Mestiza/o Melancholia reframes how constructions of indigeneity and mestizaje are understood in Mexico. Melancholia manifests in mixed race anxieties that mestizos project onto indigenous people. Mestizos mourn the ‘decimation’ of indigeneity caused by the ‘change/progress’ happening to indigenous people and confusion with their own indigenous identities. Utilizing semi-structured interviews as method and performance studies as a lens, I analyze mestizo-indigenous interactions at prominent events to understand how power relations and cultural appropriations inform mestiza/o identity.

Plastic – the quintessential modern material – has come to symbolize the destructive dimensions of human innovation. As an opening to social and environmental problems, plastic has inspired valuable research across the sciences, arts, and humanities. This interdisciplinary project based in Haiti examines how marginalized people’s mundane engagements with plastic complicate or challenge the ideas of scientists, analysts, and other environmental experts, offering a greater understanding of global environmental inequalities and creative solutions to contending with toxicity.

Bodies and life vests washing up on the Mediterranean’s northern shores have recently disrupted the idyllic image of the Mediterranean. However, it has long been an ambivalent space for the Palestinian people since the loss of their homeland in 1948. Joseph R. Farag's book project explores how a geographic reading of the sea in Palestinian literature and film can reshape our views of the Mediterranean and of Palestinian experiences of both place and exile.

A good scientific theory tells a story not just about the way the world is but about the ways the world could be. Scientists have produced many such theories, with variegated stories. How do they all fit together? How does the structure of their stories bear upon how we have gained, and do gain, evidence for them? Samuel C. Fletcher develops new concepts and mathematical methods for answering these questions, especially for modern physics.

The Sun is the most powerful particle accelerator in the solar system, but the methods it uses to do this have puzzled scientists for decades. Lindsay Glesener’s research group uses the novel method of focusing X-ray telescopes to investigate energy release and particle acceleration in solar flares. This involves building new telescopes and flying them into space to unravel the high energy mysteries of the Sun.

Traumatic orthopaedic injuries can leave patients with significant lifelong dysfunction. Some injuries, such as volumetric muscle loss, are particularly challenging and current treatment guidelines for skeletal muscle remain elusive. To understand these injuries, Sarah Greising’s team evaluates how the muscle environment is limiting to adaption during treatment (surgical, regenerative medicine, and/or rehabilitation). Her lab is committed to using the physiology to promote an endogenous environment supportive of treatments to improve long-term function for these patients.

Recent technological advances afford the ability to change the DNA, or genetic code, of human cells with unprecedented efficiency and fidelity, termed ‘genome engineering’. In parallel, the use of immune cells to treat cancer and disease has demonstrated great therapeutic promise, an approach termed ‘cancer immunotherapy’. However, immunotherapy has demonstrated limited success against advanced cancers. By implementing genome engineering in immune cells, it is now possible to develop immunotherapies capable of curing advanced cancer cases.

Christopher Pexa draws on Native American and Indigenous studies approaches to examine how a diverse range of archival, legal, and literary texts by Indigenous authors challenge and reimagine liberal citizenship, property, and sovereignty, as well as the ongoing colonialisms of settler states. His current book project examines works from Indigenous authors across the world that assert movement—considered in linguistic and aesthetic terms, but also as physical border-crossings—as a key future-oriented means of performing tribal peoplehood and tribal sovereignty in our present moment.

The Schroeder lab provides broad research opportunities for undergraduates in two main research areas: 1) exploring the biology of freshwater sponges in Minnesota and 2) examining the molecular mechanisms underlying sexual development and the impacts of contaminants on development in reptiles. This research purposely involves many areas of biology such as molecular biology, genetics, and environmental stressors, to provide undergraduate students with the opportunity to pursue research in their specific biological field of interest.

Increasingly frequent large storm events produce floods and landslides. These widen rivers, modify flood hazards, and reshape landscapes across Minnesota and around the world. Andrew Wickert links field observations, open-source sensor development, and physical experiments to develop comprehensive theory and numerical models that predict how changes in both climate and land use impact landscape stability. Through this, he works to explain the geological origins of our present landscape and inform sustainable land management into the future.