Between Fall 2019 and Summer 2021, we plan to think with scholars, artists, activists, and other engaged members of the Twin Cities community to address the ways that our intellectual and artistic creativity and political analyses can be combined to address the dynamics that give rise to xenophobic and Islamophobic violence.
Our collaboration will be a step towards: (a) deepening our understanding of violence against refugees, immigrants, and U.S. communities of color, and recognizing our own complicities and responsibilities in relation to it; and (b) helping to create just futures for those whose humanity is undermined by laws and sentiments that justify such violence.
By inviting a mix of activists, artists, and academics from the Twin Cities, we seek to build connections between immigrant communities, local organizations, and our student body and faculty in order to foster an inclusive environment that contributes to the culture of learning and engaged research at the University of Minnesota.
One of the questions that guides this collaborative research across sites of scholarship, activism, and art is whether Islamophobic violence is an isolated event that has emerged after September 11, 2001 in the “global north,” or whether Islamophobia as a part and parcel of colonialism, settler colonialism, and the rise of the security state in the global south and the global north alike.
Our research collaboration will grapple intersectionally with relationships between settler colonialism in the Americas, colonialism in South Asia, and settler colonialism and imperialism in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (Middle East). By connecting Islamophobia to these legacies, we hope to complicate the analyses that reduce islamophobia to an individual problem, fixable by ineffective hate crime laws and policies. Rather, we want to create a body of research and art that thinks about Islamophobia in critical relational terms and through highlighting the connections among seemingly disparate locations and times.
ITSRC works in close partnership with AGITATE! Unsettling Knowledges.
Past Events
- Deadly Iran Sanctions: Lessons Learned from Iraq and Palestine
- Abolitionist Feminism: From Trans Justice to Radical Mothering
- From Black Lives Matter in the U.S. to Palestine, Kashmir, Iran, and the Balkans: Protest Strategies
- Politically Engaged Art Amid Multiple Pandemics: Part 2
- SWANA and South Asian Artists Discuss Art Amid Multiple Pandemics
- Webinar Series: Anti-Black Racism in SWANA + Diaspora
- An Evening of Poetry Reading and Discussion on "Jadon Ki Zameen" (Land of the Roots) with Jacinta Kerketta, February 21
- An Afternoon of Poetry Reading and Discussion on Writing Childhoods with Jacinta Kerketta, February 20, 2020
- Panel Discussion on "Indian Colonialism: Gender, Nation, and Occupation in Kashmir" with Huma Dar and Mohamad Junaid, February 14, 2020
- Nathalie Handal: An Evening of Poetry. November 1, 2019
- “Why #standwithkashmir: A Co-learning Forum.” October 13, 2019.
- Meeting with scholars from the International University of Rabat, Morocco, Drs. Meriem El Haitami and Badr Guennoun to discuss collaboration. October 8, 2019.
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“History is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary,” Roundtable discussion with Curators Heba Y. Amin and Maymanah Farhat, Artists Athir Shayota and Fadlabi. September 13, 2019.
