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 2026.
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: Dec. 12, 2025
For summer 2026, there are two faculty-led public humanities projects:
Reclaiming Forgotten Pasts: Documenting and Assessing Climate Risks to Historic Sites in Mariposa and Merced Counties
Faculty Mentor: Beth Scaffidi
This project partners with museums and county departments in Mariposa and Merced Counties to document historic sites and cemeteries and to assess climate-change risks from wildfire and flooding. In 2023, Mariposa County GIS identified an urgent need for documentation: many historic sites lack legal protection, remain unverified for decades, and face growing environmental threats. To address this, I proposed a UAV and pedestrian survey to identify sites, combined with change-detection analyses from aerial imagery to quantify fire and flood risk. I also proposed using my lab’s portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) instruments to monitor airborne contamination—from fires, floods, and road traffic—affecting stone heritage. However, the counties identified major roadblocks. First, more than half of the sites listed in the California Built Environmental Resource Directory (BERD) still need to be ground-truthed in the field. Second, we lack key descriptive data for many BERD sites, including structure size, building materials, construction year, and other attributes essential for hazard evaluation. In Mariposa, some information exists only in undigitized paper forms, while additional materials needed for robust documentation—photographs, videos, news coverage, and otherarchival records—remain dispersed across local archives.
The Summer 2026 project has two phases. In spring, students will digitize paper archives and use machine-learning methods to search and compile building histories. In summer, a month-long UAV and pedestrian survey will verify coordinates, document building perimeters, and update BERD entries for sites in both counties. Stone structures will be tested twice for airborne pollutants such as lead and copper—once in winter and once after fire season. Project researchers will also photograph and 3D-scan structures and markers. These scans will be integrated with previously recorded façades by Lercari to build a unified 3D inventory. After ground-truthing, we will map confirmed locations and calculate fire and flood damage within two miles over the past decade. We will fill gaps in Mariposa County’s ArcGIS Story Map, expand the inventory to include undocumented cemeteries and historic route markers not listed in BERD, and create a new story map and database for Merced County. The result will give UC Merced and local communities a ready-made platform for interpreting, preserving, and sharing the histories of these often overlooked heritage places.
Gateway to Merced Oral History Podcasts
Faculty Mentor: Jayson Beaster-Jones
The Gateway to Merced Oral History Project seeks to create an open monument to evolving history in-the-making through the deployment of podcasting and video production to feature the variegated histories of Merced’s residents. We will harness broad community participation to improve the livability of our economically-challenged locale by making visible and audible stories of its diverse and growing populations in the public spaces of Merced. In Summer 2026, we will collect the oral histories of Merced County residents, concentrating upon the lived experiences of Merced’s ethnic diverse communities, as well as the individuals and institutions who lobbied for a new UC campus to be built in Merced. These oral histories will be added to the Gateway to Merced oral history archive that will be hosted by the UC Merced Library. Portions of these interviews will be transformed into podcast episodes and short form videos exploring the experiences of individual Merced County residents from diverse communities.
In a one credit class in Spring 2026, student researchers will collaborate with the PI on honing their oral history interview techniques, learning to use audio and video equipment and transcription tools, and developing their local contact network. Oral history interviews will begin in the early summer, each student will be responsible for collecting and transcribing 2-3 interviews. By early July, each student will collaborate with their interlocutors and edit each of their interviews for public broadcast. By the end of summer, these media productions will be hosted on several media platforms, including YouTube and made publicly available on https:\\gateway2merced.org.
