For the 2022-2023 academic year, the research teams of Platform have joined up on the topic of Bloomington UnBound, a close look at the history of our city.
Since it is our final year, all of our projects will feature a public activation in the spring of 2023, where we invite the Bloomington campus and our city neighbors to come together and celebrate the stories of Bloomington.
Our team members have diverse backgrounds in race theory, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, labor studies, literature, folklore, cultural heritage, anthropology, archeology, public health, and archival history. They work in a multitude of creative traditions and are eager to focus their research on Indiana Studies. Together, they have committed to the goal of amplifying new and underrepresented Hoosier voices and stories, in order to generate more accurate and dynamic representations of the state’s past, present, and future.
Using both critical and creative methods, the team hopes to engage the state and its people in a series of self-reflective activities accessible to the population at large. With an intensive series of place-based endeavors combining heritage, history, demographics, social critique, politics, economics, law, and geography, the team will establish a more dynamic set of frameworks and a better vocabulary for understanding and addressing regional issues. Throughout, research will be attuned to the evolving dynamics of place and space, maintaining a perspective that accounts for the often complex interplay between the rural and the urban, the local and the global, and the traditional and the modern.
At its core, the Indiana Studies team is dedicated to answering the question, “What role can a major Midwestern research institute with significant strengths in the arts and humanities play in the progressive development of its state as a whole?”
