The Brown Institute is pleased to support four seed grants for the 2022-2023 Season. These include:
Reading on the Inside
Topography
TRANSforming Journalism
Detailed descriptions of each of the projects can be found below.
Reading on the Inside
Dozens of states and municipalities have recently signed contracts with telecommunications firms to provide electronic tablets and other emerging technologies to incarcerated people. These technologies must be better understood in order to develop meaningful solutions to improve the reading, writing and educational experience for incarcerated people. In collaboration with several formerly incarcerated editorial advisors, the project will explore the experiences of incarcerated readers, writers and students, including the opportunities and challenges created for incarcerated people by the distribution of state-issued electronic tablets.
The Team
Topography
Topography is a multimedia documentary project exploring the layered perspectives defining America’s public lands. The project uses technologies including photogrammetry, game engines, and augmented reality to transform documentary footage captured in U.S. National Parks into explorable spaces. Transporting the viewer across time, species, scale, and histories, the team will prototype a multi-sensory experience designed to create new embodied ways of seeing. Informed by research into effective climate and environmental communication practices, these spaces will be centered around careful noticing of the natural world, the contested histories that shape our understanding, and the looming climatic changes that threaten to unbalance and undermine it.
The Team
TRANSforming Journalism
In a 24/7 news cycle, coverage of trans communities takes limited forms – these stories are often focused on hot-button political topics, and for trans communities of color, specifically, mostly scandalous news like murder and sexual assault. Not only are these stories limited in scope, they often deadname and misgender sources, effectively retraumatizing trans people of color and their communities. This journalism crisis runs rampant partly because of a lack of trans journalists of color in positions of power in newsrooms across the United States, or in them at all. TRANSforming Journalism tackles this crisis by way of a docuseries that follows five trans journalists of color on their passion projects in trans communities of color, and how the people within them are ensuring their own survival and success.
