The College of Arts & Letters aims to lead a movement in humanities scholarship that engages the contemporary digital world with a discerning sense of critique rooted in ethical imagination and oriented toward creating more just communities.

Situated where digital theory and practice intersect with urgent questions of social justice and human difference, the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age (CDDA) animates a holistic strategy designed to attract, retain, and support collaborative leaders who think synthetically about scholarship, teaching, and the creative endeavor. Our aim is to advance the recognized strengths of Michigan State University in the digital arts and humanities through a focus on questions of race, inclusion, cultural preservation, global interconnectedness, and engaged scholarship. Our strategy includes three dimensions:

  • A Two-Phased Hiring Strategy
  • Creation of Research Consortium (called CEDAR)
  • Establishment of a Residency Program in the Performing & Fine Arts 

CDDA is shaped by three imperatives:

  1. To expose the limits of existing practices and structures of reality in order to interrogate the conditions under which they operate and thus to uncover what they enable and prevent;
  2. To discern what is possible in the wake of this exposure so that we might imagine more just possibilities of engagement;
  3. To enact practices of justice and freedom rooted in and animated by discerning critique.

For more information on the Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative, listen to this episode of the Liberal Arts Endeavor in which Dean Christopher Long, Chair of the Department of English Cara Cilano, and Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Jackie Rhodes discuss the motivation and push for this initiative.