See/Hear/Say: New Work with Voice, Bodies, Sound & Word. Faculty coordinators: Kurt Rohde (Professor, Music), Margaret Kemp (Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance), and Lucy Corin (Professor, English).

Collaborative Research In A Pandemic

In response to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scholars leading this year’s clusters pivoted by developing engaging and sometimes surprising ways to collaborate and share research remotely. 

The Disability and Social Injustice cluster is particularly well-suited to the challenge of remote collaboration, according to Cartwright. “Disabled communities and disability studies scholars have a special advantage during this pandemic: we’ve long accepted the unruliness and uncertainty of human bodies and the consequent necessity of approaching event organizing with flexibility and creativity,” Cartwright explained. The cluster will both advance research on disability studies and “serve as an experiment for new forms of ‘physically distant’ collaboration” based on “care webs” and other practices begun by disability justice collectives. Such experiments, Cartwright writes, “will have a material basis: that is, they will involve physically creating and mailing materials to one another to create a tangible connection between cluster members, many of whom have never met.”

The digital project proposed by the Migration and Aesthetics cluster, a collaboration with the Global Migration Center, also answers a need for remote accessibility. The cluster “aims to establish a digital archive of global migration in its literary, cinematic, theatrical, and artistic representations” to be used for research, teaching, and community outreach. According to Zhang, “Graduate student and faculty participants [will] introduce works from seven languages and present them in English to make connections between cultures, languages, and communities.”

See/Hear/Say, a collaboration now in its third year between faculty and graduate students in the departments of Music, Theater and Dance, and Creative Writing, will explore the possibilities of physically distanced performing arts. Rohde writes that this year the cluster will focus on virtual and physically distanced in-person collaborations to create “original music, sound, text, dramaturgy and staging, all with the goal of unveiling the deep historic inequality and injustice in current culture.”

Clusters Promote Collaboration Between the Sciences and the Humanities and Arts

Research clusters make possible critical conversations between science and the humanities that might otherwise lack institutional support.

Early Science Workshop approaches scientific knowledge from the perspective of the humanities, foregrounding work that “helpfully moves us past rigid, Enlightenment notions of fixed gender identity and defined racial attributes” through a focus on “the flexible systems of categorization and idiosyncratic taxonomies of early science,” write faculty coordinators Webster and Stolzenberg. Scholars of pre-1800 science, medicine, and technology have collaborated as the Early Science Workshop since 2017.

The Geoarchaeology Working Group makes possible collaborations between anthropologists and geologists that can advance archeological research. According to the group’s faculty coordinators, several pilot research projects, including work with ostrich eggshells and work at an archaeological site in South Africa, will allow the cluster “to explore the application of new geologic methods to previously unanswerable questions about human behavior during the Middle Stone Age of Southern Africa.”

Radical and Relational Approaches to Food Fermentation and Food Sovereignty “brings together food scientists, Indigenous scholars, cultural studies scholars, and fermentation practitioners (and people who are all four) who have a shared commitment to Native food sovereignty and a shared fascination with the material and metaphorical power of fermentation,” writes Stephanie Maroney, who is a core cluster member, feminist food studies scholar, and the DHI Mellon Public Scholars Program Manager. Maroney adds, “We are reading scientific papers, theoretical articles in the humanities, and Indigenous food guides; watching films on Inuit food culture, performances, and microbial visual art projects; and creating an expansive keywords project that will develop the concepts we want to think more deeply with across multiple disciplines and methods. Our collective work this year will inform a Fall 2021 undergraduate course that is part of the Mellon-funded SHAPE program.”

Hubs for Interdisciplinary Research on Race and Power

Several of this year’s clusters have a primary focus on race and the formation of racialized subjects. 

The ultimate goal of the DNA, Race, and Reproduction cluster, which brings together researchers from the College of Letters & Sciences with those from the College of Biological Sciences, Law, Medicine, and Nursing, is “to publish an edited volume that brings our various perspectives to bear on the role of DNA in reproduction, in race formation, and particularly in the reproduction of racialized bodies.” As faculty co-coordinator Merchant described it, “The volume is divided up into three sections of 2-3 chapters each, with the conceit being that each section is a bit like a conversation among colleagues from different parts of the same university, using different research methods to explore similar concepts.”

The Racial Justice Policy Cluster seeks to use UC Davis’s unique positioning—as a neighbor to the California State Capitol and home of some of the oldest ethnic studies programs in the nation—to “monitor policy initiatives to examine the ways in which policies advance, bolster, and/or indirectly facilitate racism in global societies.” The cluster plans to mobilize research and expertise to “provide tangible advice and data for policymakers and the communities they serve,” writes faculty coordinator Rodriguez. Ultimately, Rodriguez and cluster participants from colleges and professional schools across the university hope to use the DHI cluster grant as seed funding to create a Racial Justice Policy Center at UC Davis.

Free People of Color brings together scholars from Law and History to “investigate the relationship between law, race, power, and status in the post-Civil War United States.” Faculty coordinator Downs, along with Gabriel Chin (Edward L. Barrett Jr. Chair of Law, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of Clinical Legal Education) and Mary Louise Frampton (Professor of Social Justice Practice and Director, Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies) plan to devote part of this cluster’s workshop and speaker series to “exploring the legal history of race-making on Davis’ campus and environs.”

CRTMIL, this year’s longest-running research cluster, also foregrounds the role of state power in subject formation, specifically “the production of subjects under practices of militarization, the technologies that facilitate surveillance and state power, and the contestations to such forms of violence.” Founded in 2008 by former longtime faculty coordinator Caren Kaplan (Professor, American Studies), CRTMIL remains a vital space for considering “both military interventions and the securitization of everyday life,” particularly within the context of the current uprising against militarized police violence, write new faculty coordinators Nath and Arbona.

All of this year's clusters are planning upcoming events and activities; watch for more information on the DHI's website and events calendar.