Campus Reverberations of University-Community Collaborations: Student Internships, University Processes, and Anti-racist and Decolonial Possibilities
537 Heller Hall
Abstract: Minnesota Transform is a Mellon-funded Just Futures initiative, designed to mobilize humanistic public engagement to increase universities’ capacities for racial and decolonial justice. Our approach involves co-producing new knowledge and supporting initiatives of our partners, both on and off campus. Over three years, we funded hundreds of student internships, oversaw thousands of transactions designed to transfer funds to community projects, increased access to university spaces and archival resources, and worked to make the university more porous to the communities in which it resides.
As we near the end of our grant cycle, we are working to document what we’ve learned. One of the most important things is that many people on this campus are supportive of, engaged in, and interested in this work. But we also learned other, more surprising, things. We will use this opportunity to workshop two “zines” we are developing, one on student internships and another on navigating “administrative injustice” in university bureaucracies and processes, designed to share our outcomes and to help future projects. There’s no advance reading but we are grateful for your suggestions on Friday.
Downloadable poster:
About the Speaker
Tracey Deutsch is Associate Professor of History, affiliated with the Departments of American Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. She researches and writes on food and the politics of food access.She has also led numerous publicly engaged and interdisciplinary initiatives, most recently as Faculty Coordinator and PI of Minnesota Transform.
Denise Pike is MN Transform’s Managing Director. Denise is a public historian with extensive experience in community engagement in antiracist historical work. She regularly collaborates with community groups and offers professional education on housing, discrimination and racial inequities. She is dedicated to linking inequalities in our present day with evidence of historical injustice. Her research interests and past work include the intersection of data, mapping, race, power, and urban history to address today’s disparities.