By Shiraz Noorani, Graduate Student Researcher, Center for the Humanities, UC Merced
The Center for the Humanities at UC Merced has been hosting a series of community lunches on the theme of “Our Interwoven Futures.” Our second lunch took place on May 2nd, 2025, at the UC Merced Downtown Campus Center, where people representing various communities from Merced County gathered to discuss how to better envision a prosperous future.
The sub-themes for the community lunch included: Risk, Durable Justice, and Reconciliation; Transformative Communities of Care and Mutual Aid; Migrations, Diasporas, and the Future of Cultural Revitalization; and Designing Responses to Climate Impacts – from Wildfires to Floods.
The event provided a chance for community members to establish connections with each other and with faculty and staff at UC Merced. The lunch began with Ignacio López-Calvo, Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Presidential Endowed Chair in the Humanities, welcoming attendees before Christina Lux, Managing Director of the Center for Humanities and Principal Investigator of the Mellon Grant, introduced the themes and goals of the three-year Mellon Grant for participants.
The participants sat in four groups of six to develop the primary and secondary themes of the Mellon Grant for this year. Using a MindMap format, attendees brainstormed their concerns and visions for the future in a collaborative manner. Then, each group presented outstanding insights and concepts about co-creating and co-designing our futures together.
Later, two UC Merced professors, Patricia Vergara, Assistant Professor of Music, and Nigel Hatton, Associate Professor of Literature and Philosophy, presented their summer projects, “Soundscapes of Merced,” and “Universities, Prisons, and the Public” and received input and questions from community members. Eight graduate fellows worked together with them and in collaboration with community partners on public humanities initiatives throughout Merced County as part of these projects during the summer.
In the end, the community lunch became a meaningful space of dialogue, partnership, and collaborative imagination. Emphasizing justice discourses, care, migration, and response to climate change, the event made fruitful intersections between project leaders, scholars, and members of the surrounding community. This event illustrated the potential of public humanities to connect varied voices towards building our shared futures.