The NMCAH Research Group is an interdisciplinary association of scholars, writers, physicians, artists, educators, storytellers, and community builders who use narrative and the arts to promote health, equity, critical compassion, and healing and to advance related research and activism. Their research includes multiple disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, such as narratology, discourse analysis, disability studies, critical theories, arts-based inquiries, and qualitative mixed methods. Members use story and art to critique social and institutional practices and to transform them.

NMCAH collaboratively develops and supports research and generative dialogue to bring together communities and institutions to impact health, equity, critical compassion, and healing. As a Taft faculty research group which integrates community partners in its membership, they reach into public spaces by hosting public events and symposia; facilitating exhibitions; developing pedagogies, curriculum, and online media; and creating publications that feature member research, creative and scholarly work, and interdisciplinary approaches to their interdisciplinary endeavor.

Co-Directors:
Cheli Reutter, American Literature and Medical Humanities
Vittoria Daiello, Art & Design Education and Arts-based Research

UC Faculty, Grad Students, and Affiliates:
Christina LaVecchia, A and S, English and Rhetorical Studies
Anu Chatterjee, Clermont, English & Narrative Medicine
Kathleen Hulgin, Clermont, Education & Disabilities Studies
Elizabeth Lanphier, CCMHC, Bioethics & Narrative Medicine
David Schwartz, A and S, English & Medical Humanities
Emily Van Walleghen, CAHS, Nutritional Science & Fine Arts

Community Collaborators:
Nam-Ha Brown, Cincinnati VA & Geriatric Medicine
Dani Clark, Art Education & Narrative Medicine
Cathy DeFoor, Pediatric Medicine & Narrative Medicine
Brittney Smith, Biological Sciences & Education
Amy Tuttle, Arts in Healing
Maria Vladova, Public Health & Narrative Medicine

The societal challenges stemming from the sizeable percentage of Ohio’s population encountering one or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—and the attention governments, health care groups, and non-profit organizations give to providing trauma informed care in response to ACEs—show the wide recognition ACE mitigation efforts have among health professionals and similarly informed groups.

But the professional-level awareness about ACEs is not the same as building individual and community understanding and capacity to help those experiencing these traumas in everyday interactions. The crux of our vision for this interdisciplinary and intercommunity research group grant request is to enhance and amplify existing community efforts at interdicting ACEs trauma. Our focus on community capacity in increasing trauma resilience is based in the reality that the prevalence of trauma experiences requires wide awareness and capacity for recognizing and responding to trauma.

Indeed, though ACEs have statistical impacts on several health conditions for which traumainformed medical interventions are necessary, the basic social, emotional, and psychological components of ACEs mean that the encounters those experiencing trauma have with others in their daily lives may be considerable factors in determining individual ACEs resiliency. This suggests that the public’s role in providing trauma-informed interactions with people from all walks of life is perpetually in need of additional effort in helping to build trauma resilience. At the same time, and given the disproportionate effect ACEs have on communities of color, we intentionally situate our research group emphasis within the context of Cincinnati’s majorityminority neighborhoods. In reflecting on the burden of ACEs experiences in communities of color, the important work others have started in creating a C-ACE approach (i.e., Culturally Informed Adverse Childhood Experiences Framework) is something on which we look to build through this research group.

This group seeks to document and promulgate “best practices” aimed at increasing trauma-informed interaction capacity for members of the general public. There are two components to this effort: 1) developing an inventory and summary of existing ACEs and C-ACEs trauma care programming in Greater Cincinnati, 2) creating symposium-style programming and literature to increase the profile of existing trauma care efforts (and/or discern areas where care may be extended), and 3) provide media outreach and education in assisting journalists in the reporting of stories touching on trauma-related topics. 

Members:

• Leila Rodriguez, Anthropology
• Michael Gott, French
• Mauricio Espinoza, Spanish and Latin American Cultural Studies
• Shailaja Paik, History
• Anjali Dutt, Social-Community Psychology
• Katherine Sorrels, History
• Shaunak Sastry, Communication

The Identities and Representations of Human Mobilities research group seeks to contextualize the movement of humans within a framework of multiple mobilities, and to question how these various transitions are conceived by people, and differentially represented in scholarship, law, policy, film, literature, and other mediatic and cultural products.

We live in largely unprecedented times, where the new pandemic has overshadowed – but also coexists with – other global phenomena including the movement of people internally and internationally, forced displacement, new forms of slavery, human and animal trafficking, the trade and repatriation of material culture, upward and downward socioeconomic mobility, among others. These movements, in turn, occur at different stages in the life cycle of people, households, and communities, and across space and time. In this context, it is imperative to rethink concepts like mobilities, transitions, stages, boundaries, and cycles, to critically engage with contemporary human movements.

Topics the group will address include: perceptions, identities and representations of shifting from a culturally-defined qualitative state to another (e.g. nonmigrant to migrant, free to incarcerated, working class to middle class, healthy to ill, young to old); technologies of mobility (e.g. digital diasporas, apps and map plugins used by migrants and refugees); immobility as political rhetoric and response to mobility; as emerging activism in response to environmental crisis, or as reaction to combat pandemic.

Director: Angela Potochnik, Philosophy
Associate Director: Melissa Jacquart, Philosophy
Affiliates:

• Susan Allen, Anthropology
• Zvi Biener, Philosophy
• Brooke Crowley, Anthropology/Geology
• Lucas Dunlap Philosophy
• Nate Morehouse Biology
• Rob Skipper, Philosophy
• Carlie Trott, Psychology

The Center for Public Engagement with Science expands and enriches the interface between science and the public to benefit all stakeholders. We work to increase engagement with science by connecting the university to community partners and the public, to improve the quality of science engagement by promoting dialogue among and benefit for all stakeholders, and to innovate forms of science engagement by drawing on philosophy and other humanities, natural and social sciences, and science education. See UCEngagingScience.org to learn more about the Center and our activities.

All faculty and graduate students whose work intersects with science and the public are encouraged to collaborate with the Center on existing or new projects. To date, the Center director has met with approximately 40-50 collaborators and potential collaborators in A&S and the School of Education at UC, as well as collaborators at organizations across Cincinnati (e.g. Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati Nature Center, Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens, the Mercantile Library, Greater Cincinnati STEM Collaborative).

Members:

• Thérèse Migraine-George, Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures
• Leah Stewart, English
• Mauricio Espinoza, Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures
• Carlos Gutiérrez, Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures
• Gergana Ivanova, Asian Studies
• Rebecca Lindenberg, English
• Michael Peterson, Elliston Poetry Room/English

 

The goal of the group is to support the development of long-term collaboration focused on multi-lingual projects in creative writing and translation involving faculty and students from ours and other Taft departments, as well as from partnering institutions outside of UC.

 

• Evan Torner (German Studies)
• Stephanie Sadre-Orafai (Anthropology)
• Tony Liao (Communications)
• Katherine Castiello Jones (Sociology)
• James Lee (English)
• Nancy Jennings (Communications)
• Todd Herzog (German Studies)

"Algorithms, Simulations, Platforms" (ASP) seeks to understand the media, infrastructure, culture, and emergent systems of our modern digital ecosystems, as well as non-digital appropriations and responses to those ecosystems, through the lens of humanities and social sciences. This approach is offered as a corrective to a dominant narrative that heedlessly champions "technology" without considering its due constituents and effects. By "algorithms," we mean the specific rules and computations used to sort and re-arrange data, from search functions to motioncapture to finance-predictive software. By "simulations," we mean the imitations of processes or systems, created via the combination of data, lived experience, and the interpretation thereof. By "platforms," we mean the combined hardware and software that constrain and afford certain forms of computation and user behavior. The proposed group draws on interdisciplinary fields such as critical algorithm studies, game studies, cultural studies, communication, and media studies to examine algorithms, simulations, and platforms as means of artistic, literary, and social expression. They both instigate -- and reflect upon -- the fraught societal dynamics of the 21st Century, and inhere within them centuries of capitalist and technological assumptions. The goal of the proposed group is an edited series of public media on these topics, much in the model of HASTAC or Culture Digitally, in the form of essays and podcasts published via the University of Cincinnati Press's Open Educational Resources.

Committee:

• Sunnie Rucker-Chang, German Studies
• Gergana Ivanova, German Studies
• Ashley Currier, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

This Research Group (RG) recognizes the roles of global capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, migration, and other movements in bringing cultures into contact with one another, often by force. Transnational Cultural Studies (TCS) builds on the insights of older fields, such as comparative literature and studies, and overlaps with new fields, such as comparative area studies. This RG emphasizes nimble, transnational comparisons over “global studies” perspectives that gloss over important distinctions between countries and world regions. TCS is poised to carry UC into twenty-first-century research excellence by overcoming disciplinary compartmentalization that keeps faculty and students from talking and learning across fields.

This RG will highlight Taft member departments’ current strengths in international research and attract faculty from anthropology, area studies (African, Asian, European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern studies), gender and sexuality studies, history, language and literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. Topics of interest to TCS members include: language and identity studies; “text, representation, and context”; popular and visual culture; postcolonial, postsocialist, and postcommunist studies; comparative racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, and religious studies; intercultural communication; and transnational social movements.

Committee:

• Kate Sorrels (Chair; History)
• Lora Arduser (English)
• Danielle Bessett (Sociology)
• Vanessa Carbonell (Philosophy)
• Jeffrey Jacobson (Anthropology)
• Michelle McGowan (Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies; Pediatric Medicine)
• Edward Wallace (Africana Studies)

Health humanities scholarship promotes interdisciplinary methods and theories that focus on the intersection of the arts and humanities, health, illness, and healthcare in order to understand the health experiences of patients, caregivers, and communities. It includes medicine, the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, allied health, and the community at large. We use the term, Health Humanities, rather than the long-standing term, Medical Humanities, in order to emphasize that we incorporate perspectives from within and also beyond the boundaries of medicine.

As an interdisciplinary group of faculty from seven departments in Arts and Sciences, our interests range broadly but particular areas of strength include contemporary and historical research on reproductive health, eugenics, medical ethics, rhetoric of health and medicine, health disparities, and trauma. We also have a strong interest in the allied field of Disability Studies. The group seeks to promote collaborative research and grant seeking in the field of Health Humanities and to organize events on and off campus that showcase this research, build connections to other research groups and centers on campus, and engage community partners.

Committee:

• Carolette R. Norwood (Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies)
• Tia Sherèe Gaynor (Political Science)
• Brandi Blessett (Political Science)
• Cassandra Jones (Africana Studies)

The social justice research group is composed of scholars whose research, teaching, and community activism prioritizes equity and inclusion and protection of our natural environment. We are deliberately invested in identifying and dismantling structural and systemic apparatuses that oppress, restrict, contain, demean, degrade, and deny the dignity of individuals’ humanity. We recognize human diversities across and within socially constructed categories such as “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “class,” “ability,” “religion,” “nationality,” “citizenship,” etc. We believe that equity and inclusion is key to social justice and that every human person is entitled to good health and material well-being and that any true justice is fairness driven and will actively seek to protect individuals’ autonomy, right and opportunities for a good quality life. The foundation of a good quality life includes: secure, clean and sustainable housing; access to health services and health care providers; employment with livable wages; an education; the right to live, work, and play in environments free of hazardous toxicants; rightw to bodily autonomy which includes the rights to marry another individual irrespective of gender, race, nationality, etc.; the right to have children or not and the right to live life in the absence of violence (interpersonal, spatial, state, and structural).