Current Working Groups

Leaders: Sarah Jewett (Undergraduate Academic Affairs), Charlotte Keniston (The Shriver Center), and Tania Lizarazo (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication and Global Studies) 

The Digital Storytelling and Civic Agency in Higher Education Faculty Working Group explores the research focus of digital storytelling including discussions of digital literacies and competencies in the humanities and social sciences, narrative and storytelling research, and classroom work across disciplines. They serve as a steering body for ongoing digital storytelling activities and connect with other campus work that involves storytelling for civic agency and engagement. The group promotes opportunities for faculty involved in digital storytelling research to share their experiences through presentations, workshops, round tables and a one-day conference.

Leaders: Emily Yoon (English), Mika Thornburg (Asian Studies), Tamara Bhalla (American Studies)

This faculty working group is an effort to build a critical ethnic studies dialogue across various departments, disciplines, and geographic research sites on the UMBC campus and beyond. For this first year, we conceive the group to be a space for faculty, staff, and graduate students interested in the study of race, ethnicity, culture, etc. through a critical investigation of its production through local, regional, and global power structures. We also imagine this to be a welcoming space for those who are interested in, but not trained in/see themselves as doing ethnic studies. The field of ethnic studies is frequently viewed as an American-centered space due to its historical formation and its indebtedness to the American civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, much of the ethnic studies have deeply engaged transnational studies, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives since the 1990s, allowing for deep critique of the nation-state framework. We hope to destabilize the siloing of academic thought that is advanced by the clustering of knowledge around regional and national assemblages (e.g., US or Asia). This space is open to all geographic contexts. We hope to decenter America, but not omit the US context from discussion as it serves as a key site in the production of ethnic studies theory and discourse as well as a key player in transnational and geopolitical power, particularly since the end of World War II. We also hope that the conversations in this group generate ideas for possible future projects, including public-facing/public humanities projects and broader applications of ethnic studies on campus and beyond, in such areas as student affairs and K-12 education (as several of our members are interested in embarking on such collaborative endeavors). Lastly, we see this working group as an opportunity to build community and solidarity, particularly in this historical moment, when the ethnic studies is under attack from our own federal government. Building alliances, networks of care, and joy is fundamental to our resistance to the attempt to silence and censor the academy.

Leader: Tim Phin (Ancient Studies)

Generative AI is transforming the landscape of higher education. There are ethical, pedagogical, and humanistic questions around this technology that will be best answered by the work of a combined group of humanists. This group will provide a place for humanists from many fields to come together to contend with the issues central to the Humanities and generative AI: particularly issues surrounding the purpose of this technology, the impact is has on human communities, and the future role of the university in navigating the concerns raised by generative AI. This group will be a place to advocate for the importance of the Humanities in any conversation at UMBC pertaining to AI. We recognize that human intelligence is necessary for us to evaluate the place of artificial intelligence in society.

Leaders: María Célleri (Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies), Tania Lizarazo (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications and Global Studies), Yolanda Valencia (Geography and Environmental Systems), and Thania Muñoz D. (Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication)

The Latin American Feminisms Working Group is an interdisciplinary multilingual research group that focuses on feminist and decolonial Latin American and Caribbean scholarship from a hemispheric perspective. Attentive to the inequitable politics of translation between South America and North America, the group centers scholarship from and for Latin America and the Caribbean. In particular, it considers the formation of Latin American and Caribbean feminisms from a decolonial and intersectional framework that honors the work of Indigenous, Black, and Brown women. They bring together faculty, graduate students, artists, and community members from the humanities and social sciences to engage in and debate issues around race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, mobility, feminism and decoloniality as these pertain to the Latin American and Caribbean hemisphere, which begins in the Southern Cone and extends to the Latinx/Chicanx diaspora. We read and discuss recent work around Latin American and Caribbean studies, invite scholars from Latin America to speak about their work, as well as collaborate to support our work and move our research projects forward.

Leaders: Lindsay DiCuirci (English); Lindsey Loeper (AOK Library Special Collections); and Craig Saper (Language, Literacy, and Culture)

This working group will bring together faculty and staff interested in library science, book history, printing and print cultures, book arts, archives, and preservation and access. The interdisciplinary working group will have several key functions and goals. First, the group will provide space to share research and works in progress. Second, the group will exchange pedagogical ideas and best practices, especially as it relates to collaborations between Special Collections and faculty. In this vein, the working group will conduct research together into other university programs that offer certificates or minors in print culture and archives in the hopes of developing a similar program at UMBC. Third, the group will develop ideas for other pedagogical and research innovations on campus such as the recently proposed Chesapeake Print House or other Humanities makerspaces related to printing and bookmaking. Community partnerships would fall into this category as the working group seeks to learn from and build relationships with presses, archives, libraries, book artists, and collectors in the region.

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Leaders: Trang Ta (Global Studies) and Karin Oen-Lee (Visuals Arts)

This groups aims to explore our entanglements with the material world in the aftermath of catastrophes, technological obsolescence, raging military conflict, economic precarity, and invisible destabilizing forces that have tangible and lingering effects. Phenomena such as the recent COVID pandemic, ongoing wars in the Middle East and Europe, erratic weather driven by climate change, the rise of extremist nationalist movements, and speculative financialization fueling gambling compel us to find new methods to perceive, recognize, and identify our relationships to “things” that “matter.” We will be drawing on a series of formative works to help us focus attention and awareness to physical, abstract, digital, ghostly, transient, and emergent matters such as infrastructure, data, algorithms, energy, space, pathogens, and even air to capture the multitude of agents that shape our collective existence.

Leaders: Beth Saunders (Library) and Sarah Sharp (Visual Arts)

“Has the pen or pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle?”

This question posed in Olive Schreiner’s 1926 novel Man to Man indicates an awareness of the ways needlework and textiles function as sites of meaning-making. Yet, it would be many decades before the significance of stitched texts and textiles earned critical scholarly attention. Writers such as Rozika Parker and Maureen Daly Goggin, and artists like Joyce J. Scott and Sheila Hicks explore the ways in which textiles document and trace complex relations among people, culture, gender, politics, communities and identities.

We are a group of writers and makers who wish to further our historical and creative research about textiles and their role in contemporary art and society. We invite our UMBC colleagues from any discipline to join us in a series of open discussions, research talks and events that explore textiles, their history, production, significance and creative use.