In Defense of Black Studies Small Grants Program

The In Defense of Black Studies Small Grants Program is organized by the Banned Scholars Project in African American Studies and funded by a generous Affirming Multivocal Humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation. The program launched in fall 2025 with a call for applications from undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff at UC Berkeley conducting projects that affirm and model the significance of Black study in light of the recently reinvigorated attacks against it. Grants of up to $1,000 were awarded to eleven grantees across campus. Learn more about our first cohort of grantees below.

AY 2025-206 Grantees

Ja'Nya Banks, Graduate Student

Department: Berkeley School of Education

Project Title: "The Soundtrack of Survival, Black Schools as a Study "

My project is a “mixtape” that represents the oral histories shared for my dissertation study on the survival of historically Black schools. Each track represents a theme of survival and legacy, built on a case study of four school sites that have lasted for roughly 100 years and continue to serve majorly Black students despite the rise of Black-community killing (Morris, 2022). I intend on creating each track from the recordings of interviews of alumni, families, and local leaders at each institution, paired with the regional music of each city that was developed through artists who matriculated in each school system. I hope this work both exemplifies and makes urgent the need to study and protect cultural institutions at a time when many are under threat. Additionally, I hope this format introduces academic study in a format that is both multi-generational and culturally embedded for the community served.

Isabella C. Brown, Graduate Student

Department: Berkeley School of Education

Project Title: "Closed Doors Tell Stories: How Confidentiality Works to Conceal Inequalitble IEP Meetings for Black Parents"

Project Closed Doors Tell Stories examines how special education decisions are made within Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings that shape students’ access to curriculum and how parents experience these decision-making spaces. Although federal law mandates meaningful parent participation, IEP meetings are often conducted in ways that constrain authentic collaboration for Black parents and allow inequities to persist. Under the guise of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), these meetings occur behind closed doors, enabling inequitable practices by school professionals to remain obscured and often unchallenged.

This pilot study, which informs my dissertation, seeks to understand the legibility of parent agency in decision-making and explores pathways toward more transparent, equitable, and inclusive IEP practices in support of our Black students in special education.

Nikia Denetha Durgin, Undergraduate Student

Department: Rhetoric

Project Title: "Bay Area Rap Rhetoric: Rhymes & Reasons, and their Lasting Impact on Bay Area Culture (A Developing Curriculum)"

The In Defense of Black Studies Grant would fund my research in developing a curriculum to be implemented as a DeCal course on campus titled "Bay Area Rap Rhetoric: Rhymes & Reasons, and their Lasting Impact on Bay Area Culture."

This course examines the rhetoric of Bay Area rap and the social, political, and historical influences that have shaped it from the pre-Hyphy era to the present day and beyond.

This course will educate students on Bay Area Rap history, focusing on pioneers of the subgenre by city, lyrical content of the music, and its deep connections to social and political struggles and how they vary intraregionally. Students will be asked to critically engage with the lyrics, tying their findings back to past and present challenges faced by Bay Area communities.

In preparation for teaching this course, I will conduct in-person interviews, draw on scholarly texts, artist memoirs, as well as my own experience as a Bay Area-born female hip hop artist for 8 years. By centering Bay Area hip hop as both an artistic tradition and a tool of survival against institutional oppression, this project contributes to a fuller understanding of California History and American culture as a whole.

Patrice Douglass, Faculty

Department: Gender and Women's Studies

Project Title: "Reproductive Justice Collaborative Forum"

Collaborators: Dr. Jyothi Marbin, Director, UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Medical Program, Assistant Dean, UCSF Regional Campus at UCB, HS Clinical Professor, UC Berkeley & Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco, Arneta Rogers, Executive Director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, UC Berkeley Law, Dr. Tina Sacks, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare

"The Reproductive Justice Collaborative Forum" is an opportunity for students from Gender and Women’s Studies, the UCSF/UCB Joint Medical Program, School of Social Welfare, and School of Law to discuss how to collaborate across disciplines to advance reproductive justice. Reproductive justice as a framework was first defined by fourteen African descendant women who were a part of an informal alliance called “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice.” Since reproductive justice has expanded as a theoretical and practical model for advancing intersectional reproductive liberty and autonomy.

This forum will feature a panel of experts working to advance reproductive justice in medicine, law, social work, and community organizing. The panel will consider often minimized concerns involving reproductive care and support for Black girls, prison and reentry medical and family support, as well as the deepening legislative and judicial battles that are rapidly emerging in a post-Dobbs America. Following this panel students will gather in breakout sessions to discuss case studies using prior readings, course teachings, and the expert panel as a guide to brainstorm strategies to issues facing Black and other birthing and parenting individuals who encounter care and caracal institutions, like hospitals, prisons, and the foster care system.

Nitoshia Ford, Graduate Student

Department: African American Studies

Project Title: "In Defense of Black Studies: Reading & Discussion Series at Oakland Public Library- West Oakland Branch"

Collaborators: West Oakland Branch Library of Oakland Public Library

This project will launch a community reading and discussion series at the West Oakland Branch Library of Oakland Public Library, which centers on Black Studies and responds directly to patron demand for non-fiction book club programming.

This discussion group builds on the success of the Black Authors Book Club at the West Oakland Branch, where readers have consistently shown interest in non-fiction titles but have faced limitations due to the limited number of circulating copies available in the Oakland Public Library system. To meet this demand, we will purchase copies for both participants and facilitators for a pilot group, along with a dedicated Book Club Kit containing 12 books. This kit will include guiding questions and outreach materials, and be available for circulation throughout the Oakland Public Library system. This will enable librarians to host discussion groups at their branches and enhance accessibility to Black Studies programming citywide.

Anissa Hall.

Anissa Hall, Graduate Student

Department: Social Welfare

Project Title: "An Exploration of Afro-Indigeneity"

Historical trauma (HT) builds upon theories of psychosocial, political/economic, and social/ecological systems (Sotero, 2006) to conceptualize the collective and cumulative experiences of trauma and its aftereffects endured by oppressed communities across generations. While a burgeoning subfield has begun exploring applicability of the HT framework to African American populations, empirical inquiries have been stunted by a critical factor. Although theories of historical trauma often discuss a separation from traditional Indigenous practices and lifeways as a key component of the traumatizing experience, there is a scarcity of literature exploring the connection to – or severance from – a relationship of Afro-indigeneity amongst African Americans. Investigation is therefore needed to further our understanding of this relationship before we can begin to adequately apply – or refine – a theory of historical trauma amongst the African American community. This pilot project aims to venture into this gap through the development and dissemination of a survey focused on assessing individuals’ relationship to their sense of Afro-indigeneity, a concept we define through inspiration from Boateng, 2023 as “...a condition that also exists where land-based claims are either impossible or untenable, complicating questions of belonging….[Indigeneity] thus denotes a people's ways or modes of being, with or without land.”

Melika Jalili, Staff

Department: Berkeley School of Education

Project Title: "UCB CREEO-HBCU Program"

Collaborators: PI: Travis Bristol, Co-I: Tolani Britton, CREEO, Renee Starowicz, CER at ISSS, UC Berkeley Graduate Division, Morehouse College, Talladega College

Learn more: www.creeo.berkeley.edu

The UCB CREEO-HBCU Program, a UC-HBCU initiative, is led by PI Travis Bristol and Co-PI Tolani Britton through UC Berkeley’s Center for Research on Expanding Educational Opportunity (CREEO). The program broadens PhD pathways by recruiting emerging scholars from underrepresented backgrounds. In collaboration with the Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education and Talladega College, it provides fellows with research experience and increased access to UC opportunities, supporting them to apply to PhD programs in education and social sciences.

From 2026–2028, CREEO will host 6 HBCU fellows each summer (3 per college) for a funded 7-week research experience. Fellows' work with the PI and Co-PI will include engagement in a qualitative research workshop, mentorship, professional development, and social opportunities in partnership with UCB departments. Pre-and post-program surveys will measure growth and impact. By fostering a supportive research environment and cross-campus collaboration, the program prepares HBCU students for graduate study while strengthening ties between UCB and HBCUs.

Hyungtae Kim.

Hyungtae Kim, Graduate Student

Department: English

Project Title: "Sociology Hesitant "

Collaborators: 99 Canal

"Sociology Hesitant" is a curatorial research project that explores Black aesthetic strategies of refusal, improvisation, and radical ambiguity in public performance and exhibition. Drawing inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1905 essay Sociology Hesitant, the project reframes the solo art exhibition as itself a type of jazz solo aesthetic. In collaboration with 99 Canal, an artist-led Manhattan 501(c)3, I will curate an exhibition showcasing contemporary BIPOC artists who challenge conventional forms of display and forced-performance.

This project emerges from my dissertation and seeks to bridge curation and public scholarship. The project will support the research-and-development phase of the exhibition (October-March 2026), including: 1) archival research at UMass Amherst’s Du Bois files and 2) the fabrication of a vitrine designed to make publicly available for the first time, Du Bois’s widely cited Sociology Hesitant essay. The exhibition will open in December 2026 at 99 Canal’s main exhibition space, imagining it as a parenthetical interval between unconfident works, taking each silence as if it were a way of starting every song with a rest note. One recalls here how 99 Canal resides in a former piano factory. What happened to all those rest notes?

Abigail De Kosnik, Faculty

Department: Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

Project Title: "The Hug Shared Around the World"

Collaborators: Keith Feldman, Ra Malika Imhotep, and Rashad Timmons

"The Media Crease: Theorizing Culture, Repetition, and Social Difference" is the second anthology by The Color of New Media, a UC Berkeley–based working group dedicated to analyzing media and technology through the lenses of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. The volume’s co-editor, Dr. Rashad Arman Timmons (Ph.D. African American Studies, UC Berkeley; President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Barbara), contributes a chapter that examines the recurring circulation of a 2014 photograph depicting Devonte Hart, a Black child, hugging a white police officer during protests against police brutality in Portland, Oregon.

The essay shows how this image reappears after moments of racial violence and protest, becoming a powerful, if deeply ambivalent, racial icon. His analysis also recovers the fragile archive of paratexts surrounding the photo that have vanished from the web but are preserved in his screenshots and transcriptions. The chapter performs vital cultural memory work, illuminating how Black representation is mediated, erased, and reinscribed across time.

This grant will cover the reprint fee for the photograph. Supporting this request affirms the significance of Black studies at UC Berkeley by enabling the publication of urgent scholarship from one of the department’s distinguished alumni.

David Kyeu, Faculty

Department: African American Studies

Project Title: "In Defense of Swahili and Other Black Languages"

Collaborators: African Languages Instructors, including Mr. Amlaku Eshetie and Ms. Gladys Ajaelo

Learn more: YouTube

"In Defense of Swahili and Other Black Languages" addresses the exclusion of Kiswahili and other African languages from Bay Area institutions and U.S. educational systems. Despite Kiswahili’s status as the African Union’s working language, its 300 million speakers worldwide, and its deep cultural ties to African American communities through traditions such as Kwanzaa, the language remains largely absent from K–12 curricula and public services in California. This marginalization reflects a broader national decline in language education, compounded by the recent rollback of federal protections for English learners under Title VI.

The grant will support four key activities: 1) Hosting Kiswahili awareness workshops in four Bay Area high schools, highlighting the countries where it is spoken; 2) Preparing advocacy briefs for schools and public agencies such as BART, the DMV, and social welfare offices; 3) Purchasing print learning materials, including textbooks and Swahili-themed T-shirts, to be distributed to workshop participants; 4) Promoting awareness of the linguistic and cultural diversity of Swahili-speaking regions in East, Central, and Southern Africa.

These efforts aim to increase visibility and build momentum for the inclusion of Kiswahili and other Black languages in public life. By framing Kiswahili not merely as a “foreign language” but as a Black language spoken in more than seven African countries and deeply rooted in histories of resistance and cultural affirmation, the project underscores the urgency of equitable linguistic representation. Funding will advance social justice, educational equity, and cross-cultural understanding across the Bay Area.

Josie Lafontant, Undergraduate Student

Department: Sociology, Linguistics

Project Title: "Digitizing the Diaspora: Documenting Black History through Personal Correspondence"

Collaborators: Ms. Daphne Muse

Learn more: https://www.aaihs.org/the-art-of-black-letter-writing-a-conversation-wit...

"Digitizing the Diaspora: Documenting Black History through Personal Correspondence" is a project dedicated to preserving and amplifying the voices of Black activists, writers, and leaders whose correspondence reflects the struggles, visions, and intimate connections that shaped 20th-century Black life and culture. Since 1958, Ms. Daphne Muse has curated an extraordinary archive of letters from figures such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and many others. These letters reveal both the private tenderness and the fierce collective resistance that fueled Black freedom movements. Building upon summer preservation work, this project will advance digitization efforts to ensure long-term accessibility and will lay the groundwork for a public exhibition. The exhibit, ideally housed at BAMFA, will highlight correspondence from Black women leaders alongside ephemera such as first-edition novels, photographs, and personal artifacts. By combining words with material culture, the project offers a more intimate view of the extraordinary and everyday lives of these women. Ultimately, "Digitizing the Diaspora" seeks to preserve an irreplaceable archive while fostering public engagement with the brilliance, resilience, and humanity of Black freedom struggles for generations to come.

Chantel McCrea, Graduate Student

Department: African American Studies

Project Title: "Flesh-Work: Black Queer Sex Work and the Erotics of Liberation"

Collaborators: B. Tourmaline

This project will support a collaborative event organized with B. Tourmaline, a Black queer–led kink and sex work organization, to host an all-day workshop centering skill-sharing, community nourishment, and embodied liberation. The event will bring together practitioners, organizers, and scholars to cultivate space for collective learning and joy. Structured around the theme In Defense of Black Studies, it insists that the erotic and the intimate are not outside the purview of the discipline but integral to its future. Black Studies has long defended forms of life and knowledge made unintelligible within dominant institutions. From the study of fugitivity and marronage to the theorization of Black performance and aesthetics, the field insists that Black life exceeds capture and narrates itself on its own terms. This project extends that tradition by recognizing sex workers and kink practitioners as theorists of relation, survival, and possibility. By foregrounding the erotic as a site of knowledge, the event demonstrates how practices often dismissed as marginal are central to Black Studies’ ongoing work of imagining otherwise.

UC Berkeley Center for Research on Expanding Education Opportunity (CREEO), California Black Studies Curriculum (CABSC) Project.

Jacquelyn Ollison, Staff

Department: Berkeley School of Education

Project Title: "Affirming Black Studies in K–12 Classrooms: Curriculum Innovation via the CABSC Teacher Fellows Program"

Collaborators: Travis Bristol, Tolani Britton, Hillary Walker, Honey Walrond, Jeremy Martin, Aukeem Ballard, Melika Jalili

Learn more: website (https://creeo.berkeley.edu/programs-projects/california-black-studies-cu...), video (https://youtu.be/XR9Nbre5oH8)

The California Black Studies Curriculum (CABSC) Teacher Fellows Program, led by PI Travis Bristol and Co-PI Tolani Britton, affirms the critical role of Black Studies at a moment when it faces renewed political attacks. This initiative positions teachers as both learners and co-creators of curriculum, drawing on their expertise to adapt and implement interdisciplinary Black Studies modules in high school classrooms across California. Guided by principles of collaboration, teacher knowledge, and student agency, the program fosters a liberatory approach to curriculum that transcends disciplinary boundaries and centers Black intellectual and cultural traditions.

With support from this grant, we will strengthen the Teacher Fellows Program by compensating participants who contribute to co-design, implementation, and reflection on the CABSC modules. Fellows will participate in workshops that introduce the curriculum, adapt modules for their classrooms, and reflect on student engagement and outcomes. Importantly, this grant will allow us to honor teachers, students, and families by providing research participation gift cards to Marcus Books, ensuring reciprocity in the knowledge exchange process. By integrating curriculum development, professional learning, and community engagement, the CABSC Teacher Fellows Program affirms that Black Studies is indispensable to both K–12 and higher education, modeling how liberatory pedagogy can thrive.

Sophia Sanzo-Davis, Graduate Student

Department: African American Studies

Project Title: "Locating the Black Image: A Black Visual Culture Working Group Inquiry "

Collaborators: Zana Sanders, Karina Karbo-Wright, Irene Denise Ross, Brandon Ashton Archer, Mark Anthony Williams Jr., Victor Omojola, Taye Khalil Hughes

How do we locate the “black image” through different affective registers? The Black Visual Culture Working Group proposes a multi-year project plan that will culminate in a curatorial project. This curatorial project, as a research method, will feature contemporary works from local artists exploring the relationship between image, sound, and affect as it relates to the practice of envisioning and imagining blackness within and beyond the frame. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the group engages in collaborative modes of Black Study that examine Black art practices and cultural production in the Bay Area and beyond, alongside the local cultural spaces and ecologies that support Black diasporic art. The initial phase of the project (academic year 2025-2026) is designed to support the Black Visual Culture Working Group's mission through an immersion program that introduces an emerging cohort of interdisciplinary scholars to the local Black arts community through exhibition visits, artist talks, and a series of dinners with local arts professionals. This multi-year endeavor will culminate in an art exhibition and a speaker series planned for the 2026-2027 academic year.

Logan Shanks, Graduate Student

Department: African American Studies

Project Title: "The House of the Lorde Learning Community"

Dana Washington-Queen, Staff

Department: Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

Project Title: "Fieldnotes: A Conduit for Connection"

"Fieldnotes: A Conduit for Connection" draws on ethnographic methods to index black LGBTQ+ barbers in American barbering history, and the ways they reconfigure barbershop tradition. Black barbershops have been a discursive field to study the barbering trade and human interaction. Barbershops have anchored communities by driving economic development and providing men with a place of refuge. However, the social context of the barbershop is regulated through heterosexual hypermasculine performance that predetermines male behavior.

LGBTQ+ ethnographers and documentary filmmakers have called attention to the ways misogynoir, homophobia and transphobia is enacted in barbershops. Barbershop talk serves as a functional component of social exchange and as a way of perpetuating culture and community, but for LGBTQ patrons, the barbershop is a site marked by hostility and ostracization.

This project takes a divergent trajectory of barbershop conceptions and interjects Black queer placemaking through a rearrangement of gender norms, aesthetics, and sociality. By centering queer agency, my desire is to shed light on the emergence of black queer barbers working in barbershops–where blackness and queerness are features of community building and culture making. From behind the chair, black LGBTQ+ barbers are a presence and conduit for connection.

Joy Wilson.

Joy Wilson, Undergraduate Student

Department: African American Studies

Project Title: "Am I a 'Good' or 'Bad' Black Girl?: The Criminalization of Black Girls in San Diego and Identity Formation"

San Diego is “America’s Finest City,” but it's an epicenter for policing and minority criminalization, with a Marine Corps Base, U.S. Border Patrol, and 11 police departments. The experience of Black girls’ identity formation in a hyper-policed space like San Diego is absent in research, with most available accounts only focusing on Black men and boys. Joy will therefore study how the spatial environment of San Diego impacts how Black girls make sense of their social world when trying to fit in and find their identity. Joy's research will explore how the process of criminalization and the fear of violence influence how a Black girl moves, behaves, and presents herself. Therefore, Joy aims to expose how the criminalization of Black girls in San Diego influences their identity formation. By conducting surveys and semi-structured interviews of young Black women who are native to San Diego, Joy strives to develop a deeper understanding of how race, gender, and space influence how Black girls navigate their Blackness and being a woman in San Diego.

Topics

Banned Scholars Project topic page

In Defense of Black Studies Small Grants Program