Impact

The IRISE community works to advance equity and justice with community-based research and initiatives across our city and state. We are uniquely positioned to make an impact both in academia and in community, serving as a bridge between two worlds that often do not interact meaningfully. Below you will find a selection of our recent work that is making an impact.

The image above is the Memoria de Nuestra Tierra by Judy Baca. The 10 foot by 50 foot mural tells the Hispano-Mexicano history of the Southwest with specific emphasis on the Colorado four-corners area of the United States and Northern Mexico. Learn More

Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future

DPFF Project Website

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IRISE Wins National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

IRISE partners with the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences to offer new classes that bring students into the study of Colorado's Chicane/x Past

IRISE received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pilot a unique interdisciplinary curricular project starting in the 2023-24 academic year. Part of a larger IRISE initiative called Documenting the Past, Fostering the Future (DPFF), faculty from the across the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences will use 12-18 courses to amplify Youth Voices in El Movimiento and the Struggle for Racial Justice along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountain West. The NEH grant will allow us to design a robust and integrated multi-course curriculum to engage students, faculty, and community members in place-based learning and humanities research to understand how the activities of young people from this area played a role in the past to inform perspectives for racial justice work in the present and future. These classes will engage students in primary research and give them skills in the production of original, community-centered multimedia narratives. Oral histories or testimonios that the students collect will contribute towards efforts to decolonize the archives of the Rocky Mountain West. At least 12 testimonios will be housed at History Colorado, who is also a partner in this effort. As students work with a team of faculty members and local historians, they will center young people in cross-generational dialogue as major change agents and thought leaders in the Chicane/x movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the larger struggle for racial justice today.

Curriculum

Fall 2023

Popular Music and Social Justice

Instructor: Runchao Liu

Winter 2024

Courses and Instructors:

Latinos in American Society

Instructor: Lisa Martinez

Social Movements

Instructor: Hava Gordon

Narrating Memory, History, and Space

Instructor: Esteban Gomez

Spring 2024

Latinos and Spanish in the U.S.

Instructor: Lina Reznicek-Parrado

Internship in Spanish

Instructors: Lina Reznicek-Parrado and Carlos Jimenez Jr.

Digital Anthropology

Instructor: Esteban Gomez

Audio Documentaries

Instructor: Runchao Liu

Activist Media

Instructor: Runchao Liu

American Women's History

Instructor: Elizabeth Escobedo

The courses will be part of the University’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program and are being developed in partnership with the Departments of

Students will be able to take the courses either as part of a major or minor or in fulfillment of their liberal arts requirements.

In Press

NEH announces $28.1 Million for 204 Humanities Projects Nationwide

DU student, Camila French, shares her thoughts about the project.

Follow us online @irise_du

"Being able to interview someone who grew up here allowed me to see Denver for what it is now and learn about how it used to be."

Camila French, DU Student

collage of chicano movement photos over map of northern Colorado from 1905

Project Team

IRISE has partnered with a group of scholars, scholar-activists, and community partners from multiple disciplines across DU and Colorado to be engaged in all aspects of this curricular project. Faculty partners contribute their passions and scholarly expertise to design and curate a curriculum that fosters the skills, insights, opportunities, and content that this project seeks to bring together, in collaboration with a diverse range of community organizations, voices, and partners.