Working Groups

The Innovation Farm-funded project will expand “workshops, classes, and hands-on experiences focused on addressing the root causes of health inequalities through the revitalization of food and herbal-based treatments, health maintenance, and spiritual rituals.” This project builds on an ongoing collaboration between Dunbar Coalition, Inc., El Rio Health Centers, the Coalition for African American Health and Wellbeing, and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies. Bringing together Jerome Dotson of the Africana Studies Program and Megan Carney of Anthropology, along with several community initiatives, Towards a Vision of Community Wellness will involve community education about gardening, herb identification and usage, and cooking. Innovation Farm support will go towards student staffing of the programming, invited speakers, and domestic travel in order to share local findings more broadly.

The project fosters scholarly exchange between researchers at the University of Arizona and at the University of Queensland, Australia, along with Indigenous community partners and applied practitioners from both countries. According to the proposal, “This research collaboration will explore a central question: how are intellectual and legal institutional frameworks for recognizing and protecting Indigenous land, knowledge, and property rights implicated in solutions to Indigenous inequality?” The project will facilitate two different workshops, one in Tucson and the other in Brisbane, Australia, along with webinars and a project wiki. The Innovation Farm award will facilitate student workers, honoraria, and web design and web conferencing for this ongoing project.

This project asks the question: “Why were certain conceptualizations of sex/gender championed over others?” The proposal outlines the challenges for “trans people and scholars of Trans Studies (to) rarely have collective spaces to reflect upon the nuances of trans subjectivity,” and therefore “proposes the development of a two-and-a-half-day symposium titled Trans ± Sex: Rethinking Sex/Gender in Trans Studies.” The symposium will take place in September 2019, with Innovation Farm funding to support invited speaker honoraria, logistics, graduate assistant staffing, and videography and archival work to ensure the symposium can inform ongoing conversations. A roundtable discussion with local organizations following the symposium will continue the conversation in non-academic spaces.

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How do borders – of any kind at any time – create tensions that reflect cultural, ideological, linguistic and artistic expressions of division or cooperation among human beings? This project will create an ongoing, interdisciplinary faculty seminar to explore new approaches on colliding and reformulating cultural heritages, looking to respond how, over time, a mosaic of boundaries is imagined, created, enforced, or dissolved through history, geography, law, art, music, cinema, and language. By exploring diverse expressions of shared heritages through the lens of different boundaries – either political, legal, social, cultural, linguistic or economic – this project seeks to foster discussion and analysis on the complexity of change through forces and tensions, reflected in the transformations of people, spaces and identities.

This project seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholars whose work critically examines the material and symbolic manifestations of borders. By centering the concept of borderlands, Transfrontera is making an intentional appeal to scholarship that attends to the violence and inequality that borders perpetuate, or what Gloria Anzaldúa called “una herida abierta” (an open wound), as well as the creativity, solidarities, and utopias that are possible when communities come together in the third space that emerges between worlds. Transfrontera invites scholars to engage the multiplicity of meanings found in the idea of borderlands movements, community, and identity in the Américas. By hosting networking events and works in progress and speaker series, Transfrontera will create a space within the institution for intellectual exchange around these themes, an initiative that will include scholars inside and outside of the University of Arizona.
 

•  Anita Huizar-Hernández; Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, College of Humanities

• Lillian Gorman; Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, College of Humanities

• Maurice Magaña; Assistant Professor, Mexican American Studies, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences

• Michelle Téllez; Assistant Professor, Mexican American Studies, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences​