The Humanities Collaboratory Equity Initiative Grant built on the collaborative humanities work initiated on the University of Michigan campus in response to the Mellon Foundation’s 2020 call for proposals from multidisciplinary teams “whose work focuses specifically on and addresses racial inequality and its many manifestations.”
The Collaboratory invited UM teams which had assembled in response to the Mellon Just Futures Initiative to apply for one-time experimental grants of up to $55,000 for project development and/or research in the spring and summer of 2021 (May-August). Awardees were selected based on the strength of the proposed work as well as the project’s engagement with understanding, addressing, and dismantling racial inequity.
The Equity Initiative Grant served a number of purposes for researchers and for the Collaboratory. For researchers the grants enabled further development of project ideas that originated in response to the Mellon call. For the Collaboratory, these grants provided an opportunity to experiment with smaller scale, more flexible grants. These grants also enabled the Collaboratory to support critical, explicitly anti-racist research. DEI has been at the center of much of our thinking at the HC and most of the work we have funded interrogates structures of inequality. However, we have not, to date, called for projects that explicitly focus on racial inequality. We believe that there is untapped capacity at UM to do more of this essential work and that the Collaboratory is well positioned to support it.