2024 Seed Grant Awardees Abstracts
Cayla Colclasure
Department of Anthropology
The construction of the Western North Carolina Railroad through the Blue Ridge Mountains during the 1870s and 80s relied on the forced labor of thousands of incarcerated men, women, and children. Most of these prisoners were Black men and boys imprisoned under laws designed to effectively re-enslave them. In recent years, grassroots scholars and activists across western North Carolina have been grappling with this history, and creating avenues for education and memorialization. In this project, I will use the interdisciplinary tools of historical archaeology and participatory research to contribute to these ongoing efforts. I will co-instruct an archaeological field school at the Cowee Tunnel Labor camp, one of many prison labor camps were people being forced to work on the railroad were confined. Working alongside Western Carolina University professor Dr. Benjamin Steere, I will instruct 12 WCU undergraduate students and community volunteers in archaeological methods, and will explore the archaeological record of incarceration at this site. I will be partnering with Danielle Duffy of the WCU Mountain Heritage Center and the Jackson County chapter of the NACCP to create a mutually beneficial research strategy, involve community members, and create educational programming based on our results. Community participants will engage in hands-on learning during the field school, collaborative interpretation of archaeological and archival materials, and oral history interviews. For those who cannot be present during the field school, I will host listening sessions and group oral histories with invested community members, wherein I present about the ongoing work and bring relevant archaeological materials for them to interact with, through the late summer and early fall.
Maria Teresa Maza
Department of Developmental Psychology and Neuroscience
Social media has fundamentally transformed the landscape of adolescent social interactions, providing teens with broader social networks and ample opportunities for digital social influence. While certain online influences may be beneficial for adolescent health outcomes, others may have detrimental outcomes, and it is currently unclear the impact a given digital influence might have and for whom. Moreover, much of the existing research has excluded adolescents, the people who know the most by virtue of their lived experiences, thereby limiting collective understanding and failing to generate solutions that are helpful, applicable, and accessible to those it impacts the most. Partnering with Student U, an education nonprofit in Durham, the current project proposes integrating high school students’ perspectives into research through photovoice, an actionable research methodology that combines art and psychology. Through facilitated discussions, we aim to 1) understand adolescent’ real lived experiences with digital social influence, 2) explore individual, community, and systemic-level factors that determine how digital social influence may impact health, and 3) identify ways to promote positive health outcomes. This project seeks to uplift voices of adolescents to ensure a more precise understanding of digital peer influence and improve future recommendations for youth, adults, and policymakers.
Stephanie Kaczynski
Department of Communication
In May 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. Years later, the intersection where he died—38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis—continues to function as a space for art, community support, and protests. George Floyd Square is not just a city block; it is comprised of the people who live, work, gather, protest, communicate, and exist within the space. This project focuses on the ongoing negotiation of George Floyd Square to center the embodied knowledges of those most vulnerable to police violence and least visible in public discourse. The 2024 Seed Grant will directly support my critical performance ethnographic engagement with Sabathani Community Center, a Black-led nonprofit founded in 1966 located in the heart of South Minneapolis. I draw on Jackson’s (2005) praxis of racial sincerity by contributing my time, skills, and labor to support community-led initiatives. I seek to engage in political work alongside community members; contribute to efforts for community support, organizing, and/or liberation; and learn from grassroots organizing practices and embodied knowledges.
Isabel Abarca
Department of Anthropology
This research project will explore and assess the relevance of preliminary research questions centered on Salvadoran immigrants, families, and communities in North Carolina, how stories and histories are (or are not) transmitted, and the implications of these told and untold stories. This research aims to contribute to the contextualization and building up of localized understandings of migration and displacement, identity, family histories, and community engagement, specifically among Salvadoran families and individuals. Through this preliminary research, I hope to expand upon two core preliminary questions: How do stories, histories, and experiences of Salvadorans and Salvadoran Americans connect to the long history of violence, movement, arrival, and historical reckoning in the broader context of the U.S. South? And how do these stories and/or silences that are passed down from immigrant parents to their American born and/or raised child, shape notions of community and belonging amid the growing diversity of identities, Latino/e/x and otherwise, in NC? The support received from the 2024 GCPR Seed Grant will provide me with the opportunity to build community relationships and work towards mutually established and shared interests that will stem from (or move beyond) the outlined research questions.
Olivia Harmon
Department of Environmental Science and Engineering
Alabama’s Black Belt is characterized by a rich cultural heritage and as the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. However, the region has recently gained national attention for failing or nonexistent wastewater infrastructure outside cities served by conventional sewerage leading to the Department of Justice’s first environmental justice investigation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This investigation concluded with the citing of two areas of concern: the use of fines and law enforcement to punish people with inadequate wastewater treatment systems and inadequate action to assess and address health risks from raw sewage. In response to this sanitation crisis in the rural south, this research will examine the effects of an ongoing infrastructure project in Hale County, Alabama, located in the Black Belt region of Alabama. Specifically, this research is intended to assess the effects this sanitation intervention on environmental contamination, public health risk, and individual well-being. One way I will assess the intervention is through conducting a qualitative analysis via photovoice to capture residents’ perceptions of sanitation deficits prior to the installation of new sanitation infrastructure.
Khari Chanel Johnson
Department of Communication
Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship of Black feminism, performance studies, and critical food studies, my project argues that shared meals are vital for building community bonds, strengthening social health, and, ultimately, fostering forms of Black joy. I offer a novel theorization of “Black food joy” as a necessary condition of liberation and everyday resistance to racialized patriarchy and capitalism. I use performance ethnography and oral history to examine how food preparation and consumption can function as care work and social reproduction to highlight the resistance and resilience within Black women’s lived experiences. Here, I center the communal spaces of foodmaking, like community gardens and kitchens, to examine how care, joy, and resistance emerge. The Bronx’s overlooked communal spaces are ripe with potential for transformative food politics, practices, and consciousness-raising. The GCPR seed grant will provide me with crucial support to conduct community-engaged fieldwork in New York City, which will form the basis of my dissertation. My fieldwork, centered within diasporic community spaces such as community gardens in the Bronx, will explain how public spaces are reclaimed and reconfigured as sites of communal gardening and eating.
Allison Waters
School of Social Work
Over half of the 7.36 million arrests in the U.S. each year involve a person with a behavioral health (i.e., mental health, substance use, or co-occurring) disorder, contributing to this group’s overrepresentation in the criminal legal system. Gaps in essential resources (e.g., transportation, treatment providers, employment opportunities, housing), particularly in rural communities like Chatham County, can impede efforts to keep people with behavioral health disorders out of the criminal legal system. To address needs of court-involved individuals, including those with behavioral health disorders, community members in Chatham County recently established a Local Reentry Council (LRC). This project will support the LRC’s efforts to determine its mission and priorities by gathering perspectives on the county’s diversion and reentry services from court officials, law enforcement officers, and individuals with a history of court involvement. The GCPR Seed Grant Award will help me cultivate relationships with community members in order to (1) build understanding of existing local diversion and reentry services and processes and (2) identify community assets and opportunities for improvement. This project will also inform future research aimed at enhancing community supports and diversion opportunities for individuals with behavioral health disorders and criminal legal system involvement.
Fowota Mortoo
Department of Geography
Situated at the intersection of cultural heritage, ecology, and placemaking, this research will examine how ecological practices central to indigenous knowledge systems can redress persisting logics of extractivism in southern Ghana. Drawing upon oral histories with farmers, seedkeepers, and artists alongside engagement with archival materials, I will explore how African ecologies can inform the construction of an audiovisual archive and design of an educational garden. In collaboration with the ANO Institute of Research and Knowledge, an organization committed to reimagining food and education systems in Aburi, Ghana, this project will broaden the geographic reach of the subfield of Black Geographies, whose scholarship is largely North American and Caribbean centric, while contributing to community-grounded work that has significance beyond the boundaries of academia.