Funded Projects

The 6 projects selected for the 2025 Anti-Racist Digital Research Institute were selected from a competitive pool of over 30 applications. This is the third set of projects to go through the program, joining the cohorts from 2022 and 2024.

Queer Migrations: Zines and Anti-Colonial Storytelling

Description: Queer Migrations: Zines and Anti-Colonial Storytelling explores how queer migrants of color (QMOC) use zines as tools for empowerment, resistance, and community-building beyond dominant cultural frameworks. Zines serve as counter-hegemonic spaces, challenging narratives around migration, queerness, and racialization. Engaging southeastern Michigan’s QMOC community, educators, and researchers, our project bridges analog traditions with digital tools to preserve and expand the reach of these vital stories.

Awardees: day parker and Oluwaseun Ogunleye, doctoral students in Educational Studies at the Marsal Family School of Education

It Takes HEART To Grow: Archiving Repro Justice & Gendered Violence Islam-Based Organizing

Description: This project seeks to create a digital archive of the work of HEART, a national nonprofit organization working to advance reproductive justice (RJ), promote sexual health, and uproot gendered violence for the most impacted Muslims. The project seeks to: 1) engage in the memory-keeping of feminist and abolitionist Islam-based organizing through the collection of print documents, images, and other materials, 2) document the needs of Muslims on the margins, and 3) highlight the strategies and lessons learned in the last 15 years to strengthen future organizing efforts.

Awardees: Greer Hamilton, assistant professor of Social Work, and Kiran Waqar and Sahar Pirzada, HEART

From Archives to Access: A GIS Portal for UMMAA's Philippine Collections

Description: This project aims to digitize and make accessible the extensive collection from the University of Michigan's 1922-25 Philippine Expedition through an innovative online portal. The portal will integrate museum and archival resources into a comprehensive geographic information system (GIS), allowing community members and researchers to access, analyze, and engage with digitized field notes, photographs, and archaeological materials, including human remains and associated burial goods. Making these materials publicly accessible for the first time empowers communities and researchers to identify the historical communities most likely connected to the human remains curated at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA).

Awardee: Jim Moss, collections manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA)

Empowering Black Girls Through Digital Narratives: Addressing the Social and Educational Impacts of Off-Time Pubertal Development and Adultification Bias

Description: Black girls often experience puberty as early as 8-9 years old, making them the first in their age cohort to develop physically. These early transitions may expose them to increased scrutiny and adultification bias — a phenomenon in which Black girls are perceived as more mature, less innocent, and less in need of protection than their peers. These biased perceptions result in higher disciplinary action rates and lower emotional support levels in educational settings. This project aims to integrate digital storytelling with academic scholarship to reshape how we understand and address the intersection of development, bias, and education.

Awardee: Rona Carter, associate professor of Psychology

Black Power: A Digital and Physical Collection of the African American Energy Experience

Description: African Americans play a significant yet often overlooked role in the energy industry, ranging from inventions to labor to leadership. African American communities have also experienced systemic barriers, environmental injustices, and socioeconomic inequities related to the energy industry. This project seeks to fill the gap in comprehensive documentation and scholarly resources by creating a digital and physical archive that reinforces the narratives of resilience, innovation, and advocacy within the African American energy experience. By documenting and presenting these narratives, the project will contribute to a more inclusive and accurate historical record and inspire. 

Awardee: Tony Reames, Tishman Professor of Environmental Justice at the School for Environment and Sustainability

Banana Leaf Stories: Intergenerational Healing Through Eelam Tamil Ancestral Foodways

Description: In response to a community-driven vision for holistic healing, this participatory visual mapping project aims to establish a living, intergenerational, multilingual, and place-based digital storytelling archive that honors Eelam Tamil ancestral foodways. This project, created with and for the Eelam Tamil diaspora, will be hosted on an open-source, interactive story mapping platform, promoting shared collaboration and collective ownership. Working from the medicine and public health fields — where many existing maps reinforce colonial and imperial power, often marginalizing and pathologizing communities — this project serves as a counter-mapping effort. It makes visible the ancestral foodways that have sustained and cared for Eelam Tamil communities over generations, despite the ongoing threats of colonialism, genocide, and forced displacement.

Awardee: Vivetha Thambinathan, post-doctoral research fellow, Medical School

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