Research

Research Projects

The IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute is home to three major research projects: The Anthropocenes Network, the Cultural Ecologies Project, and the COVID-19 Oral History Project.

Both projects provide undergraduate and graduate research opportunities, a PhD track, community engaged scholarship, and public programs.

The Anthropocenes Network

The Anthropocenes Network is an international, transdisciplinary, collaborative network of scholars in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts; policy makers; community-based practitioners; and artists committed to developing innovative interventions in environmental research, pedagogy, and policy.

The network provides an infrastructure to pursue theoretical and applied scholarship in dialogue with experts across the disciplines. Affiliated research projects have a strong community-engagement component that ranges from the hyperlocal to the translocal.

• Rivers of the Anthropocene
• The Anthropocene Household
• Voices from the Waterways
• Anthropology of the Anthropocene
• Museum of the Anthropocene

The Cultural Ecologies Project

The Cultural Ecologies Project is a public research, learning, and residency program of the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute (IAHI). It asks the seemingly simple question, “How do cultural interventions transform cities?” We work with community stakeholders to both develop and examine the impact of the arts and humanities across multiple scales — from the personal to the neighborhood to the city level. We develop new platforms for collaboration as well as new models for formal and informal learning.   Our goal is to provide artists, cultural organizations, funders, policy makers, and others with:

1. A central research center that can offer expertise in cultural planning, research, assessment, evaluation, and reporting.
2. A suite of open access tools to help individuals and organizations continuously assess their cultural programming.
3. Reports that contextualize Indianapolis’ arts and humanities environment within national and international conversations and practices.
4. A model for cultural analysis and planning that can be replicated and scaled to meet the needs of other cities.
5. An applied PhD program that supports the community by embedding students in cultural organizations and prepares them for jobs in the cultural sector.
6. Residency programs that spark collaborations and investigate innovative approaches to equitable cultural action.
7. Educational programs that develop new ways of thinking and doing.

Cultural Ecologies Research

• Research, Consulting, and Evaluation
• Recent Studies

Cultural Ecologies Public Programs

• Art+Ethics Seminar
• Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts Seminar
• Residency Programs

Cultural Ecologies Student Opportunities

• PhD Track in Cultural Ecologies
• New Humanities Lab

The COVID-19 Oral History Project

The COVID-19 Oral History Project is a rapid response oral history project focused on archiving the lived experience of the COVID-19 epidemic.

We have designed this project so that professional researchers and the broader public can create and upload their oral histories to our database.

All the data that participants collect and produce will be open access, open source and shared with researchers and the public through the IUPUI Library and the Covid-19 Archive.

The dataset will serve as

1. an historical archive that compiles oral histories about the experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. a tool that allows individuals and communities to express their understandings, hopes, beliefs, and values about the COVID-19 pandemic.
3. a resource to help researchers, policy makers, activists, artists, and communities interpret and respond to current and future pandemics.