ASU Humanities Institute announces spring 2026 seed grant recipients

Every semester, the Humanities Institute seed grant program at Arizona State University funds faculty projects that creatively employ humanities methodologies that engage with social challenges in the past, present and future.

Of the spring 2026 recipients, Humanities Institute Director Ron Broglio states: “From a borderlands film to international agroecology design, and from stories of Muslim communities in Phoenix to doctors attending to patients’ narratives, these seed grants show the range of what is possible in humanities research. They provide ways of shaping conversations and communities by drawing from the past to inform the future.”

Learn more about the latest cohort and their projects below.

Adam Nocek — associate professor, The GAME School
Stacey Moran — assistant professor, The GAME School, Department of English

“Food, Fermentation and Philosophy: Experiments in Ecological Health” establishes an agroecological “living laboratory” in Tempe, Arizona, linked to ongoing collaborations with practitioners in Bangkok and Khon Kaen, Thailand. Combining cultivation, fermentation, shared meals and collaborative workshops, the project investigates philosophical questions about ecological environments, food systems and health.

Crops grown at the Tempe site will serve as the basis for fermentation experiments and research workshops organized around guiding philosophical questions concerning microbial ecologies, environmental design and ecological health. The project will generate experimental publications documenting these practices while supporting reciprocal exchanges about food production and consumption between researchers in Southeast Asia and Arizona.

Gabriel Acevedo — assistant professor, Department of English

Approaching the 10th anniversary of Hurricane María, “Archipelagic Memory After María: Youth Literacies, Cultural Archives, and the Long Afterlives of Disaster in Puerto Rico” explores how Puerto Rican youth tell stories about the lasting effects of disaster through writing, storytelling and community cultural activities.

Using humanities methods such as narrative analysis, oral history and archival research, the study examines how youth literacies document the lived experiences of environmental crises, migration and recovery. Through fieldwork in Puerto Rico, the project analyzes youth stories alongside community storytelling efforts. The outcomes include a peer-reviewed article and a public symposium in Puerto Rico.

Jessica Wicks-Allen — assistant professor, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
Tra Bouscaren — assistant professor, School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
Jeremy Ripley — Grant Street Studios program manager, School of Art

“Within These Walls: Harriet Jacobs’s Quest for Freedom” is a mobile history installation centered on Harriet Ann Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, abolitionist and author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” one of the most significant autobiographies in American literature. Featuring a life-size replica of the garret where Jacobs hid for seven years, the project invites visitors to encounter the spatial and emotional dimensions of her experience as a fugitive slave.

By translating scholarship on Jacobs into an accessible, immersive learning experience, “Within These Walls” aims to expand public understanding of slavery’s lived realities while highlighting enslaved women’s contributions to the destruction of slavery and the making of American freedom.

Katherine Bynum — assistant professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies

“What We Inherit: Silence and Myth in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands” is an oral history and documentary project that explores how Mexican American families remember migration and how certain stories are passed down while others are left unspoken. The film centers on the Chávez family’s migration from Mexico to Texas in 1928, long remembered within the family as escape during the Mexican Revolution. Archival research, however, reveals that the family crossed the border during the Cristero War, a period of religious persecution and political unrest in Mexico.

Rather than correcting the family narrative, the project asks why the original story endured and what it protected. By tracing the family’s journey from Jalisco, Mexico, to Coahuila to Del Rio and Sonora, Texas, the project situates their experiences within broader histories of revolution, border enforcement, segregation and anti-Mexican discrimination in the U.S. Southwest. Through interviews with living relatives, archival research and filming at key historical sites, “What We Inherit” examines how grief, religious fear and racial exclusion were transformed into stories of perseverance and respectability. In doing so, the project reveals how silence can function not as absence, but as a form of survival, shaping how families understand belonging, identity and opportunity across generations.

Kyle Jensen — assistant dean of artificial intelligence and emerging digital technologies, The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Krista Ratcliffe — Foundation Professor, Department of English

“Beyond Active Listening: A Dimensional Approach to Doctor-Patient Communications” uses a cutting-edge rhetorical listening framework to analyze recorded doctor-patient interactions collected by the company Medical Memory. By identifying and explaining communicative misalignments in doctor-patient interactions, we will generate insights that enhance medical training and improve the quality of patient care for practitioners at ASU and within the Barrow Medical Group in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Razieh Araghi — assistant professor, School of International Letters and Cultures
Tanvir Ahmed — assistant professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Carolina Mendoza — assistant professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Shahla Talebi — associate head of graduate studies, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies

Despite growing interest across the humanities, its role in translation has received little theoretical attention. Translation is often treated as the transfer of meaning between languages, yet translators describe their work as shaped by sensation and emotional intensity. This project addresses that gap by convening scholars, translators and artists to develop the emerging field of translation and affect studies. A two-day symposium at ASU and a follow-up seminar at the 2027 ACLA conference will generate a shared conceptual framework for the field. “Translation and Affect: Bodily Encounters, World-Making and the Ethics of Sensation” will culminate in a peer-reviewed special issue, advancing the first collective scholarly intervention.

Alex Ma — associate professor, The Sidney Poitier New American Film School
Carla LynDale Bishop — assistant professor, The Sidney Poitier New American Film School Yasmin Saikia — professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Chad Haines — associate professor, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies

“Mapping Blackness” investigates the Black Muslim community in the Phoenix metropolitan area — historically under-documented within both the American Islamic experience and the broader Black community in the Southwest.

Building upon "Mapping Blackness," an immersive digital archive initiated in 2020, the project aims to capture and preserve oral histories by merging humanities frameworks with the media capabilities of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Seed funding will support preliminary interviews, documentary footage and the production of a proof-of-concept short film and 360 immersive contents for installation, establishing a foundation for a future national oral history initiative.

Kristy Kang — associate professor, The GAME School
William Hedberg — associate professor, School of International Letters and Cultures
Pavan Turaga — professor and school director, The GAME School

“Mapping Pacific Barkcloth through AI” uses open-source AI to analyze dispersed global collections of Pacific barkcloth, or "tapa." By training visual pattern recognition models on digitized images, the project identifies stylistic and cultural connections for materials often lacking provenance due to colonial extraction.

The work creates a unified database and tool to support digital repatriation and revitalize lost design traditions. Through collaboration with curators, Indigenous experts and technical specialists, the project restores cultural linkages and advances ethical community-centered AI practices. This scalable platform provides a foundation for future transnational research and heritage-focused AI best practices.