ACLS Sustaining Public Engagement Grants
Baltimore Field School (BFS) 2.0: Undoing & Doing Anew in Public Humanities at UMBC (Host Institution: University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
As part of UMBC’s Public Humanities program, the Baltimore Field School (BFS) 2.0 will continue to support a planning intensive that moves away from extractive research models and builds humanities projects developed with community partners. In the midst of the pandemic, BFS prioritized our partners and built trust by acting on their feedback and adjusting our objectives. BFS 2.0 will further expand these frameworks of equitable and ethical public engagement and advance these goals through: 1) 6 Community Fellows who will help develop models for community-centered projects and 2) 11 BFS 2.0 Fellows (graduate students and faculty) who will solidify ethical humanities research, teaching, and learning. Community Fellows include leaders from intuitions like the Baltimore Beat, Mera Kitchen Collective, Beautiful Side of Ugly, and Organize Poppleton. Their work advances social justice issues focused on three core tracks: public information, racial equity, and food and land justice.
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BIPOC Monumentality in New Hampshire (Host Institution: University of New Hampshire)
BIPOC Monumentality in New Hampshire will revitalize projects shared by the University of New Hampshire and two important local partners, the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire and the Indigenous New Hampshire Collaborative Collective that have faced setbacks caused by the pandemic. These projects center on a variety of monuments and related activities in the state of New Hampshire devoted to the history and cultural presence of underrepresented communities and include markers, story maps, land connections, and conversations. Monuments, in this conception, are not only created to commemorate the past but also to activate BIPOC lived experiences, resilience, and knowledge in the present as we confront challenges of the future (social justice, climate change). Project funding will flow to research, creation and installation of monuments and markers and support of staffing positions otherwise not fundable, all with the aim of building stronger communities.
Principal Project Team:
Breaking Barriers: Humanities Discourse within Carceral Settings (Host Institution: Middlesex College)
The Center for Justice-Impacted Students at Middlesex College provides access to higher educational programming centered on empowering humanities curriculum to justice-impacted youth. Our work falls under three interrelated modes of publicly engaged humanities: 1) engaged teaching, 2) engaged research, and 3) engaged public programming. Our project will repair the disruptions caused by the pandemic across two detention centers located in New Jersey through comprehensive humanities programming centered on an inside-out learning model. In turn, this will also revitalize interest in the humanities for current College students while bridging the gap between our campus members, including traditional college students, faculty members, and detained and incarcerated youth. The partners for this project include the residents currently detained in the Middlesex County Juvenile Detention Center and the residents currently detained in the Camden County Juvenile Detention Center.
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Collective Care: Responses to Natural and Human-Made Disasters in Puerto Rico (Host Institution: University of Puerto Rico at Cayey)
Collective Care is a participatory collecting and storytelling project that explores how communities respond to current and recent disasters in Puerto Rico as agents who shape their own history. The project brings together researchers, students, community members, and community-based organizations to record oral histories and develop collections at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, the National Museum of American History and in community spaces. The next phase of Collective Care focuses on expanding public engagement with the collections through storytelling projects in the form of a podcast, public art, and data visualizations that encourage audiences to consider climate change through local histories of autonomous organizing. We highlight the experiences of communities in central and northeastern Puerto Rico, as well as the diaspora, in collaboration with local partners the Clínica Legal Psicológica and Ciencia Puerto Rico.
Principal Project Team:
Community-based Knowledges and Visions for Racial, Health, and Climate Justice (Host Institution: University of Nevada, Reno)
The department of Gender, Race and Identity (GRI) at the University of Nevada, Reno pursues the interdisciplinary and intersectional study of identity, difference, and power. The project, “Community-based Knowledges and Visions for Racial, Health, and Climate Justice,” includes a year-long collaborative programming series involving Northern Nevada’s underrepresented communities; implements an undergraduate/graduate colloquium and an undergraduate internship course tied to this programming; and staffs the project through faculty time enabled by a postdoctoral fellowship and a predoctoral fellowship for a recent MA graduate. Planned community partners include: Desert Farming Initiative, Soulful Seeds, Hampton House, Asian Community Development Corporation, Domestic Violence Resource Center, Reno Initiative for Shelter and Equality, Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, Community Health Alliance, Northern Nevada HOPES, Black Wall Street, Reno Bike Project, River Justice, Northern Nevada Black Cultural Awareness Society, Indigenous Women Hike, Nevada Humanities, Inspire Sierra.
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Connecting Through Life Histories of Perseverance and Resilience (Host Institution: University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Excerpts from 39 life histories in the UH-Manoa (UHM) Center for Oral History archive will be broadcast in weekly five-minute messages of individual & collective persistence & resilience on Hawai’i Public Radio’s “The Conversation," to all Hawaiian Islands from August 2022 through May 2023. Each program will have a 2-minute ignite statement by a Humanities scholar & a 3-minute life history excerpt that are designed to inspire hope & lay a foundation for a resilient and engaged community. Themes explored include social justice; Native Hawaiian rights & culture; compassionate & visionary leadership; surviving internment & racism during World War II; overcoming Black prejudice in Hawai’i; surviving pandemics & natural disasters & preparing for climate change. The Hawaiʻi partners for this project include the UHM Department of Ethnic Studies and Hawaiʻi Public Radio, Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo Limu Hui and Jack Hall Hawaiʻi Housing Corporation and the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana.
Principal Project Team:

Micah Mizukami
Year:
- 2022
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Associate Director of Center for Oral History
Engaged Humanities Research Accelerator (EHRA) (Host Institution: Texas State University)
The Engaged Humanities Research Accelerator (EHRA) will reinstate enrich, and support exhibition projects advancing engaged humanities research slowed or halted by COVID. Faculty and students partner with communities hit hard by the pandemic to create knowledge and increase community, cultural, and educational engagement addressing timely issues of national and global importance through humanities inquiry, dialogue, and insights about racial equality, America's diverse history, US-global relations, public health, and pandemic recovery. EHRA will accelerate and bolster these projects with meta-support including (1) a community advisory board for input and recommendations and (2) a meta-analysis of best practices and recommendations for enhancing engaged humanities research. Community partners include the Citizens Fire Academy Alumni Association of San Marcos, San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District (ISD), Texas State Development Board and Der Stadt Friedhof cemetery in Fredericksburg, Texas Association of Charitable Clinics, Alliance LGBTQIA in San Marcos, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Williams Career School of Excellence, San Marcos Youth Services, and the Hays County Youth Initiative, San Marcos (SM) Library, the San Marcos Youth Advisory Community Council, and Austin ISD.
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Flint Neighborhood History Project: Phase Two (Host Institution: University of Michigan-Flint)
The Flint Neighborhood History Project: Phase Two is an urban memory project that documents and interprets residents’ artifacts and stories of Flint, Michigan's original Black neighborhoods. These neighborhoods, segregated by federal redlining policies and destroyed by urban renewal projects, now live in the cultural networks that connect displaced residents. Members of the project team gather, catalog, preserve, and remediate documents, images, artifacts, oral histories, art, and music. Digitized materials are prepared for long term preservation and for academic and public use through web-based spatial, thematic and narrative visualization; for critical and creative curation and exhibition in public spaces; and for research into the nexus of communal memory and received historical narratives. Project partners include the University of Michigan–Flint, the Sloan Museum of Discovery, the Neighborhood Engagement Hub, the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, the Sylvester Broome Empowerment Village, the University of Michigan Libraries Digital Scholarship Service team, and neighborhood leaders.
Principal Project Team:

Jerome Threlkeld
Year:
- 2022
The Sloan Museum and Longway Planetarium
Community Engagement Coordinator
Freedom & Captivity (Host Institution: Colby College)
The Freedom & Captivity Curriculum Project will create curricula based on the materials generated through the Fall 2021 collaborative, statewide public humanities Freedom & Captivity initiative, which explored how to imagine an abolitionist future in Maine. The initiative included exhibitions, podcasts, film and photography projects, performances, presentations, workshops, and didactic materials, and was created with the participation of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. These materials are collected into an online archive, which will be the basis for creating curricula to be uploaded onto technology used inside Maine’s prisons. The curricula, structured around key humanities themes, is for college courses, discussion groups, and community classes taught by incarcerated people. The community partners for this project include Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, Maine Department of Corrections, Maine Prison Education Partnership, and Opportunity Scholars Network.
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Frost Town Archaeology: Accessibility, Environment, and Community in the Finger Lakes Region (Host Institution: The College at Brockport, State University of New York)
Frost Town Archaeology (FTA) is a SUNY Brockport project based at the Cumming Nature Center in South Bristol, New York. It was started in 2017 as a public archaeological project, intended to provide access points for local communities, descendants, and students from SUNY Brockport, which is a regional public college that serves low-income and diverse students. The archaeology of the 19th century logging town speaks to Euro-American environmental destruction, climate change, and heritage production in the local area. In 2020, the pandemic derailed FTA, resulting in cancelled seasons and frozen funding from an economically embattled SUNY Brockport. In 2022, with the support of the ACLS, we will rebuild our programming and create a publicly engaged future for Frost Town Archaeology. Our community partners include the Cumming Nature Center of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, the Bristol Hills Historical Society, and the Naples Historical Society.
Principal Project Team:

Alexander Joel Smith
Year:
- 2022
The College at Brockport, State University of New York
Assistant Professor
Graduate Public Humanities Experiential Learning Partnerships (Host Institution: Rutgers University-New Brunswick)
The Division of Humanities at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences supports collaborative experiential learning opportunities between humanities graduate students and public humanities organizations in the form of summer internships. Students receive a stipend compensating them for their contributions to the organization’s work, while organizations receive a stipend compensating them for supervising and mentoring students. In addition to sustaining a network of public humanities engagement in our region, this program benefits the university by helping us carry out our mission of pursuing scholarship that supports our communities, provides students with valuable professional training, and provides organizations with labor and funding for mentorship. Collaborators on this project to date have included: New Jersey Council for the Humanities, Rikers Public Memory Project, coLAB Arts, Rutgers Initiative for the Book, Rutgers University Press, Princeton University Press, Regional Plan Association, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and the American Philosophical Society’s Center for Digital Scholarship.
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Greek Drama/Black Lives: Intergenerational Collaboration in Philadelphia (Host Institution: Bryn Mawr College)
This project is designed to restore and fortify relationships between Bryn Mawr College and two institutions in Philadelphia that have been severely affected by the pandemic and that serve a wide socio-economic demographic: the Community College of Philadelphia and E. M. Stanton School (K-8) in South Philadelphia. We are creating a year of vibrant outreach programming including classes, talks, workshops, and informal mentoring, and will build to a collaborative production of a play inspired by and adapted from Medea, a tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. The play has been reconceived to place at its center questions of race and familial conflict and their impact on Medea's children: this is “Greek theater through Black eyes.”
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PrisonPandemic: Building an Infrastructure for Engaging Incarcerated Voices (Host Institution: University of California, Irvine)
PrisonPandemic is a digital archive of incarcerated voices in the COVID-19 pandemic. Since inception in 2020, the project has collaborated with community partners (VNON, Underground Scholars, Project Rebound, members of Essie Justice Group, Initiate Justice, Jail Guitar Doors, OC Friends of Detainees, Place4Grace, the Youth Offender Program) and 170 undergraduates to collect 2600 letters, 440 phone calls, and 300 artworks from people in 50-plus carceral facilities. The project is now transitioning from urgent story-collecting to sustainable story-processing and outreach, centering marginalized, under-represented voices. To advance the project’s pedagogical model of archiving and publicly engaged humanities for high school, college, and incarcerated students, the project team will institutionalize a replicable archive-based writing course, and develop pedagogical materials and partnerships with state prison facilities, state universities (including partners at UC Berkeley, Davis, Hastings, LA, Merced, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco), and Orange County high schools to increase awareness and accessibility.
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Restoring Connections: The South Side Home Movie Project and Cultural Preservation in Chicago (Host Institution: University of Chicago)
The South Side Home Movie Project collects, preserves, digitizes, researches and exhibits home movies filmed by residents of Chicago’s South Side from the 1920s-1980s. The pandemic disproportionately impacted the Project’s core community of elder film donors and South Side neighbors, and brought its capacity to preserve and share their fragile materials to a standstill. The Restoring Connections project will recover vital connections to local donor families through the preservation and digitization of their films, recording of their oral histories, and activation of their home movies across multiple public platforms. Additionally, it will re-engage the neighbors and partner organizations whose critical role as community archivists was abruptly halted, and support students whose customized cataloging work within SSHMP was suspended. Local partners include the DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago Public Library, Washington Park Camera Club, Center for Home Movies, and Mather Senior Residential Program.
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Revitalizing Community Engagement Humanities Projects (Host Institution: Northern Arizona University)
This proposal supports the revitalization of two undergraduate projects of the Sustainable Communities program at Northern Arizona University: Community-University Public Inquiry, and the Community Engagement Minor. Each program has a history of high-impact public engagement that gives students valuable experience in community-based research and organizing, helps strengthen democratic participation, and enables underresourced community partners to benefit from university research capabilities. Students work with a range of partner organizations to address issues including climate justice, racial equity, public health, immigrant inclusion, housing affordability, and equitable food systems. Both programs have been significantly and adversely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The revitalization project allows an increased number of graduate students to serve as mentors for undergraduate researchers, and also supports several community partner organizations. Local community partners include the Northern Arizona Interfaith Council, the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals, St. Mary’s Food Bank, Grand Canyon Trust, and the City of Flagstaff.
Principal Project Team:
Sustaining Collaborative Approaches to the Public Interpretation of Indigenous History at Mission Santa Clara, California (Host Institution: Santa Clara University)
Including the perspectives and voices of Native people is a crucial component of public engagement with California’s Spanish colonial mission sites. This project supports the implementation of community-developed plans, disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, to enhance the public interpretation of Indigenous Ohlone history at Mission Santa Clara on the present-day campus of Santa Clara University. University personnel and Ohlone partners will co-create public-facing interpretive materials, including a multimedia display, that honor the Native people who lived, worked, and died at Mission Santa Clara between 1777 and the 1840s. Funding supports archival research, community collaboration, student involvement, and display fabrication and installation. Local partners for this project include the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Ohlone Indian Tribe.
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Sustaining Public Engagement through the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project of Rio Hondo College and its Partners in Community (Host Institution: Rio Hondo College)
The grant shall sustain twelve months of public programming between the Mesoamerican Clay-Figurine Project and its partners. The 2022-23 program involves three public forums hosted at the East Side Café, a Zapatista-Maya inspired community center in El Sereno. These forums shall be followed-up by one public book reading with a live Q&A part hosted by the Los Angeles Indigenous People’s Alliance. To cap the programming, one public health symposium will be held at the Association of Raza Educators headquarters in Los Angeles. These five public meetings shall feature public intellectuals instructed to lead the co-creating and sharing of knowledge in the areas of racial equity, educational sovereignty, and public health. Santiago Andres Garcia, Professor of Anthropology (Rio Hondo), and Lizette “Lucha” Arévalo, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o/x Studies (Rio Hondo) shall steer the yearlong efforts.
Principal Project Team:
The Critical Inquiry Collective Project (Host Institution: University of Puget Sound)
The Critical Inquiry Collective (CIC) will rebuild the collaborative prison reading group, which was disbanded due to the pandemic. The project partners with a higher education in prison program to 1) re-create the Critical Inquiry Collective to support reentry for people who have served long sentences in prison 2) publish a book about the project and 3) present about the Critical Inquiry Collective to people still in prison to support re-organizing it on the inside. In the new iteration of this project, participants will collaborate to reimagine reentry and intellectual community by reading texts on freedom and imprisonment. The local partners for this project include the University of Puget Sound, the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, and the Washington Department of Corrections.
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The East Marshall Street Well Project’s Community Engagement Expansion Initiative (Host Institution: Virginia Commonwealth University)
The VCU East Marshall Street Well (EMSW) Project is a descendant-community-driven effort, implemented to restore dignity to human remains from the nineteenth century and primarily of African descent, discovered in an abandoned well on the MCV Campus. The EMSW Community Engagement Expansion Initiative supports reinvigorating community and VCU faculty involvement in three areas: public education, community research, & on-going public communication around the EMSW's history of structural and medical racism. This work repairs pandemic-related disruptions to implement the existing descendant community (known as the Family Representative Council) recommendations by creating focused and innovative initiatives to restore community engagement momentum. The local partners for this project are: College of William and Mary (W&M) in Williamsburg, W&M anthropologist and FRC member Dr. Joseph Jones, community historian Lenora McQueen, community history educator Ana Edwards, and filmmaker Dr. Shawn Utsey.
Principal Project Team:
The Life Sentence: Prison Education After the Degree (Host Institution: Bennington College)
Over 200,000 Americans are currently serving a life sentence. Most prison education programs terminate with a college degree. How can we make the humanities more accessible to those serving life sentences in the United States? What transformations might the humanities bring to this often forgotten population? This project centers literature and history as opportunities for those serving life sentences to deeply engage in inquiry, creativity, and human dignity. Through innovative curricular offerings and extracurricular programming, this project will overcome the headwinds of COVID-19 and develop a national model for opening the humanities to the unique needs and aspirations of those serving life sentences today.
This project partners with New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) and the administration of Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, NY. This project also remains in ongoing conversation with the Bard Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison and the New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison.
This project partners with New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) and the administration of Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, NY. This project also remains in ongoing conversation with the Bard Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison and the New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison.
Principal Project Team:
The MexiCali Biennial: The Land of Milk and Honey (Host Institution: California State University, San Bernardino)
The Land of Milk and Honey is a series of multi-disciplinary traveling arts and culture programs presented by The MexiCali Biennial and partnering institutions located throughout the Californias and along the border region. Drawing inspiration from John Steinbeck, the program will provide audiences with a comprehensive look at expanded modern and historical views of Agriculture and related subtopics including labor, migration, and food security, through exhibitions, panel discussions, film screenings, music programs and community-based interactive projects. Partnering institutions include California State University, San Bernardino, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Cheech Center for Chicano Arts and Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, Steppling Gallery at San Diego State University, IVC (Calexico), Planta Libre Espacio Experimental (Mexicali), Museo IIC (Mexicali), Best Practice Gallery (San Diego), San Bernardino County Museum, the Library of Congress, Hispanic Reading Room and ESTA, an NIH-funded program housed at California State University, Monterey Bay.
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The Solidarity Journalism Initiative: Improving Representations of Marginalized Communities Through Ethical Storytelling (Host Institution: University of Texas at Austin)
The Solidarity Journalism Initiative helps digital storytellers improve their representations of marginalized communities by bringing practical knowledge from community-based organizations to journalists in news media organizations. Digital storytelling has great potential to advance solidarity with marginalized communities. Too often, though, digital storytelling through news media perpetuates unethical stereotypes, dehumanizing rhetoric, and maudlin appeals. Solidarity storytelling techniques offer a grounded remedy for this issue. This project partners with community organizations across the United States to develop workshops, digital resources, and individual consultations for journalists, educators, and students who, in the service of social justice, seek to end longstanding unethical storytelling practices. Community partners for this project include Reframe (Resolve Philly), Press On (A Southern Media Collective for Movement Journalism), and The View from Somewhere.
Principal Project Team:
Third World Feminist School (Host Institution: University of Miami)
Third World Feminist School (3WFS) is a popular education initiative based in South Florida since 2021. The project is a radical learning space for local workers through participatory learning, guided lessons on the history of global liberation movements, and a roster of visiting lectures by organizers and scholars. Revisiting the contributions of feminists of color of the 1970s and 1980s, 3WFS challenges participants to move beyond an empty multiculturalism and towards a revolutionary coalition between women of color from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This iteration of the school will be a multilingual version held in-person, with readings and activities translated into Spanish and Haitian Kreyòl. Participants are offered funding, childcare, and other support to empower their weekly participation in 3WFS. Our local collaborators are Miami Worker’s Center and (f)empower.
Principal Project Team:
Writing Beyond the Prison: Reimagining the Carceral Ecosystem with Incarcerated Authors (Host Institution: Stony Brook University)
“Writing Beyond the Prison” redresses productive losses from COVID-19 to programs that support individuals and communities impacted by the carceral system. Faculty and graduate students at Stony Brook University will work with our community partners, Herstory Writers Workshop and the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation, to bring the voices of those most directly impacted by the carceral system into the public conversation. We will create a publicly accessible, web-based Living Archive to publish and preserve the writings of people within the carceral ecosystem as a rich public history research and curriculum-building initiative.