We offer an overview of our collaborative project entitled “From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of displacement” (http://umich.edu/~aacollab/). Since 2017, we have been funded through the Humanities Collaboratory, a cutting-edge research initiative established at the University of Michigan. Our interdisciplinary team includes eight faculty, eight graduate students, and 32 undergraduate students. Our mission is to analyze how language is entangled with cultural identity through the Patagonian Boers, a community that traces its roots to the South-African Boers who settled in Argentina after the Anglo-Boer War of 1902. We have disseminated our findings through six research articles, five public essays, and a digital archive. Our public essays, published in outlets such as Babel, The Conversation, Clarín (Argentina), Times Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed epitomize our goal of engagement beyond the academic sphere. In this talk, we will explain how our collaboration emerged, how we refined our collaborative process, and how we fostered undergraduate involvement in our research. Altogether, we demonstrate that altering the traditional educational structure while encouraging agency and creativity yields new forms of learning for all involved.

Please join us for this talk by Ana Silva Campo, with Nick Henriksen, Lorenzo García-Amaya, Ryan Szpiech, and Matthew Neubacher.