GOALS | ONE

Global Arts + Humanities will build intellectual community and capacity across the university through cross-disciplinary research and creative practices that respond to critical societal challenges

Traditional disciplinary structures and performance review processes often do not provide an adequate infrastructure to support crossdisciplinary inquiry and creation that cut across and connect previouslyseparated disciplinary domains. Global Arts + Humanities provides leadership and leverages existing strengths in order to build institutional capacity for cross-disciplinary collaborations — establishing a gateway to the integrated arts and humanities at Ohio State.

1:1 | Cross-Disciplinary Interventions

Cross-disciplinary interventions provide opportunities for arts and humanities researchers and practitioners to bring the insights and methods of their fields to facilitate engagement with and new solutions to critical societal challenges. To strengthen research networks across the university — and between the university and the community — Global Arts + Humanities has identified areas that typify 21st-century local and global challenges and opportunities. These are not content areas but heuristics for seeding crossdisciplinary collaborations. These areas include the multifaceted aspects of migration, movement and immobility that stem from socio-economic factors. The initiative also amplifies methodological exchanges that showcase the integration of arts and humanities modes of inquiry and discovery, including community-engaged research and creative practices. Additional areas of interest include climate justice, land and food sovereignty and social rights in health and cultural systems.

1:2 | Cross-Disciplinary Communities

Cross-disciplinary communities provide meaningful structural and material support for engaged and inclusive research. The Society of Fellows Program brings Ohio State faculty from across the disciplines together to share research around an annual theme that is transnational and trans-historical in scope.

This signature program supports individual faculty researchers and practitioners and facilitates the multi-disciplinary exchange of ideas and methods on a shared topic. The Society of Fellows inaugural 2020-21 theme was Human Rights Pasts and Futures.

Extinction | Imagination is the theme for the 2021-22 cohort. In addition to participating in a biweekly seminar, fellows organize a culminating year-end event to showcase their work.

The Postdoctoral Researcher Program builds on the success of Global Arts + Humanities’ 2016 collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies’ Postdoctoral Partnership Grant. The valuable presence of postdoctoral fellows at Ohio State enhances the university’s capacity for cross-disciplinary collaborations across academic units. To ensure clarity of expectations and transparency for postdoctoral

researchers and their mentors and to strengthen career development outcomes, Global Arts + Humanities has developed a postdoctoral mentoring program.

1:3 | Cross-Disciplinary Capacity Building

Cross-disciplinary capacity-building strengthens and leverages existing resources, entities and expertise to expand the university’s capacity for cross-disciplinary research that foregrounds the transformative role of the arts and humanities. These capacitybuilding investments include Centers and Institutes Grants competitions, among others. Global Arts + Humanities is growing a strong track record of collaborations with other Discovery Themes, including a forthcoming initiative with the Sustainability Institute aimed at building research communities around topics at the forefront of sustainability and resilience. An environmental justice film series and ideation workshop also are under development. As part of the Interdisciplinary Research Leads coalition, Global Arts + Humanities is involved in the development of promotion and tenure guidance language for cross-disciplinary research as well as strategies to support faculty collaboration and network building.

1:4 | Cross-Disciplinary Grants and Programming

Cross-disciplinary grants and programming sustain existing and seed new research and creative initiatives that advance the transformative impact of arts and humanities collaborations. Arts Creation Grants are dedicated to funding for the arts to seed new, impactful, arts-led research and creative productions informed by cross-disciplinary methods and practices. Centers and Institutes Grants include three categories of funding: Centers Grants (for individual centers); Collaborative

Centers Grants (to support cross-disciplinary collaboration between two or more centers or for institutes that house multiple centers or programs); and Summer Institute Grants (for cross-disciplinary research and teaching).

Race and social justice special initiatives allocate funds for research, creative practices and community engagedpartnerships focused on advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. To date, Global Arts + Humanities has run three special-initiative grants competitions: one in race, ethnicity and social justice; one in Indigenous arts and humanities; and one in racial justice and community engagement. As part of its rapid-response grants program (see below), the initiative has also collaborated with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to supplement investment in its Matching Funds for Racial Justice Seed Grants competition.

Innovative Interventions are time-sensitive, rapidresponse research grants designed to enable scholars and practitioners to bring the insights and methods of the arts and humanities to respond to urgent challenges. Innovative Intervention competitions thus far include COVID-19 Arts and Humanities Grants, and Matching Funds for Racial Justice Seed Grants. COVID-19 Arts and Humanities Grants — launched in the summer of 2020 — support projects that exemplify the importance of understanding health messaging and the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable, socially-marginalized and disenfranchised communities.

Cross-Disciplinary Digital Dialogues is a virtual series that brings together artists, scholars and activists working in a range of disciplines aligned with the annual theme of the Society of Fellows Program. Topics in the inaugural series included critical human rights, disability, incarceration, Indigeneity, environmental justice, cultural heritage and colonialism, and migrant and refugee rights. Mobile Methods Conversations foster dialogue on artistic and humanistic methods and practices and conversation about their adaptability to varying contexts.

Small grants include co-sponsorships and group travel grants that support interdisciplinary groups to attend conferences, visit universities or centers, or attend events or performances.