ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants

This collaborative project by UCR and LA Poverty Dept with LA County Health Dept and grassroots activists enhances ethical digital access to first-person narratives and archival documents from the Skid Row History Museum & Archive related to healthcare and housing justice. It foregrounds the lived expertise of Skid Row residents who are unhoused, low-income, use drugs, & otherwise marginalized to demonstrate community origins of visionary approaches to harm reductions, “housing first,” and peer-care networks. The project provides a primary source foundation for integrated housing and health policy, directly combating narrative loss, structural stigma, and the defunding of crucial public health programs. It builds capacity for advocacy, research, skills sharing and new knowledg co-creation.

Expanding Queer Cartographies addresses a persistent gap in queer history: where were the women? Working with LGBTQ+ archives and community advisors, we will digitize and map approximately 27,500 women-friendly and lesbian-friendly bars, restaurants, bookstores, and other venues from the lesbian travel guide Gaia's Guide (1975-1992). We will then integrate this data into Mapping the Gay Guides, a database and interactive map of gay male venues, presenting a multi-decade comparative spatial analysis of lesbian and gay male geographies on a national scale. Our deliverables include an upgraded website, interactive map, open datasets, scholarly journal article, and narrative vignettes - all of which make overlooked LGBTQ+ histories newly discoverable to community members and scholars alike

Since 1976, the Center for Oral History has documented Hawai'i’s working-class, Native Hawaiian, and multi-ethnic communities, centering voices often absent from formal archives. Its next phase highlights the contributions of women of color on Maui through a Mukurtu-based digital platform guided by Indigenous data sovereignty. Using recordings, transcripts, and culturally informed metadata, the project will ethically expand access to underrepresented stories. Digital tools, training modules, a mini-documentary, and podcasts will build community capacity and create a justice-driven, community-rooted repository for Hawai'i and the Pacific.

Our project will create a digital edition of a collaboratively-written 19th-century manuscript Ojibwe literary magazine, making a significant work of early Indigenous literature publicly accessible. Working with Tribal partners and an advisory board, we will develop digital tools that innovatively illuminate the contexts of translation, exchange, and appropriation crucial to the magazine’s production yet obfuscated in contemporary scholarship. With a 2023-25 planning grant, we developed editorial and workflow policies, built relationships with community partners, and digitized and transcribed all magazine issues. An ACLS grant would let us build on this success and enable us to build our digital platform and develop resources for reading and teaching the Muzzeniegun with our collaborators.

The Senegal Liberations Project brings together educators from the U.S. and West Africa to address the lack of attention to slavery and freedom within Africa. For descendant communities, and those around the world who continue to live in slavery's centuries-long repercussions, this project opens access to sources, tools, and analysis to craft a fuller and more just narrative of this fraught moment in global history. Its key source is the Senegalese Registers of Liberation (1857-1903), which documents 28,349 enslaved Africans in Senegal who presented themselves to French colonial officials to request certificates of liberty. Deliverables: accessible database of liberated Africans, public-school curriculum, collaborative research projects, animated digital story, bilingual website.

Writing Beyond the Prison expands a prior ACLS-funded initiative that created the WBP Living Archive, a national repository of manuscripts authored by incarcerated writers. This next phase builds a digital-justice ecosystem through two Edovo-based curricula: Herstory’s trauma-informed writing program and ZoMedia’s cooperative governance training. These modules enable incarcerated learners to develop craft and their leadership skills, and to submit manuscripts of any genre for publication, editorial mentorship, and archival preservation. By integrating humanities education, digital access, and authorship pathways, the project advances equity, strengthens academic and community scholarship, and centers the intellectual labor of people historically excluded from digital learning.