15 graduate students have been awarded a total of $60,000 in Humanities Centers Initiative (HCI) grants. The HCI grant is given on an annual basis to humanities students based in New York, in partnership with nine state universities. Congratulations to recipients!
Explore the full list of projects:
Hannah Ali, Cornell University
Ending Stigma: Addiction and Substance use within Somali-Canadian Communities
The project uses storytelling to ground Somali Canadians who use alcohol or drug experiences to advocate for more inclusive harm-reduction services. Additionally, Breaking Stigma addresses community stigma around drug use and addiction through education workshops at Somali mosques in Toronto.
Brooke Bastie, University at Buffalo
Ecopoetics Workshop
A collaborative nomadic residency and workshop gathering artists, poets, scholars, and scientists run by two current students and one alumnus of the UB English PhD program. We gather diverse groups to think and make together, understanding that collaboration is inherently ecological, and that individualist thinking is part of the cause of the climate crisis.
Tierney Brown, New York University
Drawn From Communities: Bhutanese Intergenerational Research and Dialog
Bhutan faces unprecedented expatriation and concerns about youth engagement with tradition. This project produces collaborative, original, and sharable documentation of shifting cultural practices at a Bhutanese temple, using sketching, recording, and interviews to engage intergenerational perspectives. Outcomes will be shared via Bhutanese media outlets and the diaspora to contribute to conversations about heritage in practice.
Gabriela Cordoba Vivas, University at Buffalo
Transfeminist Provocations Against Fascism
An exhibition that explores the work of transfeminist and queer artists fighting through artistic interventions the growing fascist affects, policies and discourses that reactionary forces worldwide are imposing with regards to gender and sexuality. The exhibition will feature new and past work from artists from Colombia, Poland and the US, and public debates about the role of art and humanities in the resistance against fascism and the creation of transfeminist futures.
Melissa Gutierrez-Vicario, Columbia University
Youth Voices Lead: Climate Justice
A community arts-based training program for youth artists and organizers (ages 15-18) to strengthen their social justice knowledge and artistic tools to discover how to engage around the issue of climate change in their own communities.
Mary Hanrahan, Syracuse University
Countering War on Terror Narratives with Muslim Community Art
The project examines the impact of post-9/11 American media coverage on Muslim communities. Our team will curate a community-sourced art exhibit showcasing emergent counter-narratives from impacted communities. We will solicit art from New York based communities and artists in order to construct an exhibit that centers the voices of those silenced and misrepresented by the post-9/11 ideological climate.
Stephanie Lopez, Cornell University
Malparidez from the Margins of the Ivory Tower
Project Summary: In response to the socio-political currents and the increased policing of education and knowledge regarding reproduction and maternity, co-hosts Stephanie M. López and Heftzi M. Vázquez-Rodríguez collaborate on a podcast that centers Black, Indigenous and People of Color, trans* and feminist voices discussing maternity and reproductive rights from the Americas and beyond.
Mercy Oppong, Syracuse University
Food Sovereignty in Migration: The New American Kitchen
This project explores the food sovereignty issues of New Americans through the production of a recipe book, which allows interested farmers to share a meaningful piece of their history and food traditions with a wider audience, including CNY and beyond. It will feature agricultural practices, culturally significant produce, recipes, and stories of New Americans to become more accessible to a wider public, as the preparation of vegetables that are less familiar to many American-born individuals will be simplified.
Kara Pernicano, Stony Brook University
Together Love Self: A Series of Poetic Meditations
Just as meditation creates a sense of calm within crisis, sharing poetry in community has a similar effect and also helps people to feel less alone. This community arts project will lead to the online publication of poetic meditations (with audio) co-authored by creatives with lived experience and freely shared with Students With Psychosis (SWP), Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), and the public.
Ali Raj, Columbia University
The South Asian Music Literacy Project
The project aims to increase public literacy of the intellectual and political underpinnings of the North Indian music tradition, as well as help build media production capacity among underprivileged New York youth.. It entails a 10-episode podcast, featuring dramatic readings of selected works of Urdu scholarship from the late-modern period that address questions of identity and inheritance.
Hena Sarkar, Binghamton University
Hidden Curriculum
This podcast will foreground the stories of people who are typically not recognized for their contributions to a functioning university—janitors, lab technicians, food servers, but also laborers outside the boundaries of the university: bus drivers, housing agents, hairdressers, etc. By conducting these interviews primarily in their workplaces, we aim to emphasize a necessary continuity between spaces of economic labor and personhood. In a fast-paced world which restricts interactions between “laborer” and “consumer,” we propose attentive “listening” as an act of community building.
Sami Seif, CUNY Graduate Center
Ensemble Phoenicia Tour
A three-part tour of lecture-recitals featuring the works of contemporary Middle-Eastern composers across the New York City area. These events will showcase Middle Eastern classical music, integrating performances with educational discussions about the compositions and composers.
Destry Maria Sibley, CUNY Graduate Center
After Mother: A Dissertation Podcast
The After Mother podcast is a short-run audio series that supplements on genres of the maternal in contemporary American memoir. The podcast seeks to broaden the significations of the “mother” figure as a means to expand the value attached to the practices of parenting, caretaking, and kinship-making.
Nimisha Sinha, Binghamton University
Narrating Environments
An environmental storytelling project in the Binghamton and Johnson City areas where, through workshops, school-aged children can write across various genres like haikus, short fiction, journal entries and letters that reflect and speculate on their relationship with local environmental issues and their ideas for the future. The workshops will also explore multimedia expression like photography and the short vlog (reels, TikToks) as part of a multi-modal exploration of local environmental histories.
Blanca Ulloa, New York University
Stress and Jest: Pressurized Violence and Cartoonish Effects
A public program that examines the political potential of “the cartoonish” as a conceptual tool to think about the pressure exerted by structural forces on certain bodies and contexts. Through talks, performances and workshops, the program reflects on mechanisms of simplification and exaggeration, sonic and visual discorrelations and challenges white supremacy’s influence on visual culture.
