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Summer Institute for New Students

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2024 Summer Institute on the Humanities of Healing and Restoration
July 22-26, 2024 | Anti-Racism, Transformation, and Healing through the Humanities

DePaul’s Social Transformation Research Collaborative (STRC) examines and celebrates the cultural forms and traditions that people of color have created to survive historical and structural violence. Our stories, art, food, music, history, poetry, and religious practices have been, and are, sources of resilience, rebuilding, and intellectual community.

Look Up by Maici Williams
"Look Up" by Maici Williams

We are very excited to invite newly admitted DePaul undergraduates to become part of our Collaborative by applying for a one-week Summer Institute on Anti-Racism, Transformation, and Healing through the Humanities.

If selected, the new undergraduates will join a dynamic group of faculty, staff, current and past DePaul students, and special guests to explore the transformative and healing power of art, photography, literature, history, religion as well as the healing power of community gardens, botanicas, and apothecaries to people of color.


Students will explore questions like:

  • What cultural and spiritual practices have survived to sustain community and manage trauma, stress, and anxiety?
  • What might, for example, Rosa Parks, the Civil Rights icon, and Tina Turner, the pop icon, have to do with Yoga practice?
  • How have people of color and members of other marginalized groups used writing, poetry, fiction, music, art, photography, and other humanistic expressions to inform action and build new structures of anti-violence and anti-racism?
  • How have communities of color engaged in environmental space-making to reclaim health, community, and joy?
  • What particular skills and inspiration can we take from the humanities that will allow us to interrogate present circumstances critically, enhance or multiply the frameworks we use to understand things, and articulate alternatives or solutions?


What are the costs?

In addition to meeting new friends and mentors and learning more about DePaul, students will earn two hours of college elective credit; all travel, on-campus room and board, fees, and tuition expenses will be paid by DePaul.

Want to learn more?

Please contact strc@depaul.edu.

Ready to apply?

Admitted students may apply here.

Learn more from Summer Institute 2022 Students