Faculty Innovation and Anti-Racism Microgrants

Allision Brzezinski, Administrator

Microgrant funds will be used to bring Nicole Brewer, of Conscientious Theatre Training, in for an anti-racist theatre training for the seven full-time faculty and selected adjunct faculty in late May. Ms. Brewer will tailor this three hour workshop to our audience and will allow faculty to engage with vocabulary and techniques in order to better de-center whiteness in their classes and curriculum. The session will not only benefit the faculty members, but will directly enhance their engagement with students in the classroom.

Angel Torres, Student

An exploration and application of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) & Anti-Racist efforts with the support/guidance of established consultation groups like WokeCoach/ArtEquity.

Anna Kazumi Stahl, Administrator - Lead
Jorgelina Loza
Paula Di Marzo, Student

This project aims to increase visibility around the racial discrimination Latin American indigenous communities face, based both on their own perspectives and demands through on a critical, research-driven analysis of the racialization of their ethnic identity. A key outcome is the creation of a set of concrete, multi-disciplinary pedagogical resources for curricular development, community-based learning, and research.

April Gu, Faculty

This new research project seeks to understand the history and nature of corporate activism. The aim is to examine the evolution of the role that major corporations have occupied in society, their motivations for stepping into the political sphere, what “corporate activism” actually entails, and how companies ought to direct their efforts in these directions in order to be more effective anti-racist changemakers.

Ares Kalandides, Faculty

An analysis of teaching material in secondary education in the German states of Berlin and Brandenburg through the lens of anti-racism. This projects includes an assessment and recommendations.

Fallon Lucombe, Administrator - Lead
Hannah Single, Administrator
Marina Ford, Administrator

Encouraging Diversity, Growth and Equality (EDGE) is creating a new resource for MBA administrators at the New York University Stern School of Business that will foster belonging and inclusion among employees. Administrators from various MBA program departments have volunteered to support the launch and installation of EDGE for our colleagues over the course of the next year. EDGE will directly address concerns of inclusion and belonging voiced by administrators of color by providing spaces for dialogue, facilitated conversations, training opportunities, and community building activities for all employees.

Furqan Abdirahman Mohamed, Student - Lead
Yasmeen Tajiddin, Student
Tatyana Ivelisse Brown, Student
Marafi Badr, Student

Korean popular music has gained immense popularity in Western media over the past few years. This popularity was followed by increased academic interest in the industry, artists, and powerful fanbase. Despite this fact, little formal research has been conducted on the experiences of Black female fans. This study aims to explore how Black women—a unique demographic whose positionality is informed by the intersection of a marginalised racial and gender identity—interact with and relate to K-pop.

Hillary Osei, Student

This proposal focuses on building awareness and providing resources for those who are Black and undocumented. Many of these people suffer under a system meant to exclude them and are often isolated from resources offered to many others. This will benefit the NYU Community by giving voices and representation to those who are not included in many community actions.

James F. Richards Jr., Administrator - Lead
Caran Hartsfield, Faculty
Erin Slattery Black, Faculty

This project addresses the question of just how different human skin tones appear on film. Did you know we are all the same color? Not based on your eyes but the sensors of any modern cameras. There is a filmmaking tool called a “vectorscope” to determine if our colors are accurate and the vectorscope has one line dedicated for skin color. This project displays that no matter what shade a person might be, as long as a human being stands in front of a camera, their skin color will line up directly in the skin color line.

Jennifer Sapio, Student

In collaboration with the Inside Literature Program and Travis County Correctional Complex, Creative Writing Inside Out connects writers who are currently incarcerated with New York University graduate students for a generative, anti-racist online writing workshop, aiming to amplify the stories and voices of those who are survivors of the prison-industrial complex.

Jewell Jackson McCabe, Faculty

The New York University Constance Baker Motley Project aims to build greater awareness around the legacy of Constance Baker Motley. A civil rights icon, Motley was the first African American woman federal judge, the first African American woman in the New York state Senate, and the first woman elected Manhattan Borough president. Revered for 20 incredible years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Motley drafted the Brown versus Board of Education docket and successfully argued 10 Supreme Court cases, winning 9 with the 10th overturned in her favor 20 years after she argued the case. In the early 20th Century, women leaders of color were never recognized by the predominantly white middle-class feminist movement even though they lived by the tenants of gender equity. This project highlights the innovative leadership of Constance Baker Motley (New York University Class of 1943 and honorary member of 1985), and her work to redress racist distortions of representation among the diverse pantheon of feminist leaders and embrace the epitome of gender equity work.

Joo Yeon (Ann) Yoon, Student

Recent conflicts among various social cleavages have been resulting in prevalent violence instead of peaceful coexistence in the United States. The research seeks to discern the possibly existing relation between local news media language targeted towards bias groups and hate crime incidents across the U.S.

Krystle Okafor, Student

Free the Land: Land Tenure and Stewardship Reimagined is a symposium and special issue on land, law, and social justice cosponsored by the New York University Environmental Law Journal and the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law.

Kurt Davies, Administrator

This workshop is designed to apply Anti-Racist Advising principles to the writing process using the technique to support New York University students applying for the Fulbright program.

Laura Chen-Schultz, Administrator - Lead
Amita Manghnani, Administrator
Shannon O'Neill, Administrator

The A/P/A Institute at New York University, in collaboration with a network of academics, organizers, archivists, and artists across the country and the New York University Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, is documenting the complex and multifaceted experiences of Asian/Pacific/Americans during the pandemic with A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project. Launched in 2020, this project centers Asian/Pacific/Americans as subjects of their own stories, offering space for thinking about the parallels, intimacies, and possibilities for solidarity between Asian/Pacific/Americans and the communities that are most impacted by recent seismic shifts in our history.  Project volunteers have recorded over sixty remote interviews with first responders; advocates for street vendors, sex workers, nail salon workers, and tenants fighting evictions; mutual aid and food pantry workers; poets, musicians, artists, and activists, and collected over seventy digital artifacts including flyers, videos, zines, resource lists, photographs, and artwork. These documentation efforts are premised on the critical idea that memory and meaning are built collaboratively through dialogue, and rooted in an ethics of care, community, and consideration.

Laura Kai Chen, Faculty

Old models of teaching Voice and Speech encourage a Eurocentric sound, but today we as teachers need to choose pedagogies that reflect our multicultural students' needs. The Knight-Thompson Speechwork training will facilitate the tools to better support our diverse student body and encourage them to access their authentic voices and better bring themselves fully to their work as artists.  In a business where it is so easy to fall into playing racial stereotypes, especially when employing accent work, One aspect of KTS training that I find especially interesting is the attentive interrogation of accents, the goal of which is to help actors efficiently and skillfully and ACCURATELY adopt accents.  Representation matters, and diversity matters, and how we send our young actors into the business-ideally, equipped with the tools to most skillfully bring to life any character-will either set our young actors up for success or failure.  I believe KTS will allow me to support my students in their art, and help them to be powerfully anti-racist in their work.

Mason Olszewski, Student

With the aim of pursuing voting equality in Harris County, this program sought to ameliorate voter registration disparities between demographics. The work has since led to town halls, PAC meetings, and universities where strategies for voter registration info have been further formulated and brought to life.

Michelle M. Lee, Student - Lead
Aerielle (Elle) Allen, Postdoc
Maureen Craig, Faculty

A deeper understanding of intra-minority relations between Black Americans and Asian Americans is crucial to racial coalition-building and solidarity in the United States. Using social psychological research methods, this project aims to examine perceptions around how Black Americans and Asian Americans are discriminated against based on status and culture in order to understand what psychological dynamics may impact Black-Asian solidarity. Ultimately, the aim is to disseminate these research findings to the public so the New York University community and the general public can be better informed and equipped to engage in solidarity-based anti-racist behaviors that work to dismantle systems of racial oppression.

Olivia Cheung, Faculty

Initial social interactions often rely heavily on first impressions of perceived personality traits, based on a glance at of individuals' faces. This study will examine the role of implicit racial bias on first impressions with a focus on the trustworthiness judgment of faces of other-race individuals and the influences of implicit racial bias and trustworthiness judgment on other important social actions, like voting decisions. The new findings will benefit the New York University community by enhancing community understanding of how implicit racial bias influences different critical aspects of a person's social life, and highlight the similarities and differences between individuals with positive and negative implicit racial biases and different political preferences.

Patricia Kim, Faculty

This project examines twentieth-century women of color artists in the United States, and how they engaged with and responded to Classical art and mythology through their visual practices. Drawing from reception studies, art-historical methodologies, and race-oriented feminist frameworks, this research illuminates how women of color have long-been important contributors to the field of Classics.

Ravi Shroff, Faculty – Lead
Aleka Dorothea Raju, Graduate Student

Over the last two years, reported incidents of anti-Asian hate have increased dramatically, both in New York City and across the United States. Accurate and accessible data on such incidents—those officially classified as crimes, as well as other occurrences of bias—are crucial for understanding the nature and scope of this problem, as well as for crafting relevant policy solutions. We survey publicly available data sources on anti-Asian hate incidents in New York City, as well as data collection mechanisms such as online reporting portals and hotlines managed by nonprofit organizations. We then conduct a series of interviews with such organizations to understand what is currently being collected, then provide recommendations for improved data procurement and standardization.

Robert Cohen, Faculty

The project provides high school teachers with guidance and historical materials to teach how American colleges and universities originally supported but moved to opposing slavery and racial segregation.

Robert R. Peñaherrera, Administrator

Pull Up is a monthly discussion series where students can engage with issues of identity and learn how to be in solidarity with marginalized peoples. Led by Robert R. Peñaherra, Assistant Director of Student Life, students will meet to discuss a specific topic or series of topics and participate in reflective activities to deepen their understanding of the issues. Guest facilitators will be invited to provide context for each meeting and help facilitate discussion amongst the students.

Ryan Grippi, Student

Ryan Grippi and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research (TCR) will host and produce two artist-focused pitch workshops for students whose work centers underrepresented communities. This collaboration, presented under Tisch’s HEAR US (Honoring Elevating And Recapitalizing Underrepresented Stories) umbrella, will offer students the opportunity to workshop their projects, build community, and refine how they present their work.

Workshops will be designed and led by representatives of each community and adapted to meet the needs of each group, including relevant historical, cultural, and disciplinary considerations. Students will walk out with the next steps for advancing their goals, an expanded network of interdisciplinary colleagues, and an affirmation in their ability to pitch their work.

Samara Mbugua, Alum - Lead
Victoria Good, Alum

Driven by the values of community, support, growth, and continual learning, the School of Global Public Health (GPH) Alumni Association Book Club was established to discuss how the shared experience in public health impacts the current month's reading. The book club  creates a safe space to have conversations about health equity, inclusion and other topics promoting anti-racist principles in an informal setting and centered on a new book. This helps expand perspective, increase cultural awareness, and improve communication skills especially as it pertains to these important topics.

Satadipa Chaudhuri, Student

Bringing together the philosophy of Thích Nhất Hạnh, Nobel-nominated pioneer of engaged Buddhism, and Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economics of Nobel prize winner, this training cultivates compassionate behavior through meditation. Interbeing Mindfulness Meditation focuses on latent psychological attributes like attentiveness, empathy, responsibility, patience, humility, and desiring the welfare of the whole.

Simón Ventura Trujillo, Faculty - Lead
Alyssa Leal, Administrator
Pacharee Sudhinaraset, Faculty
Patricia Okoh-Esene, Alum
Brandon Woolfe
Haruko Momma

This workshop series will help to develop the Faculty of Arts and Sciences commitment to anti-racist, decolonial strategies for the study and teaching of literature. This is a crucial step in galvanizing the department’s commitment to the study of literature in the context of political struggles, collective action, and protest found in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities, both in the US and internationally.

Teboho Moja, Faculty - Lead
Marie Castro, Student
Ying Dong, Student
Laura Gomez, Administrator
Dena Li, Student
Sofia Mexca-Flores, Student
Shaya Morgan, Alum
Theja Pamarthy, Alum
Erika Reyes, Administrator

PodACTS provides an honest and introspective experience through conversation. The hope of the podcast is to encourage the New York University community to become more action-oriented surrounding topics of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and to be proactive in showing up as Anti-Racists and allies in their work, conversations, and daily interactions with others.

Tiffany Llewellyn, Clinician - Lead
Tiffany Parris, Clinician
Jiyoon Lee
Mariel Bazil, Clinician

This project aims to increase learning opportunities that will foster growth in a staff, individual, and collective capacity. By conceptualizing racialized trauma, offering relevant and necessary support to students of color, this work can help students develop effective coping mechanisms to buffer against significant and life-threatening distress based on their racial identities in times of national and personal crisis.

Tobiasz Trawinski, Administrator

This research examines the effect of implicit racial bias on the perception of other-race faces. The project has a focused interest in investigating the extent of negative implicit bias towards other race poeple, and how it may facilitate in-depth or superficial processing of other-race faces.

Vasilis Molos, Faculty - Lead
Aisha Al Fahim, Alum

This project explores the diverse experiences of Emirati students across New York University's global network. By interviewing and surveying current students, matriculating students, and New York University alumni, the aim is to better understand where our institution has succeeded in creating inclusive and equitable educational environments and where challenges remain. The project’s findings will be used to make recommendations to the Office of Inclusion and Equity to aid New York University's efforts to advance inclusion, diversity, belonging, and access.

Yollotl Lopez, Student

This project is an anthology of microaggressions at New York University through interviews and written narratives. This anthology includes a theoretical framework and a best practices section that sourced from the most recent scholarship on anti-racism. The overall goal of this project is to provide a space where people can document their expereinces as well as have a text that that can be used in anti-racist training sessions.