2004-2005 Faculty and Graduate Student Grants for Community-Based Scholarly Activities in the Arts, the Humanities, and Design

The Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan (U-M) has announced the recipients of its sixth annual round of faculty grants for public and community-based scholarly work in the arts, the humanities, and design. For the fourth year, graduate students are also receiving Arts of Citizenship grants.

David Scobey, associate professor of architecture and director of Arts of Citizenship, commented, “The quality of proposals this year was exceptionally high. We had applicants from across the University—music, social work, architecture, art, natural resources, and numerous departments in LS&A. Clearly, there is a lively and growing interest in community-based work in the arts and humanities.”

The goal of the Arts of Citizenship grants program is to foster research, teaching, and creative projects that contribute to public culture and encourage innovative teaching and research in collaboration with community partners. Funds for this year’s faculty grants have come from the Office of the Vice President for Research. Awards for graduate students were funded by the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies.

For the 2004-2005 academic year, an interdisciplinary faculty Selection Committee awarded Arts of Citizenship grants to five faculty projects:

• Elizabeth Bourgeois (assistant professor, Flint theatre and dance) will partner with a music club and an arts café in Flint to create a performance about the impact on youth of national media scrutiny of their industrial city over the past fifteen years.
• Nesha Z. Haniff (lecturer III, Afro American and African studies and women’s studies) will write a book documenting her four years of work with a program that takes UM students to South Africa to train non-literate people to be educators in HIV/AIDS prevention.
• Joyce Meier (lecturer II, English) will hold a writing fair and produce a handbook as part of the five-year anniversary celebration of the life-story writing project she directs. In this project, UM students work in Detroit to foster cultural heritage by assisting both schoolchildren and elders to tell their life-stories.
• Tiya A. Miles (assistant professor, American culture and Afro American and African studies) and her students will be exploring the lives of Black slaves among the Cherokee by collaborating with a historic site in Georgia to create an education website. Miles will also write a scholarly article that will be used for exhibit development at the historic site.
• Ian Robinson (lecturer III, political science and sociology, Residential College; assistant research scientist, ILIR) and Teresa Sanchez-Snell (program coordinator, Residential College) will guide UM students in interviewing Spanish-speaking residents of southwest Detroit for a documentary film about this ethnically diverse area.

In addition to the faculty grants, three graduate student projects were selected for Arts of Citizenship awards by the Selection Committee:

• Bree Kessler (natural resources and environment; public health) will train women farmers and factory workers in Honduras to use documentary photography to increase literacy and enhance collective action for social change.
• Michal Rahfaldt (ethnomusicology) will partner with a Cape Town youth organization to produce radio pieces for international networks about teenage experiences with HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
• Carla Vecchiola (American culture) will create a video archive of interviews with African American innovators in the development of electronic music in Detroit.

Arts of Citizenship Program Announces First Civitas Fellows in Public Cultural Scholarship

The Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan (UM) has announced the winners of its first Civitas Fellowship competition for University of Michigan graduate students who are engaging in public cultural scholarship during the summer of 2003.

Karen Renee Miller and Itohan I. Osayimwese are this year’s Civitas Fellows. They are leading a summer Field School with Heritage Battle Creek, a grassroots public history association in west Michigan. The Civitas Fellows and citizen scholars will work together on oral histories, archival research, preservation activities, and interpretation of the history of the African American community in Battle Creek since World War II. The 2003 Field School is the beginning of a multiyear collaboration between the University of Michigan and Heritage Battle Creek.

Karen Renee Miller is just completing her doctoral dissertation in the UM History Department, with a focus on twentieth-century African American and urban history, particularly the reshaping of urban politics by the expanding African American community.

Itohan Osayimwese is a second-year doctoral candidate in the UM Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her research explores ways in which structures of power are encoded in spatial relationships, particularly within slave communities and postcolonial communities.

For further information about any of the projects of the Arts of Citizenship Program, call 734-615-0609; email the director, David Scobey (scobey@umich.edu); or see the website (www.artsofcitizenship.umich.edu).