Imagine That
Supporting research in literature and languages, art and architecture, music, ethnic studies, and more is a University of Minnesota priority.
By Meleah Maynard
“At a time when many other public universities are reducing resources to the arts and humanities, we must instead maintain a balance in our great university across the range of intellectual and artistic endeavor,” says Tom Sullivan, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost.
The Imagine Fund, created by Provost Sullivan, is a new systemwide annual award program established to forward research in—and enhance campus and community prominence of—the arts, humanities, and design. For the first round, 217 University faculty members received $3,000 each to help advance their work. Though relatively small, the grants can make a big difference—helping a researcher push a project through to completion so that the wider community may benefit from their new knowledge.
Says Sullivan: “The Imagine Fund produces remarkable outcomes for a relatively modest investment.”
Here are snapshots of 10 Imagine Fund projects.
The Forgotten ImmigrantsBetween 1910 and 1940 more than 500,000 people came through the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Ever since, however, their stories have remained largely untold. In their forthcoming book,
Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, historians
Erika Lee and
Judy Yung offer an in-depth account of the station, revealing that, while Angel Island is known for processing Chinese immigrants, people from many other countries around the world passed through there too.
Photo: An interrogation at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco. Photograph from the National Archives
This news came as a surprise to Lee, an associate professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of Minnesota, whose grandparents were Chinese immigrants processed at Angel Island. While researching Chinese immigration in the late 1990s, Lee pored over recently released documents about Angel Island and found evidence of immigrants from Russia, Mexico, the Philippines, and many other countries. “I knew I’d found a much larger story that needed to be told that would change the way we look at this landmark,” she explains.
Looking to offer an intimate look at the experiences of those who were processed at Angel Island before starting new lives in the United States—and of those who were detained there and turned away—Lee and Yung (a professor emerita of American studies at the University of California–Santa Cruz), combined immigration records with oral histories and photographs provided by families. Support from the Imagine Fund enabled Lee to research and pay for the rights to use many of those little-known photos. Published by Oxford University Press,
Angel Island will be released in July 2010.
Lee hopes the book, which is sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, will broaden people’s understanding of who we are as a nation and stimulate thoughtful discussion about immigration. “Immigration continues to be one of the hottest political topics there is,” Lee says. “We are detaining more immigrants now than ever before and yet we call ourselves a nation of immigrants, so we need to think about what that means.”
See an L.A. Times article on the research here.
Giving Voice to TeensA teen mother showed her classmates how it felt to be judged by those who don’t know how hard she tries. Another student was cheered for her powerful story on why she believes gay marriage should be legal. Another presented an argument for why the school day should start later. These were just a few of the highlights among the many “sound essays” students at St. Paul’s Gordon Parks High School created last year with the help of
Catherine Squires, a professor of journalism, diversity, and equality in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. (Watch all three sound essays, which combine audio and still images, on Squires’s blog. Go to
Professor Catherine Squires' blog.)
Photo: Journalism Professor Catherine Squires helped Gordon Parks High School students create sound essays. Photograph by Mark Luinenburg
Squires used her Imagine Fund award to purchase an H2 Zoom digital audio recorder and several copies of Soundfiles, a program that helps students sync their audio recordings with still images in order to tell a story. Most recently, students used the equipment to make sound essays describing and documenting the changes that could soon be coming to the University Avenue corridor when light rail linking Minneapolis and St. Paul gets under way. Squires hopes some of the projects may one day be aired as part of Minnesota Public Radio’s new youth radio project. “Some of these essays were very personal, so you can imagine with high school students that there might have been laughing or heckling, but there wasn’t,” Squires recalls. “People were so quiet when they watched, and then they were on their feet applauding. It was really amazing.”
Squires worked closely on the pilot project with Will Wright, a communications studies undergraduate at the U who interned with National Public Radio, and Paul Creager, an English teacher at Gordon Parks. She hopes the students, most of whom are teens of color, will not only feel empowered by telling stories they are passionate about, but that they’ll be inspired to become the journalists and public radio storytellers of tomorrow.
“We still live in a world where journalists of color are still few and far between,” she explains, adding that research shows that students who are not exposed to journalism or other media courses in high school are less likely to pursue those fields in college. “This project not only exposes students to the technology they need to tell their stories, it shows them that they can make their voices heard.”
The People Behind the PlacesOn one of his recent trips around Minnesota,
Leon Satkowski came across a simple, white-painted wood building in Roseau County. Located on an isolated parcel of farmland miles from the nearest town, the building (pictured below) once served as a lodge for Czech immigrants to gather and talk in their familiar language, perform music, and stage plays. The lodge played a critical role in sustaining the culture of an isolated community. “Few buildings in Minnesota convey the difficulties of rural life and the determination to overcome them as well as this one does,” Satkowski says.
Photo: Poplar Grove Lodge, Roseau, Minnesota. Photograph courtesy of Leon Satkowski
Satkowski is a professor of architecture in the University of Minnesota’s College of Design but is as interested in the people who built and used buildings as he is in the structures themselves. He and three coauthors are documenting this aspect of the state’s history for
Minnesota Architecture and Landscapes, a Guide and a History, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press.
The book project is an overdue update of a 1977 edition. The four coauthors traveled various regions of Minnesota to locate architectural sites not covered in the first edition and to visit previously documented sites. Satkowski’s Imagine Fund grant helped him finish a series of site visits outside the Twin Cities and Duluth metro areas.
While the first edition focused primarily on architectural styles in Minnesota, the new edition will put a face on the land. “When we say ‘landscape,’ what we mean is we’re addressing something that goes beyond land to talk about the culture, values, and activities of people who inhabited the land,” says Satkowski. “Knowing this gives us a sense of who we were and who we are now.”
Fashion ForwardLucy Dunne believes designer
Paco Rabanne—who used paper, metal, and plastic in his haute couture—was correct when he claimed that only the materials are new when it comes to fashion. So it’s fitting that Dunne, an assistant professor of apparel design, has long been researching and developing new materials for “smart clothing” in the University of Minnesota’s College of Design.
Photo: Apparel designer Lucy Dunne is developing “smart clothing.” Photograph by Mark Luinenburg
With her master’s degree in textiles and apparel design and her Ph.D. in computer science, Dunne works on developing ways that technology can enhance and expand the role of clothing. Dunne aims to be an innovator on the forefront of wearable technology and believes that, in the not too distant future, we will see coats that heat up when the wearer becomes cold and garments that monitor health conditions, such as heart problems, so that patients might leave hospitals earlier but stay under observation.
But weaving technology together with apparel isn’t all serious. Indeed, Dunne has learned that wearable technology has a fun side that also stretches the imagination. “Instead of getting dressed and having your outfit say the same thing all day, it could change in some way to reflect your mood or create interest,” Dunne explains. For example, a skirt she designed for an exhibition a few years ago included fiber optics that twinkled when the wearer laughed.
Dunne used her Imagine Fund grant to explore ways to make fashion more expressive. While her work is still in the early stages of development, Dunne is looking at ways to combine textiles, motors, and muscle wires (used in biomedical products like stents and heart valves) to create garments that move. “A garment might change so you’d see a rippling effect,” she says. “A lot has been done in the functional realm of wearable technology, but we are only in the exploration stages of the expression realm. The potential for the future is so great.”
The Dark Side of a Modern MarvelIn January, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates unveiled its latest architectural wonder, the world’s tallest building. At 160-stories, the 2,600-foot-tall
Burj Khalifa is almost twice the height of Chicago’s Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower). The unveiling was overshadowed, however, by the news that the building is mostly vacant, another casualty of Dubai’s real-estate collapse and economic problems.
Photo: Dubai’s Burj Khalifa has a gritty side. Photograph by Bill Foley
That the emirate’s gilded exterior has a dark side comes as no surprise to
Andréa Stanislav. An assistant professor of art at the University of Minnesota and a sculptor who looks to architecture for inspiration, Stanislav has long followed Dubai’s breakneck push to become a showcase for dream projects like the Burj Khalifa. She has also tracked the heavy cost of that dream. “When you see such a beautiful, futuristic city being created, you have to ask how the road to such a promising utopia was created,” she says. The answer, Stanislav says, is the exploitation of foreign workers and possibly slave labor. She is using her Imagine Fund grant to draw attention to this underreported issue.
The grant, combined with other support, allowed Stanislav to collaborate with Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist
Bill Foley, who traveled with her to Dubai last June. While Foley photographed Dubai’s people and architecture, Stanislav used a video recorder to capture footage of the emirate’s grittier side, including the labor camps where foreign workers live. “We went to a city outside of Dubai called Mousafah where the immigrants who build the skyscrapers live,” Stanislav explains. “People were living in very harsh conditions inside shipping containers. They work long hours and many of them say they aren’t being paid.”
Stanislav and Foley planned to return to Dubai in February to capture their final photographs and footage. They’ll use what they gather for a book, as well as an exhibition that includes photos, video, and sculpture. “The footage of labor camps is problematic because I can only show it outside the Emirates if I don’t want to wind up in jail there,” she says. “But I’m hoping what we put together gets people thinking about labor and fairness not only in other countries but in the U.S. too.”
Making Sense of Losing a LanguageWhat does it mean to disconnect from a language?
Ray Gonzalez, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is trying to find out. Using his Imagine Fund grant, he has made several trips to his hometown of El Paso, Texas, to interview residents about the fact that increasing numbers of younger Hispanics don’t speak Spanish anymore.
Illustration by Lisa Henderling
“Bilingualism used to be so important,” Gonzalez says. “Younger generations, like my nephews, have combined elements of Hispanic culture into their daily lives, but they don’t speak the language even though they know English and Spanish.”
Part of the reason for this, says Gonzalez, who grew up in a bilingual household, is that Hispanic children are now being born and raised in a culture where they speak, think, and write only in English. “This has meant identifying everything, even their own identities, in English,” Gonzalez says. “It’s like young people who grew up in front of computers and can’t imagine what it would be like to not have them.”
Older Hispanic people Gonzalez has interviewed tell him that it’s taken a long time to accept the ways in which youth have assimilated into American culture and redefined what it means to be Hispanic in the United States today. Food, music, even views on immigration have changed as Spanish has gone from being spoken at home to not being spoken at all. “Many young Hispanic people I’ve interviewed are very conservative and anti-immigration because the concept of home country has been removed by assimilation,” Gonzalez says.
As Gonzalez—the award-winning author of 12 books of poetry, two short story collections, and three books of essays—writes about his interviews and the loss of Spanish among Hispanic youth, he can’t help wondering whether reconnecting with the past is possible. “I guess it’s a search for hope,” he says. “These connections are important to me, and I think they shape people’s identities.”
Addiction DepictionsMany memoirs about drug and alcohol addiction give readers an overdose of unrealistic expectations. The authors describe glamorous or thrillingly dangerous lifestyles revolving around drug and alcohol abuse followed by a single-minded effort to overcome it. In real life, however, addiction and the road to recovery are far more complex, says
Teresa Gowan, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota.
Illustration by James Steinberg
Gowan, who is working on a comparative study of alcohol and drug rehabilitation facilities in the Twin Cities, has interviewed hundreds of people in various 12-step and other recovery programs. She has noticed that the people in recovery she talks to often mention having read some of the best-selling addiction/recovery memoirs like James Frey’s discredited
A Million Little Pieces or
Dry by Augusten Burroughs, so she decided to examine some memoirs in the genre herself.
With support from the Imagine Fund, Gowan hired Lindsey Beltt, an undergraduate student in the College of Liberal Arts, as her research assistant and the pair analyzed 10 memoirs, looking for recurrent themes and adding their findings to a database for analysis. Beltt will also be talking with addicts about these memoirs in focus groups planned for later this year.
One finding concerns the concept of “hitting rock bottom” followed by a spectacular recovery. “I’ve only had one interview [with an addict] where there was a notable rock bottom,” Gowan says. In truth, what she finds is that most people in recovery move backward and forward in the recovery process. “So this idea of rock bottom keeps people looking around at others who are in worse shape in places like AA and thinking, ‘Well, at least I’m not there yet.’ I think that keeps them using longer than they would have otherwise.”
Gowan believes insights like these will help strengthen the work of other scholars working on complex problems like addiction. “I don’t think you can study addiction by biting off one portion of it,” she says. “If we’re not looking squarely at popular culture, we’re missing out on some of the most powerful framing of the issues we study.”
The Foreign Becomes FamiliarBefore 1953, if a film was released in the United States, it was produced in Hollywood. By 1998, more foreign films (those made outside of the United States) than domestic films were playing in American theaters. “We think American culture is being exported abroad, but I’m arguing that the rest of the world is influencing us as much as we’re influencing them,” says
Lary May, a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.
Photo: American studies Professor Lary May at the Oak Street Cinema near campus. Photograph by Mark Luinenburg
Much of this influence can be seen in media, particularly films, because they often comment on some of the central issues of American life, May says. Using his Imagine Fund grant, May traveled to Los Angeles to conduct research for his tentatively titled book
Bringing It All Back Home: Global Hollywood and America’s Culture Wars. At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he combed scrapbooks and other materials, reading artist interviews and critics’ reviews. “I’m looking for nuggets, really,” he says, pointing to a story he read in which African American director Spike Lee said he borrowed techniques from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa for his first film,
She’s Gotta Have It (1986).
“I am always asking the question, ‘What is the cultural and political impact of this kind of borrowing?’ and trying to fathom the impact that has on Americans’ attitudes,” he explains. While the Beatles 1965 film Help! might have inspired viewers to grow their hair long, other foreign films like Babel (2006) offered American audiences a fictional accounting of the complexities we face in a world divided by terrorism, language, religion, and political strife.
“I’m looking at how the globe enters a dialogue with American life and culture,” says May. “If we accept America is being influenced by the world, we can become more tolerant and understanding of other people’s points of view and our own fallibility.”
Cultivating Public SpacesNineteenth- and early 20th-century British landscape designer
Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) created more than 300 gardens and wrote 14 books and nearly 1,000 articles during her career. She is best known for her use of color, texture, and form in ways that today define the style of the English garden. While much has been written about Jekyll’s private commissions, her public designs are much less well-known.
Kristine Miller, an associate professor of landscape architecture in the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, is about to change that.
A detail of a garden design drawing by Gertrude Jekyll, courtesy of Kristine Miller
Five years ago, Miller was invited by the University of California–Berkeley’s Environmental Design Archives, which holds most of the archival material on Jekyll, to submit a book proposal on the designer’s work. Having written about Jekyll, as well as the design of contemporary American public spaces in the past, Miller searched the Berkeley archives hoping to find information on Jekyll’s public projects.
“For a designer who mainly created estate gardens for the wealthy, it was fascinating to find drawings for World War I cemeteries in northern France and a tuberculosis sanatorium in Midhurst, England,” Miller says. Miller is now putting the finishing touches on a book about Jekyll’s public commissions. With her Imagine Fund grant, Miller hired a work-study student to help scan slides of Jekyll’s public gardens and organize information about plant species “to push the book through the last gate” before a final editorial meeting in Berkeley this spring and an international conference for landscape architects in Holland in May where Miller will present her findings.
Miller hopes the book will draw attention to the ways in which design shapes the public realm. At the sanatorium, for example, the gardens were not only beautiful, they were therapeutic, and patients were encouraged to stroll the grounds and work in the planting beds as part of their healing process.
“Design is a way of considering, representing, and constructing relationships between people and places,” Miller explains. “We have to ask ourselves: What kinds of relationships are we setting up and whom do they serve?”
Radio’s Good ReceptionIn the 1960s, academics Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Rachel Powell—whose work helped lay the foundation for the field of cultural studies—studied the power and influence of radio. Powell, in particular, is known for her writings on radio in the United Kingdom in which she posited that the more local or community-based radio content was, the more engaged and informed were its listeners.
Photograph from the Granger Collection/New York
Decades later, even the Internet has failed to dampen scholarly interest in what some have at times assumed to be an outmoded medium. “In the late ’80s, universities began introducing what was called ‘radio studies’ in part because of the emergence of talk radio,” says
John Mowitt, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature in the College of Liberal Arts. “Talk radio reminded us that radio was still very vital, and now that it has become a digital medium available through the Internet and satellite transmission, scholars are starting to think about it in more critical terms.”
Mowitt, who is working on his fifth book, tentatively titled Radio: Essays in Bad Reception, used his Imagine Fund award to travel to the United Kingdom last summer where he reviewed the work of Williams, Hoggart, and Powell at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He also visited the British Museum’s sound archive to listen to recordings, including some of Williams’ lectures. The material will be used for a section of the book that analyzes the philosophical discussions of radio in the 20th century.
Mowitt is broadly interested in the relationship between media and contemporary life. “Could Barack Obama have been elected president in the absence of the Internet?” he wonders. With this in mind, parts of the book are intended to get people thinking about how media, radio in particular, shapes and influences our lives.
“I’m trying to make sense of what the presence of radio means for the human experience,” he explains.
More on the Imagine Fund
The
Imagine Fund program—made possible by a McKnight Foundation gift with
additional U support from the Graduate School, Office of the Vice
President for Research, and Permanent University Fund—also supports the
creation of a new arts and humanities chair every two years; a visiting
distinguished scholar or scholars; special events that promote
innovation, collaboration, and public engagement; and single-semester
leaves from teaching. The 2010 Imagine Fund awards—to 185 faculty
recipients who will receive $4,000 each—will be announced April 1. For
more information, visit www.artsandhumanities.umn.edu.
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Meleah Maynard (B.A. ’91) is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer and editor.