Displacement, Dispossession, Belonging, and Embodiment: Co-creating Translocal Sciences and Arts of Storytelling for Justice

This Grand Challenge intervention asks: Why does university research often estrange the very communities who step into advocacy and research partnerships with researchers, and what does it mean to engage equitably and collaboratively in responsible knowledge-making? These questions inform our work as an iterative trans– disciplinary process to rethink relationship building and knowledge co-production within and across communities. Drawing upon our longstanding cross-collegiate engage– ments with minoritized and refugee communities, we plan a series of dialogues on the themes of displacement, dispossession, belonging, and embodiment among researchers, community activists, scientists, dancers, writers, and artists located in Minnesota (including at the UMN), Cuba, France, and Germany. Convenings will delve into: (1) partners’ conceptualizations of home, displacement, dispossession, and belonging in their work; (2) the methodologies and strategies they use to create more just and equitable worlds; and (3) the ways in which we as researchers, scholars, and writers can learn with them, while also co-creating innovative knowledges and strategies among and across differing sites of struggle. Together, we seek to reimagine the roles and responsibilities of academic researcher and of land-grant institutions, with the aim of fashioning more equitable partnerships with communities to build responsible and just epistemic relationships across unequal locations. By creating spaces for community-generated knowledges that are attuned to the distinct histories, struggles, and vocabularies for justice, the project seeks to:(a) generate newtranslocal knowledgesaround displacement, dispossession, belonging, andembodiment;(b)theorizethescienceand artofknowledge-making indynamic ways so thattheexpertise,authority,andemergingknowledgescan be co-ownedbyall;and (c)buildand nurture an institutional culture of research and public engagement centered on ethical and equitable knowledge co-production at the University of Minnesota.