Funded Projects
Our inaugural cohort of awardees in the Anti-Racist Digital Research Initiative were selected from a competitive pool of over 30 applications.
Anti-HMoob Violence Report (AHVR)
Awardees: Thao Nguyen (PhD Student in History and Women's and Gender Studies at U-M Ann Arbor) with Choua Xiong and Maij Xiong (from Cia Siab, Inc. in La Crosse, WI)
This community-driven project will produce a white paper and digital map that tracks, documents, and understands the impact of violence against HMoob (Hmong) people within the most densely populated states of California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin from 1975 to 2019. Funding will provide unmet technical support, impact real communities, and evolve the understanding of hate crime documentation and activism.
Detroit River Story Lab: Planning the Architecture of a Collective Memory Commons
Awardee: David Porter (Faculty in English and Comparative Literature at U-M Ann Arbor)
An interdisciplinary initiative with the goal of re-centering the Detroit River as a foundational touchstone of regional cultural identity. The Detroit River Story Lab project aims to harness the power of place-based narrative to amplify marginalized voices and activate public spaces as sites of equitable and inclusive collective memory. Funding and support will be used to help plan and design a digital archive and user interface.
Digital Archive of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center
Awardee: Stephen Ward (Faculty in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies and the Residential College at U-M Ann Arbor)
This project will work toward creating a digital archive for the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, a nonprofit organization located in the home of these longtime Detroit activists. The project will organize and digitize an array of materials that have emerged from activities of the Boggs Center, as well as material documenting the activism and thought of James and Grace Lee Boggs.
It Was All A Dream: A Digital Ethnohistory of Contemporary Political Insurgency at Florida A&M University
Awardee: Charles H.F. Davis III (Faculty in the School of Education at U-M Ann Arbor)
This project proposes a “digital ethnohistory,” an alternative and activist new media project that curates digital artifacts from the student activism and political insurgency organized by students at Florida A&M University — one of the nation’s preeminent Historically Black Colleges & Universities — in the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. The goal is to create a more sustainable, interactive record of “communities of memory” from which activists can learn and mobilize in their own organizing years into the future.
Recollecting Flint’s Historic Southside
Awardee: Vickie Larsen (Faculty in English at U-M Flint)
This project gathers, catalogs, preserves, and remediates documents, images, artifacts, oral histories (in audio and video), art, music, and performance with and from residents of the Southside of Flint, which was razed in the name of “urban renewal” in the early 1970s and now lies beneath the I-69 and I-475 freeway interchange. Participating in this initiative will support the development of anti-racist protocols for handling and storing cultural heritage narratives and objects.
The First 100: 50 Years of Chicanas Changing Knowledge, the Digital Archive
Awardees: Lorena Chambers (Postdoctoral fellow in History and American Culture at U-M Ann Arbor) and Dr. Margaret Salazar Porzio (Curator, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History)
Of the 36.6 million Americans of Mexican descent in the United States, only 104 Mexican American women hold a doctorate in History. The First 100 brings together a multi-generational team of Latinas to document the field of Mexican American history by interviewing the women who have lived and shaped it. Funding will provide support to create a website prototype featuring oral histories and short-format video productions to eventually grow into a larger digital presence.