Humanities in the Community awards

Humanities in the Community awards

The IHC congratulates the recipients of the 2016 Humanities in the Community summer awards.

The new Humanities in the Community program, sponsored by the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, will provide summer funding for seven advanced graduate students to support projects that advance civic engagement through scholarly and creative work in the humanities and arts.  This year’s award recipients are:

Elizabeth Allen, English
“Personal Narratives for Higher Education” is a collaboration between the UCSB English department and two local college access programs to create a workshop curriculum for crafting the college application personal statement.  The program seeks to better integrate the humanities into STEM-oriented college access programs by using the personal statement as a platform for exposing students to the value and significance of humanistic thought.

Carlos Jimenez, Film and Media Studies
The project establishes a bilingual (Spanish and Mixteco) journalism program working with adults and youth to create a news hour at a community radio station in Oxnard, California. The news hour will cover local politics, educational resources, health awareness, and local issues.

Emma Levine, Music
Zachary Rentz, Philosophy

In “Harmony and Wisdom: Conversations about Music and Philosophy, “ two scholars will be collaborating with a diverse group of seniors at two local retirement communities with the goal of creating a dynamic and rich dialogue that explores the areas and themes most important to the seniors of our Santa Barbara community. Drawing from their musical and philosophical backgrounds, they will contribute their interdisciplinary perspective and engage with the seniors in a meaningful exchange of ideas.

Audrey Lopez, Linguistics
All over the globe, young people work as community interpreters and translators, yet the impact of their work is often rendered invisible through processes of erasure. Understanding interpretation and translation as interactive practices of “communicative care” (Arnold 2016) as well as sites of postcolonial resistance and transformation, this collaborative ethnographic project uses student-produced film and radio to amplify the voices, visibility, and experiences of bilingual Latino youth language brokers who live and work in Santa Barbara County.

Megan Lukaniec, Linguistics
This community-centered project aims to provide online language resources for the First Nations language Wendat (also known as Huron or Huron-Wendat). These multimedia language lessons will be developed primarily for K-12 children and teens, yet as the language is currently being reawakened from over 150 years of dormancy, these resources will be valuable for learners of all ages.

Shawn Warner-Garcia, Linguistics

For the project “Promoting Progressive Sexual Ethics Among Christian Youth and Young Adults,”  Warner-Garcia will be designing a web-based multimedia curriculum module that produces innovative content on sexuality and faith. This project aims to achieve two interconnected goals: to dispel common misconceptions of Baptist communities as inherently conservative and sexually repressive, and to produce educational materials on progressive sexual ethics for Baptists in the southeastern U.S., where conservative religious ideologies are deeply enmeshed with cultural discourses of gender and sexuality.

For details about this program, visit this page.