HILL Project

HILL Team Members

Shanna Salinas

Associate Professor of English
Co-Primary Investigator
New Orleans Hub Coordinator

Francisco Villegas

Assistant Professor of Sociology
Co-Primary Investigator
Kalamazoo Hub Coordinator

Bruce Mills

Professor of English
Digital Humanities Coordinator

Beau Bothwell

Associate Professor of Music
St. Louis Hub Coordinator

Margaret Wiedenhoeft

Executive Director, Center for International Program

Christina Carroll

Assistant Professor of History

Manfa Sanogo

Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies

Alison Geist

Director, Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement

Aiming to…

Combine experiential learning with social justice

We aim to combine K’s focus on experiential education, as vital to learning, with the definition of social justice that guides K’s internationally recognized Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership: “Social Justice recognizes the inherent dignity of all people and values every life equally. It calls for both personal reflection and social change to ensure that each of us has the right and opportunity to thrive in out communities, regardless of our identities. When we acknowledge that oppression exists and work together to end systemic discrimination and structural inequities, we increase the promise of a more just world.”

Ultimately, we seek to enlarge an understanding of the ways that the humanities remain relevant to our society by advancing innovative responses to interconnected issues. By incorporating place-based learning in the humanities curriculum, broadly defined, we aim to entice students to enroll in such courses, provide entry points to examine social dynamics across the curriculum, and deepen student investment in these majors. Our intervention centers the premise that the humanities can be vital sites for social engagement and change. In order to facilitate a nuanced understanding of this interplay of location and dislocation, we will simultaneously expand and narrow our study of the fractured landscapes of power by looking beyond and within Kalamazoo.