2014-15 Working Groups

The Creativity and Aging: Saving the Legacy Obermann Center Working Group is focused on developing a strong relationship between the University of Iowa and the Iowa City community interested in developing a mechanism to provide professional aging artists with direct, hands-on support and guidance to manage and preserve their life’s work. Through closely working with the National Center for Creative Aging in Washington, D.C., this project will serve as a model for faculty engagement, community outreach, service learning, and community interactive initiatives in Iowa City. The working group will develop a course and syllabi or identify already existing courses that the pilot for this project might be offered under until it is further determined what sustainable form this project might take at the University of Iowa. Our main objectives are to devise ways to:

·      Assist older artists through organizing and documenting their life’s work

·      Create experiential learning opportunities for students and older artists

·      Create a project that is inter-generational, interdisciplinary, and inter-professional

·      Foster collaborative learning within the UI and local community

·      Identify potential research opportunities that might be carried on parallel to the main project

If you would like to know more about this working group, please contact the director: Anita Jung, anita-jung@uiowa.edu

This working group creates a space for scholars to engage in a discussion about race and ethnicity as it intersects with gender, sexualities, ability, and class in national and transnational contexts. Our goal is to cultivate an alliance among scholars who yearn to engage in a conversation beyond a particular discipline and racial-ethnic group, and to think through points of continuity between historically marginalized groups. Focus areas for the group include contemporary social movements of Indigenous Nations Peoples and Latino/as, African and Asian diasporas, borderlands, cultural production in the US, Europe, Asia, Mexico, Africa, and Latin America, and whiteness studies.

If you would like to learn more about this working group, please contact Deborah Whaley, deborah-whaley@uiowa.edu.

Our focus is interrogating the relationship between the social and biological sciences, especially with respect to issues of genomics, sex, gender, race, and social inequalities. Our goals are to create a forum where scholars from a range of disciplines can exchange ideas and expertise and learn from each other. Ultimately we hope to develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the complex interactions between biological and social processes, how we study and educate others about these processes, and their relationship to human behavior and social inequality. The group currently consists of researchers and scholars from Anthropology, Biology, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, Nursing, Psychology, and Sociology.  

For more information about this Working Group contact Deirdre Egan, deirdre-egan@uiowa.edu.

A group of dedicated graduate students, a faculty advisor, and collaborators from the across the University of Iowa and the City of Iowa City are working to take the student-managed oral and digital history project—known as History Corps (HC) (http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/historycorps/)—to a publicly engaged intellectual and interpretative digital project. Established in 2011 as the “UI Humanities Story Corps” and based on the simple model of an oral history exhibit, HC has expanded its pedagogical and collaborative reach (university, local, and state entities) through more complex and collaborative undertakings. (See 2008 Flood photographic essay.) Acting as a project facilitator and content management site, HC works with faculty to incorporate public history assignments into existing courses using short-form “exhibit writing” and “photographic essay” as introductory pedagogical models to familiarize instructors with new teaching tools and graduate and undergraduate students to public history methods.

To learn more about this group contact jacki-rand@uiowa.edu

The last twenty years have seen an explosion in the conscious use of narrative in clinical settings. These critical discussions extend from the Narrative Medicine movement, to Narrative Therapy, to James Pennebaker’s work on writing and healing. Additionally, clinicians in medicine, nursing, psychology, speech pathology, counseling, social work, grief work and hospice care are exploring narrative as a way to break down barriers between patient and clinician, strengthen therapeutic alliances that promote patient autonomy and agency, and to enhance outcomes. Beyond the clinic, narrative approaches enrich clinical education, practitioner development and clinician self-care in the increasingly stressful environments of professional training and education.

This working group will consider putting together a proposal for an Obermann Humanities Symposium or Summer Seminar to explore the intersections between narrative and clinical practice more deeply. It will also consider pedagogical alliances to offer interdisciplinary instruction to undergraduate, graduate and professional students. Furhermore, the group will explore avenues for funding interdisciplinary scholarship through such agencies as the NIH. And finally, this working group will examine the possibilities at The University of Iowa for institutionalizing the study and teaching of narrative in healthcare, either within existing programs and departments, or through the creation of new institutions.

To learn more about this group contact director Pat Dolan, patrick-dolan@uiowa.edu.

Now in its third year, this working group will focus on reading about the existing research where the voices of community partners are at the center of publicly engaged scholarship. This working groups intends to co-author more collaborative pieces that bring in the voices of community partners, an aspect that is largely missing from the scholarly work on publicly engaged scholarship. 

As publicly engaged scholars, the members of this working group believe that at the center of engaged scholarship are campus-community partnerships reflecting careful partnerships and ethical principles of engagement. The group is aware that power, position, and resources may disrupt well-intended activities of public engagement. As such, the group remains sensitive to the power and position members occupy as representatives of the University. As researchers/scholars, the group's scholarship often focuses on those who are less powerful and represent groups who are different with regard to race/ethnicity, language, literacy, and class, and face dramatic health disparities and experience gaps in education. Creating sensitive campus-community partnerships require constant monitoring of ethics so that communities/local residents do not become laboratories for University research. Second, from an academic’s perspective, the members are mindful that engaged scholarship requires time and energy investments and still may not be valued in the Academy. Since Year 1, the group's discussions have focused on how members might move the Academy so that colleagues and administrators understand the value in publicly engaged efforts of teaching and scholarship. The group will continue discussions focused on creating and maintaining sensitive partnerships with community members while also exploring new visions of engaged scholarship in rural southeastern Iowa. Finally, this working group intends to continue to explore how members can mentor colleagues and graduate students interested in similar work.

To learn more about this group contact Carolyn Colvin, carolyn-colvin@uiowa.edu.