2025 Indigenous-Focused Summer Workshop

July 14th to July 24th, 2025

This workshop will feature��a balance of brainstorming sessions, skill building exercises, networking, and an immersion into complex, recurring issues.

The goal is to help participants identify the ways in which their scholarly work carries relevance to multiple sectors of society. Every activity accents the compatibility of making the most of the individual visitor’s distinctive temperament and interests, while also immersing the visitor in an atmosphere of teamwork.

Again, in 2025 we will be offering all-expense paid 10 day Indigenous-Focused Summer Workshop Intensive in Applied History for scholars whose research focuses on Indigenous history and adjacent academic fields. Post-docs, adjuncts, recent Ph.D. and M.A. graduates are encouraged to apply. The 10 day 2025 Indigenous-Focused Summer Workshop Intensive in Applied History will be held from July 14th to July 24th, 2025 (Participants will arrive in Boulder on July 13th and leave on July 25th).

The deadline for applications is 11:59pm MST, December 17th, 2024.

��APPLY NOW!
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Participants will receive:��

��Flight or mileage.

��Meals and incidentals.

��Lodging in lovely Boulder, CO.

��A $1,200 stipend.

Practical Skill Development

Our approach, strategy and methods enables participants to emerge from this��intensive as practitioners of Applied History with the following practical skill sets:

Achieving and Maintaining One’s Footing on Historical Terrain (and Sharing the Pleasures of that Achievement with Those in Need of It):

How to put ideas and supporting evidence in a sequence that permits and even welcomes alternative interpretations, and resists the temptation to present the material in a march toward a pre-determined conclusion.
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How to use analogies (and metaphors and comparisons) without being used by them. In other words, how to point out historical similarities and patterns while avoiding the peril of a misleading simplicity in suggesting over-exact equivalents.
How to mobilize historical examples to challenge the binary arrangement of people and phenomena into opposed categories. How to escape simplified either/or arrangements—and shift instead to observing and accepting the actual complexity of individuals and groups in history (and in the present!). While the people of the past rarely fit into anything remotely resembling the casting of good guys and bad guys, keeping a vigilant look-out for this habit of thought, with its power to flatten history and to shrink its meaning, is still a necessary investment of attention.

Achieving and Maintaining One’s Footing on the Unsettled Turf of Civic Discussion

How to use the term paradox, as an alternative to inconsistency, contradiction, and hypocrisy, to minimize defensive responses and the resultant sacrifice of audience good will.
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How to use humor, even when dealing with very serious matters, and how to know when humor will be (at best) a distraction or (at worst) an accelerator of tension.
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How—and when—to manage yourself to meet the standards of neutrality. In an era when many work energetically to maximize and escalate conflict, the need for referees, moderators, and conveners leaves an open door of opportunity to historians. And yet, in Applied History, while neutrality often gets better results than advocacy, there are situations where neutrality can border up on a compromise of integrity. How, in other words, to distinguish circumstances when neutrality is useful and effective, when it is frustrating but still the best stance, and when it is unethical and unmoored.

Cultivating Customs of Expression that Will Increase the Likelihood of Messages that Reach Audiences with the Intended Message

How to speak to journalists (who are, after all, writing the “first draft of history”) while keeping control of your message. In other words, how to think ahead and choose your wording in order to anticipate—and avoid!—misinterpretations and inadvertent misquotations.
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How to put together a plan for a speech, an op-ed piece, a blog, or a podcast, and how to recognize that your plan seemed great at first, but needs serious help before it is ready to go public. And then—most important!—how to cut short brooding and self-reproach, and to work fast and effectively to get the plan into better operating order.
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How to recognize situations when academic jargon or theory is so essential for intellectual integrity that it cannot be avoided, and how to make its meaning clear to non-historians. How, in other words, to serve as a translating service for the work of academics.

It’s easy to apply. Simply submit:

A three page, double spaced, essay exploring how your academic training has prepared you for reaching a broader audience and how it could limit you in this endeavor.��
Your dissertation title or research topic along with an abstract, if applicable.
Your CV.��
Optional: If you have written for a wider audience (blog, letter to the editor, etc.), please also include a sample of this work.��

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[video:https://youtu.be/uDXkOzkzbak]

Learn more about our Applied History Programs

“After my visit, these words continue to resonate as a takeaway, be authentic, be curious, be inspired, be bolder.”

-Alison Jefferson

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