Funded Projects Center Equity-Based Change

The Humanities Without Walls Consortium (HWW) has announced five new projects funded by the third Grand Research Challenge. One of two major initiatives at HWW, the Grand Research Challenge provides grants for teams pursuing research with a commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution. Each of the five interdisciplinary research teams will receive an award of $150,000 over a two-year period, provided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Reciprocity and redistribution methodologies are at the center of HWW’s work to support humanities research that is not only publicly engaged but co-designed by community partners alongside faculty and graduate students. These methods aim to support collaborative scholarship inclusive of local and regional institutions and communities in recognition that expert knowledge making exists beyond as well as within the academy.

Applicants were prompted to build their proposals around the question of how collaborative humanities research can address the most compelling and urgent questions of our time—including global displacement, water and food justice and racial disparities—and how to design a humanities ecosystem that is truly “without walls.”

For the past seven years, the HWW consortium has been guided by these questions, creating new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities. Headquartered at the Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the HWW consortium links sixteen research universities in the Midwest and beyond. By leveraging the strengths of multiple campuses, the consortium has developed a range of interdisciplinary research teams through more than three dozen unique collaborative project awards.

Antoinette Burton, HWW Principal Investigator (PI) and HRI director said, “The Grand Research Challenge is an opportunity for humanities researchers to engage across institutions in genuinely equal and ethical partnerships, demonstrating that equity-based change can be built into projects from the ground up. We have a lot to celebrate in the humanities at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at Humanities Without Walls.”
 

GRAND RESEARCH CHALLENGE PROJECTS

Rose Brewer, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

“Environmental Justice Worldmaking: Redistribution and Reciprocity for a Just Transition”

Aymar Jéan Christian, Northwestern University

“Black Trans in the Americas”

Robert Morrissey, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“Reclaiming Stories: (Re)connecting Indigenous Painted Hides to Communities through Collaborative Conversations”

Nadine Naber, University of Illinois Chicago

“Amplifying Mothers of Police Violence Survivors”

Vania Smith-Oka, Notre Dame University

“The Latinx Obstetric Violence Project: Art and Literature as Tools of Reciprocal and Redistributive Knowledge”

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