The Co-Lab at RWU

RWU Public Humanities and Arts Collaborative

Our Mission

The interdisciplinary Co-Lab at RWU is dedicated to sharing and fostering inclusive narratives, representations, and histories that make historically marginalized or erased populations audible and visible. The Co-Lab at RWU cultivates knowledge rooted in authentic, reciprocal, and ethical collaboration between scholars, communities, and practitioners in the arts and humanities. We collaborate with communities to transform our disciplines through scholarship, programs, and methods that center community perspectives, needs, and knowledge.

Hidden Truths: Stories of Race and Place

Hidden Truths: Stories of Race and Place in New England and Beyond 2022-2023 Lecture Series

The Co-Lab @ RWU is pleased to present the third annual Hidden Truths: Stories of Race and Place lecture series. This series features the research and policy work of RWU faculty and staff that resurfaces untold histories and complicates received knowledge and understandings of our collective pasts. The series engages the campus community and the public in deeper understandings and informed dialogues around how past inequities continue to impact societal and cultural realities and disparities today.

2022-2023 Schedule
A student presents to a class of fifth graders

About the Co-Lab

The Co-Lab at RWU reimagines public stories, histories, and storytelling by changing the dynamics of whose stories get told, how, and by whom. The work of The Co-Lab at RWU centers historically marginalized or erased populations and invites them to work with us to investigate and tell a set of new defining narratives and representations for the New England region.

More About the Co-Lab
A student smiles and laughs while presenting research to a staff member

Focus Areas

The Co-Lab at RWU focuses on engaging the public in the areas of history, the visual and performing arts, heritage and heritage conservation, space and place, material and visual culture, historical narrative, and public education and intellectualism. Our investigation of topics related to inclusive narratives includes the spoken, the written, the visual, the theatrical, and the embodied, as we imagine the ways that people are both the producers and the products of their geographical and cultural landscapes.

Co-Lab Focus Areas
Students hold banner saying I stand on Native Land

Projects

Faculty, students, and staff across disciplines at Roger Williams are engaged in public humanities and arts projects that make underrepresented stories and groups in our region, our country, and around the globe more audible and visible. Working closely with communities near and far, these projects call attention to past and ongoing injustices, as well as the resiliency and creative survival of these groups.

Learn About Our Work

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