The Institute for the Humanities has launched a new collaboration with Rackham Graduate School that offers humanities-focused internships for U-M graduate students. Grounded in the idea of reciprocity, the program emphasizes mutual exchange between students and community partners, highlighting how humanities training can meaningfully contribute beyond the university while also being shaped by community knowledge and experience.
The program provides funded opportunities for graduate students to apply their humanistic skills in new contexts, contribute to organizations addressing vital community needs, and develop new professional experiences and perspectives. By working directly with community partners, students are encouraged to expand their understanding of where humanities knowledge can live and how it can support public engagement, collaboration, and social impact.
Support for this program is provided by the Mellon Foundation through the Humanities Without Walls Consortium.
Jasmine Ehrhardt, Prison Creative Arts Project
Jasmine Ehrhardt is a PhD Candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies. Their research engages in critical prison studies, digital media studies, and Asian American studies. Their dissertation "Making the High-Tech Prison: Media, Infrastructure, and Counter-Narratives of the Digital,” explores the knowledge production, analysis, and media practices of imprisoned radicals and abolitionists, and their relationships to digital technology. Analyzing the archives of abolitionist intellectual and political work from the 1970s to the 2010s—in print and digital forms such as zines, essays, personal correspondence, podcasts, TikToks, and other social media ephemera—this work shows how surveillance, security, and digital communications technologies have structured political organizing and repression inside U.S. prisons. Their research draws on volunteer experiences with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee in the Bay Area, California, and prisoner support projects in Michigan over the last eight years. Jasmine's writing has appeared in AfterImage, Journal of Visual Culture, and Amerasia Journal.
Jasmine will be working for the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) at U-M this summer, helping to contribute to PCAP's community outreach and supporting their 31st Annual Art Exhibition. They are excited to develop their skills in community engagement, outreach, and strategic planning, bringing their scholarly and humanistic research skills and volunteer experiences to support PCAP's ongoing success.
Irene Mora, African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County
Irene Mora, a historian of Detroit’s Latina/o communities, is a PhD candidate in History and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her dissertation, City Mothers: A Hundred-Year History of Latinos/as in Detroit, 1900–2000, centers Latina activism, urban life, and community formation. Her work sits at the intersection of U.S. urban history, Latine and Latin American studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and ethnicity, with particular attention to the Midwest.
She is also a public historian of Michigan history, committed to making the past accessible through community-centered storytelling. Growing up down the road in Dexter, Michigan, and Washtenaw County, telling a more inclusive history of the county she calls home is deeply important to her.
She has worked with Washtenaw County government developing online historical content, an exhibit, and short documentary-style video that highlights the many communities that shaped the county, with a particular focus on the histories of Washtenaw’s Indigenous Potawatomi communities and African American residents.
This summer, she is working with the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County on its Black Labor, Leadership & Civic Engagement in Washtenaw County initiative. As someone who grew up in a community where she rarely learned about the rich histories of the Black and Indigenous communities that helped build the county, she is deeply committed to making those histories more visible.
Eryn Talevich, Progressive Art Studio Collective
Eryn Talevich is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology, with a certification in Museum Studies. Her work focuses on the transformative capacities of textiles, exploring how movements of cloth across landscapes and persons offer profound insight into our humanity. Her dissertation, Folklux: Economies of the Local Exotic in Provençal Heritage seeks to understand how non-local colonial materialities are transformed into signifiers of local belonging and representation. Specifically, she looks to material objects that continue to carry aesthetic and linguistic markers of their “exotic” trade origins, as they present a unique paradox in being able to claim both global and hyper-local status, a term she frames as “FolkLux”.
She focuses on textile and ethnographic museums, artisans and luxury brands to trace the local transformation of these objects through institutional techniques of narrativization, affect and desire. Critically, she is interested in how vernacular/folk art is understood within larger frameworks of aesthetic legitimization, particularly once institutional power has deemed them worthy of broader consumption. She attends to how “uncomfortable histories” within historic (and present) relationships of colonial contact are legitimized, and how nationalist, regional, and luxury politics are deployed to handle the object’s paradoxical tension. Questions of appropriation, artisan labor, intangible culture and propaganda are key.
Her internship with PASC this summer is a refreshing enhancement to her work, and offers a much-desired opportunity for deeper connection to Detroit’s creative worlds. By learning through the progressive arts model, she knows her insights toward non-traditional arts will be significantly deepened. She hopes to gain a new sense of humility and inspiration toward institutional projects that work with local artisans, especially those so committed to the dignity of others.
