Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshops (RIW)

STPP Alumni Chat with Tyler Hoard - Register Here!
Date and Time: Mar 12, 2026, 3:30-4:30 pm EDT
Location: Weill Hall, Room 3240
The Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program is excited to welcome STPP Alumnus and Associate Physical Scientist at the RAND Corporation, Tyler Hoard (PhD/STPP '24), for afternoon snacks and conversation. Tyler will share his academic path and current work experience, where he delivers high-impact policy research and analysis across national security, biosecurity, space policy, and emerging technology portfolios within multiple research divisions and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs).
Speaker Bio:
Tyler Hoard is an associate physical scientist at the RAND Corporation with interests spanning biosecurity, space policy, and emerging technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of Michigan, where he also earned a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Public Policy. At RAND, his research portfolio includes projects on biotechnology, AI, synthetic biology, food security, and the commercial space industry.

An interdisciplinary research group focused on the role of critical theory in the academy today and the question of how we study culture in our current political climate.

RIW for all things Yiddish (Studies)

This workshop is for clinicians in training who seek to enhance their skills in providing weight-inclusive health and mental health care. No experience is needed - please come to as many or as few sessions are you are able. Looking forward to having you as part of the conversation!

Join us for a public lecture with Megan Ward (Oregon State University.)
"The rise of grief tech, chatbots trained on the words, voices, and memories of lost loved ones, offers the alluring chance to continue a relationship beyond death. Grief tech is new, but that allure is much older, dating at least back to nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Today’s grief tech is connected to its Victorian predecessor by a shared culture of grief - one that seemed to have disappeared. While current psychological practices try to move the bereaved toward closure, Victorian mourning lingered in yearning. Bringing together Alice Stringfellow, a Victorian mother who corresponded her dead son every night, and Joshua Barbeau, a present-day aspiring actor who created a chatbot version of his girlfriend after her death, this talk explores how contemporary technologies might reveal the value (and risks) of using technology to redress the innately human problem of death."

A Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop focused on the nexus of exhibition, collection, curation, display, and representation within museums and museum-adjacent spaces. The group’s name, rummage, evokes both a materiality and an intellectual practice characteristic of museum studies more broadly. On the one hand, rummaging has a tactile quality. It gestures to the human role in how objects are placed and misplaced, organized and disorganized, thrown into juxtaposition, and often randomly re-discovered anew by individuals negotiating various value systems associated with objects. It evokes an image of coming to objects of the past with new eyes and curiosity. On the other hand, rummaging could also be used to describe an intellectual approach. In posing questions about the how and why certain narratives come to be exhibited and interpreted, we root around historical understandings of heritage and the power dynamics that lead certain narratives to become dominant. This process is guided by curiosity, a drive to understand, and a skepticism of ordering systems.
Founded in Fall 2023, this RIW takes the attics, closets, and cabinets of exhibition history as a starting point to engage questions relating to those spaces aligned with — or challenging — the International Council of Museums’ broad definition of a museum as an institution “in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage”.

Hi all!


We're excited to announce that the final RGFP meeting of this semester will feature an external speaker. Professor Rowan Bell (University of Guelph) will give a talk titled "Making Good Tea: Gossip as Practical Social Wisdom" on Friday, April 17, from 3:00–5:00 PM in Angel Hall 2271. The abstract for the talk is available here.



If you'd like to attend via Zoom, the link is here. We hope to see many of you there!




Best,
Yixuan & Valerie

The Forum for Research in Medieval Studies (FoRMS), first formed as a
Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop (RIW) in Fall 2010, serves as a structure
for the Medieval Lunch series and a reading group for graduate students. In its geographical, historical, and disciplinary scope, FoRMS aims to
provide an important forum for graduate students and faculty to discuss their
work as contributions to the broad field of “medieval studies.” At FoRMS
sponsored lunches throughout the semester, graduate students can present their
ongoing research and receive feedback from other members of the FoRMS
community. FoRMS also sponsors interdisciplinary reading groups and other
social events, which are organized on a more ad-hoc basis.

The Political Ecology Workshop (PEW) is an interdisciplinary space for scholars at all career stages with interests in political ecology and related critical approaches to the study of environment-society interactions. PEW brings together a range of divisions across campus, including Anthropology, History, Environment and Sustainability, Political Science, Sociology, and all Area Studies departments and programs. We have founded a collaborative, multidisciplinary community with a shared investment questioning how environments and societies are co-produced and the ways in which power and inequality impact the dynamics and understandings of this co-production. We have run PEW as an RIW for two years and all the workshops have been possible from our committed participants from diverse fields. This year, we intend to develop our membership further by inviting scholars from broader fields and promoting PEW on listservs across campus.

PEW supports graduate student development, including for earlier-stage students seeking interdisciplinary conversations as they develop environment-society research projects and later-stage students seeking to incorporate political ecology into their work. PEW emphasizes dedicated time for graduate students to receive feedback on their work and facilitates faculty-student mentorship. It allows students to access a range of critical environmental studies perspectives they might not have encountered through coursework or departmental activities, and to grow from the feedback and insight of faculty and peers who share this commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and professional development.