This IHC/Division of Humanities and Fine Arts grant supported publicly engaged scholarship and arts. HFA MFA students and PhD candidates received awards of $5,000 to engage with community partners in collaborative problem-solving projects or work in community settings to stimulate public creation and discovery.
Humanities in the Community grant winners:
Jimmy Miracle, Art (2018)
INSIDE: A community based, site-specific, installation/performance multi-sensory performance with theme inside/outside involving local Santa Barbara individuals and artists diagnosed with mental illness. The ten-week project with members of the Mental Wellness Center a Santa Barbara day-use, psychosocial rehabilitation program for adults over the age of eighteen who are living with serious mental illness. The project included portrait drawing and dance workshops in the facility’s community arts room with a final exhibition and performance at the Red Barn Gallery on the UC Santa Barbara campus.
Shawn Warner-Garcia, Linguistics (2018)
Just Sex: Promoting Progressive Sexual Ethics among Baptist Communities: An online curriculum website that presents scholarly work on the intersections of faith and sexuality for use by religious communities and individuals. The scope of the curriculum was driven by the results from a national needs-assessment survey begun in summer 2016 with the support of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Anna Bax, Linguistics (2018)
MICOP Language Survey: A language survey of 1,000 members of the indigenous immigrant community in Ventura County developed in close consultation with MICOP (Mixteco/Indígena Community Organizing Project) leaders and administered by indigenous high school and college students from the organization’s youth leadership program.
Elizabeth Allen, English (2016)
Personal Narratives for Higher Education: 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 integrates 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 (2016)
Community Radio News in Oxnard: 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 covered local politics, educational resources, health awareness, and local issues.
Emma Levine, Music; Zachary Rentz, Philosophy (2016)
Harmony and Wisdom: Conversations about Music and Philosophy: A collaboration with a diverse group of seniors at two local retirement communities with the goal of creating a dynamic and rich dialogue that explored the areas and themes most important to the seniors of the Santa Barbara community. Drawing from their musical and philosophical backgrounds, Levine and Rentz brought an interdisciplinary perspective to the exchange of ideas.
Audrey Lopez, Linguistics (2016)
Youth Language Brokers in Santa Barbara: 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 used 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 (2016)
First Nations Language Resources: Provided online language resources for the First Nations language Wendat (also known as Huron or Huron-Wendat). These multimedia language lessons were 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 (2016)
Promoting Progressive Sexual Ethics Among Christian Youth and Young Adults: Web-based multimedia curriculum module producing innovative content on sexuality and faith with the aim of dispelling common misconceptions of Baptist communities as inherently conservative and sexually repressive. Produced 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.