Anti-racism pilot program sees results

December 6, 2022

Last year, the library launched the Anti-Racist Digital Research Initiative, a pilot program supporting early-stage digital scholarship projects that advance anti-racism and social justice in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences. 

In partnership with LSA Technology Services, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity’s Anti-Racism Collaborative, the program awarded six initial projects with start-up funding of $5000 each; planning support for the project lifecycle, from concept through preservation; and a support team offering library and technical expertise and resources.

The selected projects represent a range of communities, methodologies, and research products, including digital maps tracking violence toward a marginalized community and an effort to document and preserve the history of a Michigan neighborhood lost to a freeway interchange in the 1970s.

Since a February kickoff, two of the projects have received substantial external funding, and one of those, a digital archive titled The First 100: 50 Years of Chicanas Changing Knowledge, has already gone live. 

This project 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.

The project’s lead investigators, Lorena Chambers (postdoctoral fellow in History and American Culture at U-M Ann Arbor) and Dr. Margaret Salazar Porzio (curator, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution), obtained an additional $190,000 from the Smithsonian Institution. The project team included library experts who created visualizations and interactive maps for this new digital space, a living resource that will expand as the project progresses.

 

by Lynne Raughley