5x5 HRC Collaborative Grants
Deadline: Rolling
The Humanities Research Center is offering a number of 5×5 Collaborative Grants to encourage faculty in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts to organize around a topic of common interest. This can include a set of readings, an activity, or just an idea which could lead to future research/projects.
How it works
Five faculty meet five times over a period of a few months. Each group will include a minimum of three full-time faculty and can also include lecturers, librarians, post-docs, and other university scholars. (This grant is not intended for graduate students.) Ideally, 3 group members will be from CHS. The team organizer should be a full-time faculty. While five faculty members is the ideal number, the HRC will consider proposals from teams comprised of four to six members.
Why Apply
These grants will help research faculty carve out some time in an otherwise busy semester to: 1) expand your intellectual and institutional networks; 2) explore research questions of interest to you in the context of the linked interests of other faculty; and 3) develop a new kind of scholarly project.
Goals
- Encourage collaborative thinking about work in the humanities
- Create a space for low-stakes exploration of shared interests
- Facilitate the development of collaborative scholarship in the humanities.
Process
Apply by emailing the following items in a single pdf document to Cristina Stanciu (cstanciu@vcu.edu):
- a 1-page proposal (which includes the dates and topics for 5 proposed meetings/discussions)
- short bios of the participants
- a short paragraph describing the groups contributions to the intellectual life of the HRC in the last two years (panels, grant teams, research groups, webinars, Research Fridays, Meet VCU's Authors presentations, mentoring, community engagement work, etc.)
Please specify “The 5x5 HRC Collaborative Grants” in the subject line. The proposal will be evaluated by the HRC director and members of the HRC Advisory Board. Each team member of an awarded grant will receive $500 in professional development/research funds upon approval of the group’s application.
Outcome
The group will submit a one-page description of the conversations and the ideas that emerged from the five meetings (1 page) to the HRC director by June 30 of the year of the application, and will agree to be part of HRC Research presentations/workshops in the following academic year. Funds permitting, teams can reapply every 2 years in similar or different group configurations.
Previous Groups
Speculation
This 5x5 grant will be used to meet with five individuals to discuss common themes of interest around Reproductive Justice. These individuals include faculty and outside experts from gender studies, critical race studies, theater studies, pediatrics, Latinx studies and clinical gender-affirming care.
Two common themes of interest have emerged in preliminary discussions:
- Virginia is the abortion safe haven state of the south, as it is the only southern state that currently still has abortion clinics. This places Virginia in a unique and challenging position of absorbing patients from all southern states to access services, while navigating ongoing legal challenges around patients crossing state lines to access care. What are the impacts of this on patients, providers, and larger grassroots networks?
- Storytelling has been used in activism to demonstrate the lived experience and impacts of the barriers to reproductive justice. In recent years, questions about impact and truth-telling have risen about personal experience narratives in an age where fake news, AI, and continuing threats to veracity surface to challenge people’s telling of their authentic experiences. Is there a way to use storytelling, performance, and collaborative community art-making to support, heal, and nurture people accessing care, without needing it to be a mechanism for politicized communications in wider media?
This group is highly interdisciplinary, and includes expertise from the Humanities, Social Sciences, Theater, Medicine, Political Advocacy, and Clinical Care. This group will seek to identify, clarify, and address specific intersectional impacts related to Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Trans and Gender Expansive People, Immigrants, Youth, and Disability with an eye towards holistic and open-hearted support networks. These beginning conversations will hopefully lend fruit and soil towards future collaborations, networking, and scholarly and artistic projects.
Bios:
Dr. KáLyn (Kay) Coghill (they/them) is an interdisciplinary scholar, award-winning activist, practitioner, and educator residing in Richmond, Virginia. Their primary focus is addressing online gender-based violence, online harassment, and hate speech. Dr. Coghill takes pride in developing innovative harm reduction strategies, which are inspired by the profound insights of Black women and non-binary femmes within digital spaces. They also engage in critical discussions regarding the role of artificial intelligence in exacerbating sexual harm online, specifically through the utilization of deepfake technology and applications that facilitate image-based sexual violence.
Dr Margaret Wardlaw MD Margaret P. Wardlaw is a pediatrician specializing in sleep medicine and a prize-winning essayist. She received her MD and PhD in the Medical Humanities from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Her research interests include religion, spirituality, childbirth, disability studies, medicine as religious practice, sleep medicine, and pediatric palliative medicine. In addition to presenting nationally and internationally, her writing has appeared in Guernica, Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Religion and Medicine, The Persisting Osler, and The American Journal of Bioethics. Her essay, "Monsters," which received a Pushcart Prize, is the winner of the grand prize in the National Science Foundation's "Dangerous Creations" project for the bicentennial of Frankenstein.
J Gallienne, MSW, They/Them - Gender Affirming Care Navigation Manager, more information to come.
Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Ph.D., Professor of Graduate Pedagogy in Acting and Directing at Virginia Commonwealth University, received her education from the Central School of Drama, Speech and Film in London, England, Carnegie-Mellon University and the Union Institute. Prior to joining the faculty at VCU, she taught at Cornish College for the Arts, the University of Washington and was head of the Drama Department at Seattle Central College. Dr. Pettiford-Wates is the artistic director and founder of The Conciliation Project, a non-profit social justice theatre company whose mission is “To promote through active and challenging dramatic work open and honest dialogue about racism and systems of oppression in America in order to repair its damaging legacy.” www.theconciliationproject.org
Paulina Guerrero, PhD has been deeply invested in research topics and art-making around gender, reproductive health/rights/justice, the history of abortives and contraceptives in the west, cultural sustainability, personal narrative, the folklore of belief, eco phenomenology, feminist ecologies, and feminism and punk music. She is an art-maker, writer of both fiction and non-fiction work, researcher, and doula. Throughout her work, she seeks to unearth some of our most profound somatic experiences as locations of numinous praxis.
Contributions to HRC:
Dr. Coghill and Dr. Paulina Guerrero have contributed to HRC through Works-In Progress talks and seminars. They also regularly attend HRC events, panels, and support other scholarly humanities work. Additionally, they regularly work on outside humanities work as part of their teaching and service practice.
Speculation
We propose to convene a diverse group of scholars and artists from multiple units within the
University to engage in productive interdisciplinary conversations about speculative literature, media, and art.
- Grace D. Gipson, Assistant Professor, African American Studies
- Julian Kevon Glover Assistant Professor, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Dance & Choreography, VCUarts
- Michael Ra-shon Hall, Assistant Professor, English
- J Molina-Garcia, Assistant Professor, Photography and Digital Futures, VCUArts
- Jennifer Rhee, Associate Professor, English.
Workshop in African American History
- Michael Dickinson, Assistant Professor, Department of History
- Carolyn Eastman, Professor, Department of History
- Adam Ewing, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies
- Grace Gipson, Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies
- Mary Caton Lingold, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Memory Group
- Katie Logan, Assistant Professor, Department of Focused Inquiry
- Amy Rector, Associate Professor, School of World Studies
- Gabriel Reich, Professor, School of Education
- Jessica Trisko Darden, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Monuments Group
- Hilary Levinson, Assistant Professor, Department of Focused Inquiry
- Daniel Morales, Assistant Professor, Department of History
- Ryan Smith, Professor, Department of History
- David Weinfeld, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Migration Group
- Rocío Gomez, Assistant Professor, Department of History
- Gabriela León-Pérez, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
- Daniel Morales, Assistant Professor, Department of History
- Michael Ahn Paarlberg, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
- Paula Rodriguez Miguelez, Assistant Professor, Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences
- R. McKenna Brown, Professor, School of World Studies