Funded Projects

The 6 projects selected for the 2026 Anti-Racist Digital Research Institute were selected from a competitive pool. This is the fourth set of projects to go through the program, joining the cohorts from 2022, 2024, and 2025.

Black Ephemera: Reconstructing Black National and Diasporic Identities in Twentieth-Century Argentina

Description: “Black Ephemera: Reconstructing Black National and Diasporic Cultures in Twentieth-Century Argentina” aims to digitally preserve, catalog, and analyze the Unión Caboverdeana archive in Buenos Aires. Founded in 1932, this collection — letters, photographs, publications, and press materials — spans over 90 years, highlighting Afrodescendant history and culture in a country often denying its Black communities. By collaborating with community members, digitizing an initial sample of fifty family photos, and creating a multilingual digital repository, the project seeks to foreground Afro-Argentine and Cape Verdean agency, disrupt narratives of racial exceptionalism, and advance anti-racism, migration, and critical media studies.

Awardees: Marisol Fila (she, her, ella), postdoctoral lecturer in Romance Languages and Literatures

Archiving the Digital Voices of Black Horror and True Crime Podcasters

Description: Archiving the Digital Voices of Black Horror and True Crime Podcasters is a digital oral history and archival project that documents the labor, narratives, and cultural contributions of Black creators in the horror and true crime podcasting space. By centering the lived experiences and labor of Black podcasters, this project advances anti-racist media scholarship by preserving digital storytelling practices and audio production processes that traditional archives have historically overlooked, particularly those created by marginalized communities, and by documenting multifaceted digital materials these podcasters created in their podcasting ecosystems. This project aims to build a publicly accessible digital archive consisting of oral histories from the podcasters themselves, digital documentation (e.g., production notes, podcast scripts, social media materials), audio episodes, and other creative labor from Black horror and true crime podcasters.

Awardees: Kristen Leer, Ph.D. candidate and NSF-GRFP Fellow in Communication and Media

What the Walls Cannot Hold: Women’s Intersectional Experiences of the Carceral State

Description: Although the U.S. prison-industrial complex has profoundly shaped the lives of women, there remains a lack of attention to women’s experiences working and living within carceral systems. This project addresses that gap by creating an anti-racist digital space to document, preserve, and share women’s experiences across carceral roles. We propose to design an interactive website that presents a history of women’s engagement with the carceral system. The site will place formerly incarcerated women in conversation with women leaders in corrections, with the goal of imagining more humane approaches to public safety and accountability.

Awardee: Francine Banner (she/her), professor of Behavioral Sciences and 2025-2026 Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the Institute for Humanities Research, and Anna Müller (she/her), professor of History and director of the UM-Dearborn Honors Program

Mapping Impact: Uncovering Hidden Histories in TYA

Description: Hidden and Erased TYA Histories is an emerging digital humanities project that documents, preserves, and amplifies the overlooked contributions of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in Theatre for Young Audiences. Although TYA is a crucial cultural space for children, families, and youth artists, the historical narrative of the field has been shaped by predominantly white institutions whose archives, production histories, and leadership rarely include the artists and communities of the global majority who have built, sustained, and transformed the field. This project seeks to intervene in that longstanding erasure through anti-racist and community-accountable digital research practices.

Awardee: Shavonne Coleman (she/they), assistant professor in Theater & Drama

State-level legislative mandates for the inclusion of local Native histories, cultures and sovereignty in k-12 schooling

Description: The United States (US) has 574 federally recognized tribes, in addition to many more who are not formally recognized. These tribes and the thousands who consider themselves tribal citizens live in every corner of the US. However, only a fraction of states, approximately eleven, mandate that schools teach about local tribal histories, cultures and sovereignty via specific legislation, a strategy not yet well studied. (Some research exists on an alternative strategy, which is to simply include such content in state standards.) We investigate the differing processes of creating these laws, as well as the resultant legislation with the goal of promoting this strategy among Native American activists, educators, policymakers, and the general population. 

Awardee: Cherry Meyer (she/they), assistant professor in Linguistics and American Culture, core faculty in the Native American Studies program

SE Black Women's Oral history chatbot

Description: This project will create a Black women’s oral history chatbot trained on oral histories of Black women in Southeast Michigan to support political engagement and participation within local Black women communities. Drawing on original oral histories collected from Black women in Southeast Michigan born before or shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, as well as publicly available oral history collections that include Black women from the region, such as the A.P. Marshall Oral History Projects in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, the project will develop an LLM-based chatbot that enables users to easily learn about and ask questions related to Black women’s sociopolitical history and activism.

Awardee: Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin (she/her), assistant professor in the School of Information

Third cohort (2025)

• Queer Migrations: Zines and Anti-Colonial Storytelling by day parker and Oluwaseun Ogunleye
• It Takes HEART To Grow: Archiving Repro Justice & Gendered Violence Islam-Based Organizing by Greer Hamilton, Kiran Waqar, and Sahar Pirzada
• From Archives to Access: A GIS Portal for UMMAA's Philippine Collections by Jim Moss
• Empowering Black Girls Through Digital Narratives: Addressing the Social and Educational Impacts of Off-Time Pubertal Development and Adultification Bias by Rona Carter
• Black Power: A Digital and Physical Collection of the African American Energy Experience by Tony Reames
• Banana Leaf Stories: Intergenerational Healing Through Eelam Tamil Ancestral Foodways by Vivetha Thambinathan

Second cohort (2024)

• Al-Shatat: A Digital Archive for the Palestinian Diaspora by Tam Rayan
• A Digital Collection as Narrative and Visualization of the Journey of Resettled Refugees by Dr. Odessa Gonzalez Benson
• Digital StoryXchange: Connecting Classrooms, Cultures, and Continents in a Displaced World by Dr. Kristian D. Stewart
• Empowering Tenants by Bobby Madamanchi and Rachael Zuppke
• Riverbend Neighborhood Historical Analysis Project by jøn kent and Brooke Troxmondo
• Uncovering History: The Legacies of Black Mechanical Engineers at the University of Michigan by Dr. Solomon Adera and Susan Cheng

Inaugural cohort (2022)

• Anti-HMoob Violence Report by Thao Nguyen with Choua Xiong and Maij Xiong
• Detroit River Story Lab: Planning the Architecture of a Collective Memory Commons by David Porter
• Digital Archive of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center by Stephen Ward
• It Was All A Dream: A Digital Ethnohistory of Contemporary Political Insurgency at Florida A&M University by Charles H.F. Davis III
• Recollecting Flint’s Historic Southside by Vickie Larsen
• The First 100: 50 Years of Chicanas Changing Knowledge, the Digital Archive by Lorena Chambers and Dr. Margaret Salazar Porzio