Funding is available for eight summer fellowships to UC Merced Interdisciplinary Humanities graduate students at $7,500 each. Fellows will participate in public humanities projects within teams led by faculty mentors. The public humanities projects’ focus will be on engaging our region (Merced County) and/or on how our region may help address global problems. Students may enroll in a 1-credit class in spring with the faculty member related to project design and co-creation as well as mentorship. The bulk of the project itself will occur in summer 2025.
The overarching theme for these projects is “Our Interwoven Futures.” Sub-themes may include:
Risk, Durable Justice, and Reconciliation
Transformative Communities of Care and Mutual Aid
Migrations, Diasporas, and the Future of Cultural Revitalization
Designing Responses to Climate Impacts - from Wildfires to Floods
Application Deadline: Jan. 13, 2025
For summer 2025, there are two faculty-led public humanities projects:
Universities, Prisons, and the Public
Faculty Mentor: Nigel Hatton
This project takes a humanities approach to reimagining prisons and punishment and facilitating prison, university, and community collaboration. While Fresno State University, Merced College, and other local institutions have established instructional programs with Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, the prison has yet to form partnerships with a research-based humanities entity such as UC Merced. By placing the prison, university, and community in dialogue and action, this project aims to transform the prison from a hidden site of dehumanization, indifference and invisibility to one that is understood as an intersection of indices of systemic inequities, injustices, as well as transformation efforts that require collective responsibility, public awareness, and group reflection on everyday carceral practices in California. The humanities tools are several— reading, public readings, writing, narrative, journalism, art, critical thinking—, and together they form the genesis of the collaborative project among the prison, public, and community. The humanities initiatives will seek to include participation from incarcerated human beings, prison administrators (guards, warden, secretaries), community members, and representatives from the university. We will address a set of questions that include, What is this place called the prison? What happens here? How should it be understood in the public imagination? What is the responsibility of the research university to the state prison within its reach? How shall the public engage with the prison in the Central Valley? How can universities, the public, and prisons formulate ideas on freedom, justice, punishment, dignity, seen, and unseen? I propose this project at a critical moment in the California Department of Corrections history. The organization is seeking programmatic assistance from outside entities to aide in its transformation from a place known for sterilization and violence against incarcerated human beings to one that seeks to aide in rehabilitation and prevention of cycles of incarceration.
Soundscapes of Merced
Faculty Mentor: Patricia Vergara
This project explores the interconnectedness of place, sound, music, and memory with the aim of documenting the unique stories, sounds, experiences, and perspectives of Merced County’s historically underrepresented communities. Researchers will include UC Merced faculty and graduate students who, in collaboration with community members, will collect interviews and oral histories, conduct ethnographic and archival research, and record musical activities and ambient sounds (natural and urban). At the end of the research period, they will assemble the interviews, videos, and sound recordings into a public audio-visual exhibit and organize these materials into a digital archive that will remain accessible to the general public. As a practitioner and scholar of music and sound, a main tenet in my work is that analyzing the social, political, and cultural contexts of sound (music included) can provide valuable insights that might not emerge in other types of cultural-social history. A sound-focused analysis may be centered on music-making activities (performing, composing, listening, dancing, critiquing) and their contextual frames as well as on other types of aural practices and sensorial experiences of listening, which are often similarly perceived through socio-cultural constructs. The primary goal of SoM is to document and amplify the histories and experiences of Merced’s minoritized communities by way of exploring the past, present, changes, and continuities of their musical and perceived sonic environments. What sets SoM apart from a traditional oral history project is 1) its focus on the undocumented past musical life of Merced which, until the construction of Hwy 99, was composed of thriving and diverse musical communities, and its transformations, resonances, and continuities in the present, and 2) its focus on the “audibility of history” (Burke 2012), in which a sonic methodology includes collecting “earwitness accounts” (Schafer 1994)– individuals’ firsthand accounts of their sonic environments as an entryway into understanding how aural experience can afford particular sensorial memories, senses of place, and inform collective and individual histories. The outcomes I envision for SoM are not only a permanent digital archive, but also public events in the forms of an audio-visual exhibit and a music performance as proposed in this application, and, in the future, a larger multimedia exhibit for which I will apply for external funding.
