Black Humanities in the Midwest

Black Humanities in the Midwest (BHIM) engages the rich tapestry of humanities-oriented scholarly, artistic, and civic engagement rooted in the expansive legacies, protracted narratives, and collective history of Black & Africana Diasporic populations in Indiana and throughout the multi-state Midwest region of the U.S. With a mission rooted at the ever-busy intersection of Black cultural production, aesthetics, social thought, and praxis, BHIM envisions a future where critical humanities scholarship and Applied Africana Studies commingle to interpret and shape the cultural and civic landscape of the Midwest and beyond.

1. FACULTY SUPPORT & RETENTION: Strengthen the pipeline of Africana Studies postdocs and faculty who are studying at the intersection of Black Humanities and the
2. RESEARCH OUTPUTS: Train undergraduate and graduate students as well as community members in humanities-oriented democratic participation and civic engagement that takes seriously the histories, contributions, and resources of Black communities in the Midwest.
3. COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & SUSTAINABILITY: Serve as a research and development hub/resource for community partners as they actively participate in creating and envisioning social transformation and a campus- and community-wide culture of collaboration. A public humanists resident fellow embedded in each lab is pivotal to achieving this goal.
4. SERVICE TO THE FIELD: Position Black Humanities in the Midwest as a transformative site of research, discovery, creativity, and innovation that improves communities and changes lives. Our project will foster interdisciplinary collaborations with major academic organizations to share resources and knowledge and contribute to national conversations in furtherance of research and innovation in the Black Humanities.
5. STRENGTHEN RESEARCH PRESENCE: Increase the scope and dissemination of humanities research, programming, and community-engaged scholarship throughout IU by establishing three distinct humanities research labs.

Embracing the spirit of laboratory experimentation more familiar to the sciences, Humanities Labs provide innovative opportunities for student research and engagement. They bring together faculty from the humanities and related disciplines in engaged research projects organized around a central theme that connects with a public audience. Labs may focus on (but are not limited to) outreach to specific community populations, developing new approaches to familiar and urgent global challenges, engaging questions concerning the past/present/futurity, or the presentation of academic research in digital formats. Humanities Labs promote skill-building, hands-on experimentation, and outcomes communicable to the Midwest community and beyond.

BHIM Laboratories are faculty-led interdisciplinary ventures organized around a central theme. Versatile in form, a lab is simultaneously a hub of research projects, a cluster of courses, a host of events, and a platform for collaborations with campus and community, national and international partners. Our labs are aimed at redefining and broadening the traditional understanding of and contemporary discourse around the humanities.

• The Research Development Lab will identify, incubate, and support faculty, postdocs, and graduate students by holding public conversations, workshops, symposiums, research showcases, and community-engaged projects focused on various critical issues germane to the lived experiences in Indiana and throughout the 14-state Midwest region. This lab aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice by developing translational research, cross-disciplinary conversations, and community-engaged praxis both within and beyond the Midwest.
• The Applied Humanities Lab and its transformative Activism Research program based at IUB embodies a humanities-centered approach by advancing an Applied Africana Studies framework that bridges scholarly inquiry and praxis with the sociopolitical and sociocultural realities of Black communities. Our focus on public dialogue, interdisciplinary scholarship, archival research, and community-centered research aligns directly with the humanities goal of deepening understanding and addressing complex societal issues.
• The Humanities in Community Lab focuses on the intersection of placemaking, cultural expression, and community resilience in the development and dissemination of groundbreaking humanities scholarship. Key features of this lab are co-experience, narrative thinking, and storying. How can people today share experiences in a polarized world? How has the evolution and culture of our cognitive abilities led us to where we are now? This lab examines how Black experiences have posed problems with regards to representation across imperial encounters. It takes seriously narrative and creative reasoning, and as such, genres such as the novel, poetry, film, photography, sound, critical fabulation and digital spaces in thinking through the idea of expressive culture, meaning-making, institution-building, and socialization.