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.​

How does the body influence the mind? This compelling question has motivated researchers in psychology, linguistics, human development, and the performing arts for many years. Recent technological innovations and a turn toward interdisciplinary collaboration have opened up new possibilities for scholars seeking ways to disentangle thought from physical sensations. The University of Chicago has emerged as a globally recognized leader in this area of research, known as “embodied cognition,” with pioneering work on gesture, formal and informal sign languages, and the universal features of language. The Body’s Role project (2013–2016) served as a catalyst for additional work in this area, uniting a number of small projects and establishing a foundation for empirical research that cuts across the humanities and social sciences.

The project supported three studies that looked at gesture and sign in relation to storytelling, action, and indexical pointing, respectively. For the storytelling study, Peter Cook—an American Sign Language (ASL) scholar and a renowned Deaf performance artist who served as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow in the 2013–14 academic year—helped conduct comparative analyses of poetry and performance in both English and ASL. The research team used video and motion-capture recordings of ASL and English performers, and then developed coding procedures to analyze aspects like metrical structure and rhythm. The comparisons yielded important insights on the similarities and differences between the ways Deaf and hearing storytellers use their bodies to narrate. Related work in this area explored the role of eye gaze and facial gestures in performance.

The second study used motion-analysis equipment to explore the connections between gesture and action. By observing participants as they encountered perceptual illusions, the researchers were able to determine the extent to which gesture mirrors the actions on which it is based compared to the language it accompanies. Preliminary results were presented at the 2016 International Society for Gesture Studies conference in Paris. A third study, the first of its kind, clarified distinctions between pointing gestures used by signers and pointing gestures speakers produce when they talk.

The schedule of Body’s Role activities at the Neubauer Collegium was ambitious, with conferences and performances, a quarterly workshop series, biweekly meetings, a sign language reading group, and related work. The project culminated with the October 2017 capstone conference, which included a lively evening of performances by sign-language and spoken-language artists, followed by a full day of presentations by graduate students and postdoctoral scholars on the project’s three studies. Herb Clark, a psycholinguist at Stanford University, delivered a keynote address on the use of the body in everyday communication. The event, cited by the research team as a high point of the project, “not only brought together the work that we have been doing on our Neubauer Collegium projects, but also made it clear that this is not a stopping point—we have laid the groundwork for a new set of interdisciplinary interests to flourish among our faculty and students.”

From the outset, the researchers considered next-generation training a central component of the project. Students and postdoctoral fellows were involved in every aspect of the research, from study design, data collection, and statistical analysis to the presentation and publication of findings. Young scholars’ contributions at regular working meetings and reading groups helped the research team think through technical challenges and keep the project’s many activities on track, and the project inspired nearly a dozen student-led projects.

“Very early on, the Neubauer project became an exciting cross-disciplinary hub,” said Kensy Cooperrider, a postdoctoral scholar in the Psychology Department who helped run the study on pointing in gesture and sign. “Collaborations were springing up between young scholars who might not otherwise have talked much to each other. And it wasn’t long before it felt like a community. In my case, being part of this community really broadened my understanding of my research and the questions I was asking—it got me thinking about issues that will be with me for the rest of my career.”

Significant supplemental support for the project was provided by internal partners at the Humanities Division, the Delhi Center, and the Center for Gesture, Sign, and Language, a research initiative launched by Diane Brentari, Anastasia Giannakidou, and Susan Goldin-Meadow in March 2013. A $750,000 grant from the NSF Science of Learning competition provided the collaborative network that the Body’s Role project fostered with funds for a three-year project to explore how the body can be incorporated into primary school math education. The Neubauer Collegium also extended its commitment to this growing network with the Motion and Meaning project, which studied the relation between sign and body gesture in classical Indian dance.

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.

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.

The aim of this project was to build pedagogic, critical and aesthetic infrastructures through which the comic can be engaged as a scene of disturbance, a regime of corporeal technique, and a particular mood within aesthetic form. The comedic pokes fun at inelastic seriousness and inserts the threat of inappropriateness into painful scenes. Yet the study of the comedic is underdeveloped in contrast to the study of tragedy and catastrophe. We looked at incongruities of status and mind as social problems and problems of comic form. In addition to addressing these in theory and history--in a special issue of Critical Inquiry and a major conference on painting's humors--we explore the comedic through performance. We expected the performance or bodily component to be revelatory conceptually. Central to our concern were the phenomena of self-mastery, physiognomy, mimicry, bodily citation and gesture. What consequences do bodily habits and formal conventions have for the comic? What are the binding and liberating functions of format, genre, and archetype for the experience of mood, pleasure, and laughter? How do social ecologies of production contribute to these scenes? How do particular media, such as painting, theoretical writing, or performance, shift the comic encounter with pleasure and aggression?

This project brings together faculty from the humanities, performing arts, and social sciences to investigate the relationships between meaning and motion, particularly in the context of classical Indian dance. Training in classical Indian dance is intensive and requires mastery of dozens of gestures and facial expressions with extraordinarily subtle distinctions that convey specific emotions to the audience. Aesthetic expectations are very important, and the gestures of dance form a poetics of posture and movement. The overarching question of our work is how meaning is produced by the body, and our goal is to develop a grammar of somatic expression by exploring the ways in which such a grammar would be similar to, or different from, the grammars of spoken and signed languages. Our work will involve two components. The first involves the form-meaning correspondences within the locus of the dancers themselves. The second component investigates the meanings as they are understood by the audiences within the communities in which these dance traditions are typically performed.

This research project will explore biographies and geographies of breath through a focus on the colonial histories and postcolonial politics surrounding tuberculosis in South Africa. It will be a research- and performance-based collaborative endeavor between anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan (University of Chicago), writer Stacy Hardy (Polokwane and Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa), and composer Neo Muyanga (Cape Town, South Africa). Together, we will plan and perform six performance lectures over the three-year period of this grant, targeted towards different kinds of audiences in different venues. The sixth lecture will be a synthetic performance lecture that incorporates elements from and reflects upon the trajectory of the first five lectures, and will be held at the University of Chicago. Sunder Rajan will also teach two graduate seminars on Pulmonographies over a three-year period at the University of Chicago.

This project, the Neubauer Collegium’s first collaboration with Court Theatre, supported the Visiting Fellowship of award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Auburn. Auburn’s first play, Proof, received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and is set on the University of Chicago campus. His other plays include Lost Lake (2014), The Columnist (2012), The New York Idea (adaptation, 2010), and An Upset (2008), among others. As a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow, Auburn completed a stage adaptation of Saul Bellow’s picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March for a world premiere production at Court Theatre. Working in collaboration with Charles Newell (Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director, Court Theatre) and with members of the Court Theatre Faculty Advisory Council, chaired by Larry Norman (Romance Languages and Literatures), Auburn led a new exploration of this uniquely Chicago novel on the campus that both Bellow and Auburn called their academic home.