The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is now accepting applications for its Digital Justice Seed Grants to promote and provide resources for projects at various stages of development that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.
Donor Name: American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 12/15/2023
Size of the Grant: $10,000 and $25,000
Grant Duration: 18 months
Details:
This program especially supports projects that engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people. In this way, the program seeks to address the inequities in the distribution of access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects.
Digital Justice Seed Grants for projects at early stages of development. All grantees have the opportunity to receive tailored coaching from the Nonprofit Financing Fund in order to plan for the long-term stewardship and sustainability of their projects.
The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to invite applications for Digital Justice Seed Grants, which are made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Through both their content and methods, projects funded by ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants pursue the following activities:
- Engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people.
- Explore or experiment with new materials, methodologies, and research agendas by way of planning workshops, prototyping, and/or testing products.
- Cultivate greater openness to new sources of knowledge and strategic approaches to content building and knowledge dissemination.
- Engage in capacity building efforts, including but not limited to: pedagogical projects that train students in digital humanities methods as a key feature of the project’s content building practice; publicly engaged projects that develop new technological infrastructure with community partners; trans-institutional projects that connect scholars across academic and cultural heritage institutions.
Funding Information
- Amount: between $10,000 and $25,000
- Grant terms must begin between July 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024, with a workplan that lasts from 12-18 months.
Eligibility Criteria
- Project’s principal investigator must be a scholar in the humanities and/or the interpretative social sciences.
- Project must be within the start-up or prototyping phase of development.
- Projects must be made as widely available as intellectual property constraints allow, ideally with the most liberal open-source and Creative Commons license that is appropriate for the underlying content.
- An institution of higher education in the United States must administer awarded grant funds.
Evaluation Criteria
Peer reviewers in this program evaluate all eligible proposals on the following criteria:
- The project’s advancement of equity and justice by centering and engaging with understudied, underfunded, or otherwise marginalized topics of inquiry that are relevant to both society and scholarship.
- The feasibility of the project plans, as well as a realistic assessment of how risks and challenges will be managed.
- The proposal’s analysis of the various technological, financial, and/or institutional supports (or lack thereof) and how grant funds might complement, or in some cases, completely underwrite, these gaps in support.
- The project’s potential to bolster the ecosystem of digital scholarship within and/or outside the project’s home institution, whether by (yet not limited to) its intellectual contributions, innovative use of existing technology, and/or networks of skills-building and sharing.
- The project’s clarity with respect to how it will engage various publics (e.g. as intellectual partners or as audiences of the produced content) and why.
For more information, visit ACLS.
