UDARI Subcommittee Grant Award Winners for 2021-2022
Posted on November 22, 2021 at: 9:44 am
The following subcommittees of the UD Anti-Racism Initiative have been awarded grants for anti-racist projects or events they are organizing this academic year: Associate in Arts Equity and Inclusion Subcommittee, Legacies of Dispossession and Enslavement Subcommittee, Anti-Racism Programming Subcommittee, First State First Chance Subcommittee, Asian-American Anti-Racism Initiatives (AAAI) Subcommittee, The Indigenous Programming Subcommittee, The Latino and Hispanic Heritage Caucus.
Associate in Arts Equity and Inclusion Committee:
The University of Delaware Associate in Arts Program (AAP) Outreach subcommittee will be utilizing UDARI grant funding to fund three AAP students (one from each campus) to support the AAP Equity and Inclusion Committee. Students will be collaborating with community partners and activists in Wilmington, Dover, and Georgetown to organize a racial-justice event on each campus in the spring of 2022. Additionally, students will assist with organizing and hosting listening sessions with current and recently graduated AAP students attending the Newark campus who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native or multiracial. They will gain qualitative insights into their experiences attending a predominantly white institution. UDARI grant funding allows the students to work for the committee and thus cut back on paid employment outside of school, which will assist in furthering the anti-racist goals of both the AAP and the University. Since AAP students are, and have historically been, excluded from meaningful engagement, internship, and professional development opportunities at UD, these positions will contribute to the ongoing antiracist work of making such opportunities available to those whom racism has excluded.
Legacies of Dispossession & Enslavement Subcommittee:
The Legacies of Dispossession and Enslavement Subcommittee will be utilizing UD Anti-Racism Initiative grant funding to employ two graduate research assistants. The research assistants are designing and creating a WordPress site to publicly host findings and sources generated by students in HIST460/660: Race and Inequality in Delaware. This course is also cross-listed with AFRA/ANTH/ENGL460, GEOG428, and with AFRA661, ANTH660, ENGL660, and GEOG628. The graduate research assistants are also responsible for completing two in-progress data collection projects: a spreadsheet of data entered from 19th and early 20th-century U.S. censuses schedules for Newark, Delaware and a spreadsheet listing all trustees, staff, faculty, and students associated with Delaware College. These spreadsheets will enable advanced research, including a demographic analysis of the populations associated with the Newark area and Delaware College, as well as biographical and genealogical research into particular families and individuals. These projects will advance the goals of UDARI because both the website and spreadsheets will allow the products and sources of recent research to be publicly accessible. These materials will be useful for a variety of future projects associated with the history of racial inequality at UD and the surrounding community.
Anti-Racism Programming Subcommittee:
Unearthing the Collection: An Interactive Workshop at the Mineralogical Museum is a collaborative endeavor of the Anti-Racism Programming subcommittee, the University of Delaware Mineralogical Museum, the Geography and Spatial Sciences Department, and the Museum Studies Program. The subcommittee will be utilizing UDARI grant funding to host three half-day workshops to train advanced undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Delaware to initiate anti-racist practice and scholarship in museums through the University’s mineral collection. This workshop contributes to the application of anti-racist approaches in a critical engagement of scientific knowledge production, particularly in, and through, physical science collections. The subcommittee will raise awareness of anti-racist science communication in museums. This will allow for anti-racist practices in the mineralogical museum’s digital repository to be archived online and shared with other interested parties. The Anti-Racism Planning subcommittee will also create a blog post that addresses not only this project, but the evaluation of data and presentations at Artefacts Consortium 2022 and American Geophysical Union (AGU 2022). Unearthing the Collection has the potential to be run annually by the Museum Studies program and the Mineralogical Museum, or developed as a Continuing Professional Development course for museum practitioners. UDARI funding is providing the vital first step toward any such continuing education.
First State First Chance Subcommittee:
The First State Chance Subcommittee will be using UD Anti-Racism Initiative funding to cover student enrollment in courses offered in Winter and Spring 2022. Offering incarcerated people of all races and genders the opportunity to earn a college degree is a matter of social justice and can be articulated as a form of reparations. Those previously denied an opportunity for an education and access to social, educational and cultural capital can gain a pathway to full citizenship through prison education. Tuition will be spread across courses with preference given to those students enrolling in courses that fulfill either degree or certificate pathways. The First State First Chance Subcommittee remains optimistic that funding will allow for the roll out of several non-credit bearing certificates to be offered through the Professional and Continuing Studies. This funding will allow the First State First Chance subcommittee to continue building capacity, while troubleshooting the pedagogical and institutional issues unique to this kind of program delivery.
Asian-American Anti-Racism Initiatives (AAAI) Subcommittee:
The Asian-American Anti-Racism Initiatives (AAAI) will be using UDARI grant funding to support two events in Spring 2022: a film event and a workshop with high school teachers in Delaware. This project is in response to the success of their project in Spring 2021, “Fighting for All,” which emphasized alliances and social activism across racial and class differences with a focus on two prominent Asian American activists. For Spring 2022, the film event will consist of a public film screening, a structured panel of discussions that include film producer(s) and experts, structured questions from graduate students, and a Q&A period open to all participants. The in-person workshop will be at UD, in which our community’s members and high school teachers participate to develop classroom activities to promote cross-racial activism and a cross-racial alliance against racism.
The Indigenous Programming Subcommittee:
The Indigenous Programming Subcommittee will be utilizing UD Anti-Racism Initiative’s grant funding to employ two graduate students for research tasks for the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 semesters. These graduate students are organizing student support for the living land acknowledgement, managing data collection, and organizing events on federal and tribal law in relation to the University of Delaware’s history of dispossession of Indigenous lands and other related issues. Additionally, these students will be researching and writing UD’s land grab history and a glossary of key terms, which will be housed on the UDARI webpage. These two graduate students will have a critical role in organizing students to transform UD’s institutional norms and culture towards accountability regarding its colonial legacy.
The Latino and Hispanic Heritage Caucus:
The Latino and Hispanic Heritage Caucus (LHHC) will be utilizing UDARI grant funding to host a series of “Out of the Box” workshops to educate and train faculty and staff on racial consciousness to increase cultural proficiencies and advance the objective of fostering an anti-racist campus. The LHHC has contacted two groups to develop a program for a small group of participants at UD. First, is the Just Act group (https://justact.org/), which uses techniques from Theater of the Oppressed to address issues of racial justice. The second is the Creative Reaction Lab (https://www.creativereactionlab.com/our-programs), which educates, trains, and challenges Black and Latinx youth to become leaders working for healthy and racially equitable communities. The LHHC hopes that educators will adapt the workshops to the needs of their learning spaces, to amplify and shift power to youth, while understanding their roles in designing equitable outcomes.