Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshops (RIW)

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”.

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.

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.