Humanities Labs

AI Futures Lab

AI Future Lab

The HRC AI Futures Lab is an interdisciplinary hub dedicated to understanding the power relations that organize AI systems and imagining ethical AI practices and futures. The goal of the AI Futures Lab is to bring people from the humanities, arts, social sciences, and sciences together to collaboratively examine AI technologies and their impacts on the world, including how AI intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and disability, as well as with environmental concerns.

Environmental Humanities Lab

White text reading The HRC’s Environmental Humanities Lab is a convening ground centering humanistic inquiry in a broader field of transdisciplinary environmental scholarship. We understand Environmental Humanities as an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that seeks to understand, interpret, and diagnose how social and cultural relationships with the natural world are mediated by texts, media, art, history, and embodied experience.

Graphic Narratives Lab

Black and white illustration of a person sitting cross-legged, happily reading a comic, with colorful swirls of imagination behind them Graphic narratives—ranging from cave paintings to wood cuts to comic books—are integral to how individuals and societies express and share views of their places in this world. The HRC's Graphics Narratives Lab is a central hub where faculty and students will meet to study the importance of graphic narratives within the humanities, and consider why and how faculty can implement graphic narratives into their pedagogy. The creative process underlying graphic narratives is explored through the lab.

Health Humanities Lab

White text reading 'Health Humanities Lab' on a dark blue background with swirling light blue particles. The HRC Health Humanities Lab fosters interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research collaborations that center on better understanding and critiquing the systematic and structural inequities that produce health and healthcare disparities, and on imagining and enacting alternatives. The goal of the Health Humanities Lab is to bring fresh perspectives from the humanities, arts, and social sciences, as well as from the Richmond community and beyond, to advance individual and communal well being.

Indigenous Humanities Lab

Close-up photo of a pot with a painted-on image of women holding water jugs The HRC Indigenous Humanities Lab will create vital spaces for collaboration between our scholars, students and Virginia's tribal nations, fostering meaningful relationships that transcend traditional academic boundaries.

Memory Studies Lab

White text reading 'Memory Studies Lab' on a black and gold background In the humanities, the term memory is often used to describe how social groups form and remember ideas about the past. Group memory is formed through social practices, such as commemorative holidays, monuments, language, stories, school curricula, popular culture, and other shared activities. The HRC Memory Studies Lab is a space to examine and engage with memory studies through an interdisciplinary research approach. We come from a wide array of disciplines, such as history, political science, education, comparative literature, paleo-anthropology, and urban planning, and we study memory in both local and global contexts.

Migration Studies Lab

White text reading 'Migration Studies Lab' on a purplish-brown background with an image of a globe The HRC Migration Studies Lab provides a forum and research home for all VCU faculty, post-docs, and graduate and undergraduate students interested in migration from any disciplinary or regional angle. The Migration Studies Lab enhances the collaboration between VCU and community partners who work with migrant communities, including Sacred Heart Center and New Virginia Majority.

Public and Digital Humanities Lab

White text reading 'Public & Digital Humanities Lab' on a dark purple background with a glowing pink grid pattern The HRC Public and Digital Humanities Lab serves as a central hub for connecting students, faculty, staff, and other community practitioners engaged in the research, pedagogy, and practice of public and digital humanities. The goal of the PDH Lab is to foster the practice of collaborative and innovative inquiry and teaching related to the public-facing dimensions of the humanities, whether in digital or other modalities.

Spirituality, Care, and Culture Lab

White text reading 'Spirituality, Care and Culture Lab' on a blue background with a textured paint pattern The HRC Spirituality, Care, and Culture Lab aims to foster and support humanistic inquiry into the intersections of spirituality, care, and culture among VCU faculty, staff, grad and undergrad students, and the wider community. Some of the lab's key areas of inquiry includes: the history of emotions; illness narratives; emotional healing; wellness culture, rejected knowledges, and conspiracy thinking; and how a humanistic approach to researching, teaching, understanding healthcare might support reverence for the human body for healthcare workers and patients.

Transformative Justice Learning Collaborative Lab

Red text reading The HRC Transformative Justice Learning Collaborative is a lab made up of artists, activists, educators and researchers dedicated to abolitionist praxis in all of its formations. Through collective study, activism and group projects, we are dedicated to community work, working with students, and supporting research/curricular projects that deal with abolition and abolition studies.