Headlines
Collaborative ‘Stories for All’ project aims to share marginalized voices and histories through digital media
LAWRENCE — The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas, in partnership with KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, has been awarded a three-year grant of $1,478,000 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a collaborative digital storytelling project that will work with community and KU partners to recover marginalized and suppressed histories and share them widely through digital media.
Anti-racism plan from researchers calls for moving beyond statements to action
LAWRENCE — It’s no secret that the geosciences are among the least diverse STEM fields in the United States. That won’t change until organizations get serious about naming — and dismantling — racism and discrimination as barriers to access, inclusion and equity in science, technology, engineering and math, argue the authors of a peer-reviewed Perspective published this month in Nature Communications. Authors — including Blair Schneider, associate researcher and science outreach manager at the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas — offer a 20-point action plan that individuals, communities and institutions can implement to become more inclusive and accessible.
Full stories below.
————————————————————————
Contact: Mindie Paget, Office of Research, 785-864-0013, [email protected], @ResearchAtKU
Collaborative ‘Stories for All’ project aims to share marginalized voices and histories through digital media
LAWRENCE — Storytelling lies at the heart of the humanities and is central to the human experience. Through stories, we reveal who we are and what we value, as individuals and as cultures. Stories connect us to one another and to our pasts. Yet many stories remain ignored or silenced, and they often divide us, in part because there is so little interchange among approaches to storytelling rooted in diverse cultures and histories.
University of Kansas scholars hope to shift that dynamic. The Hall Center for the Humanities, in partnership with KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, has been awarded a three-year grant of $1,478,000 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a collaborative digital storytelling project that will work with community and KU partners to recover marginalized and suppressed histories and share them widely through digital media. “Stories for All” will involve more than 40 partner projects, roughly half of which originate in community initiatives and the other half from within KU. It will address the opportunities, challenges, ethics and politics of storytelling in the digital era. And it will ask how different stories and storytelling strategies can help to connect rather than divide us if we have better ways to share them across existing and perceived boundaries.
“Stories for All” will bring into conversation digital projects that represent a wide range of traditions, histories and motivations. The partners range from small collectives preserving local histories of injustice to institutions known for working at the intersection of the humanities and social change. They use a variety of storytelling strategies, including oral histories, social media posts, online writing contests, videos, blogs, interactive maps, long-form documentaries, online companions, art installations and place-based storytelling. Some of these projects are already in development; others will launch during the grant period.
“The advent of digital technology has enhanced the power of stories to reach broad audiences and to serve exclusion or inclusion, privilege or social justice, while the costs and technical demands involved in digital storytelling have created new inequities and barriers alongside preexisting ones,” said Richard Godbeer, director of the Hall Center. “As racial tensions and the pandemic expose anew the inequities within our society, this is a critical time to invest in new and equitable ways to engage in the art of storytelling.”
The project will center on a multi-year forum that brings together partners to share their diverse storytelling traditions and the ways they have adapted their approaches to storytelling for a digital age. These conversations will take place in locations throughout Lawrence and the region to foster an expansive storytelling community. Forum events will provide opportunities for partners to present their own projects and approaches to storytelling; to discuss the ways in which these different approaches might learn from each other; to address the particular opportunities and challenges posed by digital storytelling; and to consider the broad implications of these conversations for storytelling as a facet of human expression.
“KU scholars associated with the Hall Center and the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities are uniquely positioned to bring together a diverse group of partners and approaches to storytelling with this extraordinary support from the Mellon Foundation,” said Simon Atkinson, vice chancellor for research. “We feel privileged to provide a platform to elevate a richer array of voices, traditions and cultures, and we look forward to learning from one another and making connections across communities and time.”
The diversity that characterizes the partner projects extends even to technical infrastructure. The “Stories for All” website will serve as a portal linking to externally hosted partners with different storytelling techniques; this will bring partners together in a common space without compromising their autonomy or diversity of approach. The website will make digital storytelling resources available to anyone by providing free access to the partner projects. The website will also be the first stop for storytellers seeking technical assistance.
“Although digital storytelling technologies are often open-source and freely available, the digital literacy required to deploy the platforms recreates — perhaps even widens — the digital divide that open-source software was intended to ameliorate, becoming a new and formidable mechanism of privilege and exclusion,” said Dave Tell, co-director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities. “By providing consultation and training in frequently used platforms for digital storytelling, we hope to narrow that digital divide.”
“Stories for All” will contribute to a vibrant conversation about the ways in which the art of storytelling can evolve and flourish in a 21st-century digital world. “Our project is designed to create a storytelling forum in which many diverse voices can engage productively with each other,” said Godbeer, “so that we can learn and grow together.”
————————————————————————
The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
Refollow @KUNews for KU News Service stories, discoveries and experts.
Tweets by KUnews
————————————————————————
Contact: Mindie Paget, Office of Research, 785-864-0013, [email protected], @ResearchAtKU
Anti-racism plan from researchers calls for moving beyond statements to action
LAWRENCE — It’s no secret that the geosciences are among the least diverse STEM fields in the United States. That won’t change until organizations get serious about naming — and dismantling — racism and discrimination as barriers to access, inclusion and equity in science, technology, engineering and math, argue the authors of a peer-reviewed Perspective published this month in Nature Communications.
And there’s no time to waste. Like so many other institutions, geoscience organizations released statements decrying societal racism and discrimination in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and other highly visible acts of violence against Black Americans in the summer of 2020.
“We assert that these statements of support, though important first steps, are generally ineffective at assisting minoritized people in fighting racism or discrimination,” the authors wrote.
To help move beyond well-intentioned words, the authors — including Blair Schneider, associate researcher and science outreach manager at the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas — offer a 20-point action plan that individuals, communities and institutions can implement to become more inclusive and accessible.
“Necessity led us here. Our lived experiences as we navigate the culture and climate at our institutions, our professional organizations, our labs and field sites as minoritized individuals are rather similar,” said Hendratta Ali, the paper’s lead author and associate professor of geosciences at Fort Hays State University. “But in this similarity, there is a pecking order. Black individuals — Black women in particular — are mostly at the bottom of this hierarchy. Tackling racism seems like the right place to engage professional geoscience societies, organizations and unions because, in the process, everyone is lifted.”
Ali, Schneider and their 17 co-authors identify six essential constructs for effective anti-racism: identity, values, access, inclusion, equity and justice. They base their plan around these constructs, which they characterize as essential to the following objectives:
1. Encouraging individuals, communities and institutions to acknowledge racism and intersectionality.
2. Being transparent and accountable.
3. Removing barriers to opportunities.
4. Embracing and accommodating all members.
5. Addressing racist and discriminatory history.
6. Tackling colonial and parachute science (research typically conducted in low-income countries by international scientists and published without including local researchers).
They then identify 20 actions associated with the constructs that can be taken to combat racism and discrimination. Some specific actions in the plan include adopting inclusive ethics and conduct codes, evaluating and redefining standards of professionalism, addressing barriers for the retention of minorities, and establishing accountability for income parity.
The authors suggest that to implement their plan, organizations will need to engage with all historically underrepresented and marginalized groups— Black, Indigenous and other people of color, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, foreign nationals and women — within the geoscience discipline. But the plan is applicable beyond the geoscience community.
“To clarify, when we say geoscience organizations, we include universities and other institutions. We mean all spaces where geoscience happens. However, it seems to us that professional geoscience societies, associations and unions have a broader scope and wider reach and have greater potential to set the tone in the discipline,” Ali said.
“But more broadly speaking, I think it is not news that racism and discrimination do not exist only in the geosciences. Racism and discrimination exist in all STEM disciplines and in society. We focus on geoscience as an example because it is our primary discipline and because it remains one of the least diverse STEM disciplines.”
The plan builds on a petition the authors launched last summer, Call for a Robust Anti-racism Plan for the Geosciences, which has amassed more than 26,000 signatures.
“After launching our petition, we received several requests from academic departments, professional associations and societies, groups, and individuals who asked to use the petition as a basis for their own plan of action. We decided to expand on it and write this peer-reviewed article,” Ali said.
Their work earned the American Geophysical Union Presidential Citation and the President’s Award from the Association for Women Geoscientists. Several organizations, such as the Geological Society of America, have engaged with Ali in various ways to advance their efforts in anti-racism. But other geoscience organizations and institutions have remained notably silent, Ali said.
“What has hindered progress in our field especially is white people’s inability or refusal to acknowledge that racism still exists and that we play a key role in dismantling it,” Schneider said. “In order to accept responsibility for our role in this problem, we have to move past our uncomfortable feelings and actively work on being anti-racist.”
Schneider and Ali are heartened by some of the movement they have seen in the field. For example, Schneider serves as a co-principal investigator and Ali is a trainer on the research team for the ADVANCEGeo Partnership, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to address sexual harassment and other exclusionary behaviors that lead to hostile workplaces in the earth, space and environmental sciences.
“Our workshops already covered harassment and bullying, but after working on this petition, we modified them to include information about racial aggressions, including scenarios and consequences,” Schneider said. “Many of us have already been working with leadership in professional societies on other issues. These networks and relationships have been developed over the years, and so we know that we have a lot of allies in some of these organizations who can help spread the message and be a role model for creating change.”
————————————————————————
KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu
Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]
Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs
