The Banned Scholars Project in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley is pleased to announce the In Defense of Black Studies Small Grants Program. The program will accept 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. These grants of up to $1,000 will support research, teaching, curriculum development, and related projects drawing on our theme. We welcome proposals from across campus that are collaborative, and we are particularly interested in funding public scholarship efforts. Some examples might include curatorial projects, poetry chapbooks, interdisciplinary course development, oral history projects, public syllabi, TikTok or Instagram series, and built-environment projects. Applications will open on August 25th at 9:00 am and close on September 26th at 5:00 pm.
Housed in the Department of African American Studies and funded by generous grants from the Mellon and Spencer Foundations, the Banned Scholars Project highlights threats to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the teaching of race and gender around the country. Black Studies has been under attack since its founding, created in a struggle for radical education that represented the demands of Black students and the community. And in part because of the profound impact the field has had in clarifying the conditions of our past and present, those longstanding attacks have reached a crescendo, echoing from the boardrooms of university administrators to halls of Congress. As an antidote to this authoritarian movement, the Banned Scholars Project provides resources for scholars who are directly under assault while also curating critical conversations to think about greater questions concerning history, freedom, and democracy.
The In Defense of Black Studies Small Grants Program will build upon this project to expand the ground upon which we do this work. We seek proposals that push forward this field’s rich history of struggle in the face of widespread efforts to eradicate it. The aim is to build a collective radical pedagogy that can meet our moment.
For more information, please visit the program webpage.