Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Six independent but linked initiatives will shape and support a culture of experimentation and critical analysis around arts research on campus. Our projects include conceptual and practical workshops in opera; the creation of a Movement Theory Lab; a dance-theater adaptation of a classic dramatic text; workshopping a new musical with Court Theater; diversity initiatives in contemporary literary publishing; and renewed operations of the Black Cinema House, bringing UChicago faculty and visiting artists into conversation at the intersection of scholarly inquiry and artistic making. The labs will create space for the development of creative projects while fostering dialogue among scholars and artists (and artist-scholars) about the opportunities and challenges of artistic research.​

Between the humanities and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from different perspectives and with different political implications. In recent decades, these disparate fields have built a tentative and growing dialogue. However, truly multidisciplinary research between the two is still rare. This project aims not merely at translating existing theory across humanities and medicine, but rather at co-producing new plural knowledge of the human that transcends epistemological boundaries. As such, The Case of the Human proposes one ambitious project addressing core questions: “What is the human?” and “What does the category of the human do?” Our project is thus to create novel, multidisciplinary, and pluralistic knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We achieve this goal through three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing novel, plural knowledge on the human, through a multidisciplinary research conference series; 2) disseminating new knowledges on the human, through a collaborative case series published in The Lancet; and 3) fostering community reflection and personal engagement on the human, through collective writing on this collaborative process. The project is led by a group of scholars and practitioners in medicine, the humanities, and the humanistic social sciences, in partnership with Janna Palmer, Executive Editor at The Lancet. The Lancet editorial team will review the final submitted essays, and will select content for publication in the journal.

CEDAR is a multi-project digital humanities initiative involving literary corpora that have complex histories of composition, revision, and dissemination. The first phase of the project focused on three corpora written in different historical periods using very different languages and scripts. The initial projects involved the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. This phase adds four more projects: one ancient, on the Egyptian Book of the Dead; one medieval, on the Middle English poem Piers Plowman; one modern, on the works of Herman Melville; and a project on indigenous American sign systems that is not easily categorized under traditional rubrics of Western literature. This diverse and growing group of projects demonstrates the practical benefits of a shared computational platform for scholarly research and the corresponding intellectual benefits of jointly addressing a shared conceptual challenge faced by scholars in very different fields. The challenge is to design digital editions of literary works that preserve the hard-won achievements of traditional philology but open these works to new readings and new modes of analysis. CEDAR does this via a state-of-the-art database representation of both the internal epigraphic and discursive structures of texts, in all their complexity, and their external relations with one another and with other cultural media through time and space. By the end of Phase Two, CEDAR will be ready to welcome scholars in all fields to contribute to a new University of Chicago series of online critical editions.

To learn more, please visit the CEDAR website.

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The CEDAR project aims to produce critical editions for the digital age. It brings together six faculty members from four different departments and schools in the University of Chicago as well as scholarly advisors from beyond the University. The textual foci of the project are four distinct literary corpora: English (Shakespeare), Assyriology (Gilgamesh), Biblical Studies (the book of Genesis), and South Asian literature (Middle Bengali poetry). Employing the OCHRE database software developed in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, CEDAR is creating digital text editions that are maximally descriptive and data-rich in their representation of texts and their media (including scrolls, codices, clay tablets, etc.). By comparing the features of exemplary texts studied in the respective fields represented in this project and by examining reflexively the scholarly practices of these fields, CEDAR will abstract the common challenges presented to philologists everywhere and apply lessons learned from one textual corpus to other texts written in quite different scripts, languages, and cultural contexts. In its software engineering component, CEDAR will follow the time-honored practice of identifying the common structural elements and algorithms inherent in a seemingly heterogeneous collection of data and methods, an approach that yields simpler, more elegant code that can be used for many different purposes. The intent is to make the critical editions produced by CEDAR available online in open access format with a sophisticated analytical user interface.

The problem of climate change forces us to rethink many of the basic analytical categories in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Within the humanities, writers and artists are experimenting with new ways in which their practices can catalyze environmental awareness, and emerging research is beginning to integrate the history of culture with the history of the earth’s climate.

This project brought together faculty and graduate students from across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in a reading group. We were especially interested in the place of the humanities in meeting the challenge of climate change. How might humanistic perspectives inform the science and politics of climate change? We also considered how climate change is transforming our understanding of history, politics, literature, and ethics, inspiring new approaches within the humanities.

This project used techniques of gaming, mixed reality performance, and networked media culture to create and evaluate an intervention that engaged middle school students in a curriculum about climate change, environmental science, and twenty-first-century skills. This intervention took the form of a transmedia game with live-action networked elements (an “Alternate Reality Game,” or “ARG”). The project leaders secured participation from three public and private schools at the seventh-grade level as research sites. The project generated empirical data via mixed methods research (quantitative and qualitative) on using game-based learning to educate students about one of the most urgent and complex problems of our time. The grounding hypothesis is that humanistic knowledge—especially linked to storytelling, games, and media—can be used to strengthen STEM pathways. The timing of this project, amid the COVID-19 transition, was especially important, given the search across educational institutions for effective hybrid learning methods. The project aimed to achieve a completed game and a replicable remote learning structure that, in future iterations, can scale to the level of Chicago Public Schools in a citywide game.

Learn more about the research team's Fourcast Lab here.

For many humanists and social scientists “the economy” has long been a realm apart, inscrutable to their analysis. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, new work, ranging across a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, has sought to make the economy newly legible and alive to various forms of scholarly inquiry. Boundaries between economy and history, society, literature, politics, philosophy, law, psyche, environment, and more are being scrutinized. The ambition of this project was to set the groundwork at the University of Chicago for a cross-disciplinary, humanistic social science of economic life. Where, within different methodological and disciplinary approaches, can “the economy” be located? How and for what purposes can it be analyzed? How might various approaches inform one another? Faculty in History, Sociology, and English convened the group with the goal of creating dialogue between humanists and humanistic social scientists who use qualitative and interpretive methods, and social scientists who employ quantitative and mathematical methods.

Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab is an initiative of the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago. Co-founded by Drs. Patrick Jagoda (Assistant Professor of English) and Melissa Gilliam (Professor of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Pediatrics), the GCC Design Lab created workshops in which high school aged youth – recruited primarily from underserved schools on Chicago’s South Side – collaborated with faculty, staff and fellows (undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities and arts) on digital stories, transmedia games and new media art projects. The GCC Design Lab is both a maker-space and a research lab. As a maker-space, we have a strong commitment to developing youth-led products, running game design workshops, and creating games for national and transnational dissemination. As a research lab, we promoted continued work at the intersection of art, narrative, health, and technology with an eye to critical thinking and healthy social and emotional outcomes.

The Gaming Orientation project (2016–2019) transformed the University of Chicago’s 2017 college orientation into an immersive, alternate-reality game (ARG) called The Parasite. Incoming students were invited to collaborate on nine challenges, each of which helped them get acclimated to campus and prepared for college life. As they banded together in search of clues to solve a central mystery—Where is the room that a secret society of masked monks seems to be guarding?—they became acquainted with each other and with key sites on and near campus. Innovative participatory-learning activities throughout the week prompted them to confront questions about their own identity, the identity of others, and presumptions about each. Whether they realized it or not—the game was not announced as a game, intentionally blurring the border between fiction and reality—the students were being primed for valuable lessons about collaboration, leadership, inclusivity, and digital media literacy. They were also helping the research team test the effectiveness of ARGs as tools for twenty-first-century education.

Preliminary research suggests that ARGs and related forms of transmedia storytelling and gameplay can be a useful platform for collaborative learning. Participants report that gameplay improves critical thinking and problem-solving skills and strengthens social bonds. Pervasive games that involve role-playing and a mix of challenges are increasingly common in areas as diverse as business, marketing, education, and personal leisure. But with one exception (an ARG focused on the technical skills that incoming students needed at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts), large-scale gaming had not been attempted in a higher education environment prior to this project. Its impact has never before been rigorously studied. The Parasite was the first ARG that aimed to shape the culture of a specific university cohort. The Gaming Orientation project will assess whether it succeeded. With more than 600 players online, a robust Facebook following, and live play that included roughly half the incoming class of 1,750 students, it was arguably the largest educational transmedia game ever created.

Designing, preparing, running, and evaluating a production at this scale required collaboration. The project included an interdisciplinary team of scholars with expertise in sociology, new media studies, digital game theory and design, theater and performance, and visual art. The team developed and coordinated plans in close partnership with academic and administrative leaders on campus and solicited contributions from creative professionals and institutions around Chicago. Current students were partners at every stage, from conception to live performance. Kristen Schilt worked with a group of undergraduates to gather ethnographic data on the 2016 orientation, which helped the team plan for the 2017 event. An interdisciplinary “Big Problems” course, co-taught by Patrick Jagoda and Heidi Coleman in the 2016 Fall Quarter, introduced students to ARG theory and production while helping the research team tailor the game’s design for its intended audience.

The process of designing the ARG was regarded as practice-based research, an opportunity to develop, test, refine, and transform concepts about performance, digital media culture, and game-based education. Jagoda, Coleman, and other collaborators have already presented and published several scholarly articles exploring various aspects of The Parasite and broader implications for the future of “networked play.” The project has also received significant media attention, including a feature in Wired magazine that offered a nuanced portrait of The Parasite and quoted one first-year student who described it as “the coolest experience of my life.”

Research continues as the scholars focus on measuring the game’s effectiveness. Immediately after the game, they conducted a series of focus groups with approximately thirty first-year students, including those who did and did not participate. Those discussions are being translated into data and analyzed, and may inform the planning process for a proposed larger-scale ARG in 2019. The study’s key indicators of success include improvements in students’ co-curricular participation, mental and physical wellbeing, attitudes about diversity, feelings of integration into the University community, and degree attainment, particularly for under-represented minorities.

If the evidence shows positive results, this innovative approach to student orientation will further establish the University of Chicago as a leader in understanding and addressing issues of diversity and social difference within a community. The Parasite may serve as a model for introducing new forms of participation and networked play into higher education curricula.