Welcome to the Discovery Research Hub
at the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry
The CICI-housed Discovery Research Hub allows graduate students to expand and refine their research while encouraging undergraduate students to explore and reimagine their futures as critical thinkers and professionals, whether within or outside the academy. The program seeks to catalyze and sustain progress on graduate writing/research by funding graduate Discovery Fellows to work in small research clusters with undergraduate students. For the undergraduates, the program offers a chance to experience the pursuit of independent research questions within a select community of like-minded students; they will essentially be participating in a small-scale graduate level research seminar.
CICI Discovery Fellows will assemble small working groups of 2-3 undergraduate student researchers around a theme related to their research, e.g. the origins of photography and developments in 19th-century fiction. These undergraduate students will come with, and may even be recruited for, their own interests in some part of the Discovery Fellow’s doctoral research. In the above example, one student might be interested in the history of photography as art, while another might be intrigued by the science that led to the development of photography, and yet another on the relationship between photography and print journalism.
The Discovery Research Hub supports the development of graduate students' dissertations while developing their leadership and mentorship skills. The Discovery Fellows and undergraduate student researchers gather about five times each semester to learn skills for creating productive mentoring relationships, applying for grants and fellowships, developing coherent pitches and presentations, and exploring archival resources both on and off campus. This workshop series, facilitated by the Discovery Initiative, fosters community among the graduate and undergraduate students which in turn has the potential to lead to further collaboration among them, their home departments, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.
Discovery Fellows will determine how their research clusters proceed. They might begin by identifying places in their research where additional thought partnering would be useful, then develop a reading list around topics of mutual interest, isolating points of intersection that will form the crux of the research cluster.
Two hypothetical examples:
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A Discovery Fellow working on a project involving the relationship between minimalist art, autobiography, and gay male identity might find two undergraduate student researchers: one with a background in art history and one with a background in gender studies.
This Fellow might then assemble three reading lists: One that covers their project’s most important texts, a second that focuses on the best sources on minimalist art, and a third that covers their field’s specific takes on gay male identity.
The Fellow would then convene their cluster to discuss texts from the central reading list, guiding the undergraduate researchers through major concerns or theoretical problems in the central field of interest. Through this process the Fellow would invite them to expand or even redirect this discussion in light of their own readings of both the central texts and the texts on the secondary lists–lists which the Fellow would teach them to expand.
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A Discovery Fellow working on representations of race and surveillance technologies might find two undergraduates: one with a background in ethnic studies or critical race theory and one with a background in AI. Each undergraduate would generate a list– one of them could even curate a list of artworks or performances addressing these themes– to bring to bear on the Discovery Fellow’s central reading list.
