Research Groups

• Algorithms, Simulations, Platforms

  • Evan Torner (German Studies)
  • Stephanie Sadre-Orafai (Anthropology)
  • Tony Liao (Communications)
  • Katherine Castiello Jones (Sociology)
  • James Lee (English)
  • Nancy Jennings (Communications)
  • Todd Herzog (German Studies)

  
  

  "Algorithms, Simulations, Platforms" (ASP) seeks to understand the media, infrastructure, culture, and emergent systems of our modern digital ecosystems, as well as non-digital appropriations and responses to those ecosystems, through the lens of humanities and social sciences. This approach is offered as a corrective to a dominant narrative that heedlessly champions "technology" without considering its due constituents and effects. By "algorithms," we mean the specific rules and computations used to sort and re-arrange data, from search functions to motioncapture to finance-predictive software. By "simulations," we mean the imitations of processes or systems, created via the combination of data, lived experience, and the interpretation thereof. By "platforms," we mean the combined hardware and software that constrain and afford certain forms of computation and user behavior. The proposed group draws on interdisciplinary fields such as critical algorithm studies, game studies, cultural studies, communication, and media studies to examine algorithms, simulations, and platforms as means of artistic, literary, and social expression. They both instigate -- and reflect upon -- the fraught societal dynamics of the 21st Century, and inhere within them centuries of capitalist and technological assumptions. The goal of the proposed group is an edited series of public media on these topics, much in the model of HASTAC or Culture Digitally, in the form of essays and podcasts published via the University of Cincinnati Press's Open Educational Resources.

• Transnational Cultural Studies

  Committee:

  • Sunnie Rucker-Chang, German Studies
  • Gergana Ivanova, German Studies
  • Ashley Currier, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

  
  

  This Research Group (RG) recognizes the roles of global capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, migration, and other movements in bringing cultures into contact with one another, often by force. Transnational Cultural Studies (TCS) builds on the insights of older fields, such as comparative literature and studies, and overlaps with new fields, such as comparative area studies. This RG emphasizes nimble, transnational comparisons over “global studies” perspectives that gloss over important distinctions between countries and world regions. TCS is poised to carry UC into twenty-first-century research excellence by overcoming disciplinary compartmentalization that keeps faculty and students from talking and learning across fields.
  
  This RG will highlight Taft member departments’ current strengths in international research and attract faculty from anthropology, area studies (African, Asian, European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern studies), gender and sexuality studies, history, language and literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. Topics of interest to TCS members include: language and identity studies; “text, representation, and context”; popular and visual culture; postcolonial, postsocialist, and postcommunist studies; comparative racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, and religious studies; intercultural communication; and transnational social movements.

• Health Humanities

  Committee:
  

  • Kate Sorrels (Chair; History)
  • Lora Arduser (English)
  • Danielle Bessett (Sociology)
  • Vanessa Carbonell (Philosophy)
  • Jeffrey Jacobson (Anthropology)
  • Michelle McGowan (Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; Pediatric Medicine)
  • Edward Wallace (Africana Studies)

  
  

  The long-standing term “medical humanities” has closely aligned itself with some of the Taft Research Center’s membership (literature, creative writing, history, and philosophy), but historically it has done so from within the boundaries of medicine. Health humanities scholarship, on the other hand, promotes interdisciplinary methods and theories that focus on the intersection of the arts and humanities, health, illness, and healthcare in order to understand the health experiences of patients, caregivers, and communities. Therefore, it includes medicine, the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, allied health, and the community at large.
   

  Going forward, we would like to work toward the following activities and final products:

  1. Build our social media presence through a Facebook page and twitter account.
  2. Continue activities that promote dialogue within and beyond the group.
  3. Strengthen ties with relevant centers at UC, especially the Center for the Public Engagement with Science (Philosophy) and the fledgling Ethics Center (Office of Research).
  4. Apply for more external funding (two teams of group members are currently working on grant applications).
  5. Increase communication and efficiency through a Basecamp group (an online tool for organizing and implementing group projects).
  6. Create a database of relevant funding opportunities and a network of internal feedback to support each other’s applications. 

• Social Justice

  Committee:
  

  • Carolette R. Norwood (Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies)
  • Tia Sherèe Gaynor (Political Science)
  • Brandi Blessett (Political Science)
  • Cassandra Jones (Africana Studies)

  
  

  The social justice research group is composed of scholars whose research, teaching, and community activism prioritizes equity and inclusion and protection of our natural environment. We are deliberately invested in identifying and dismantling structural and systemic apparatuses that oppress, restrict, contain, demean, degrade, and deny the dignity of individuals’ humanity. We recognize human diversities across and within socially constructed categories such as “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “class,” “ability,” “religion,” “nationality,” “citizenship,” etc. We believe that equity and inclusion is key to social justice and that every human person is entitled to good health and material well-being and that any true justice is fairness driven and will actively seek to protect individuals’ autonomy, right and opportunities for a good quality life. The foundation of a good quality life includes: secure, clean and sustainable housing; access to health services and health care providers; employment with livable wages; an education; the right to live, work, and play in environments free of hazardous toxicants; rightw to bodily autonomy which includes the rights to marry another individual irrespective of gender, race, nationality, etc.; the right to have children or not and the right to live life in the absence of violence (interpersonal, spatial, state, and structural).