Arts of Citizenship grants awarded to faculty, grad students

The Arts of Citizenship Program 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 also are receiving grants from the program.

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. For the 2004-05 academic year, an interdisciplinary faculty Selection Committee awarded Arts of Citizenship grants to five faculty projects:

Elizabeth Bourgeois (assistant professor, U-M-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 during the past 15 years.

Nesha Haniff (lecturer III, Afroamerican and African studies and women's studies) will write a book documenting her four years of work with a program that takes students to South Africa to train non-literate people to be HIV/AIDS prevention educators.

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, U-M students work in Detroit to foster cultural heritage by assisting schoolchildren and elders to tell their life stories.

Tiya Miles (assistant professor, American culture and Afroamerican and African studies) and her students will explore the lives of Black slaves among the Cherokee by collaborating with a historic site in Georgia to create an education Web site. Miles also will 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, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations) and Teresa Sanchez-Snell (program coordinator, Residential College) will guide U-M students in interviewing Spanish-speaking residents of southwest Detroit for a documentary film about this ethnically diverse area.

The committee also selected three graduate student projects:

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.

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

The mission of the Arts of Citizenship Program is to build bridges between the University and the community in the arts, the humanities and design. The program promotes a more active citizenry through community partnerships in which faculty and students work with schools, museums, libraries, public agencies and citizen groups.

Funds for this year's faculty grants have come from the Office of the Vice President for Research. The Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies funded the awards for graduate students.

For more information, call (734) 615-0609 or visit http://www.artsofcitizenship.umich.edu/.

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