Caroline DeVane awarded a Wenner-Gren and Pulitzer Grants
The title of Caroline’s Wenner-Gren project: DeVane, Caroline (Massachusetts, Amherst, U. of) "What Families Know: Fragile X Syndrome, Counter-Narratives, and Artificial Intelligence," supervised by Dr. Lynnette Arnold", approved on October 9, 2026
Also, “as part of a grant I received from the Pulitzer Center in June”, she has organized an event with the IDEAS team for a British journalist who is an AI Accountability Fellow with The Pulitzer Center to speak at UMass about her investigative journalism on AI psychosis. Here is the event page: https://www.umass.edu/ideas/events/teaching-age-ai-what-matters-most-learning
Caroline was originally a co-organizer, but the other organizers decided to put her on the panel, so she’ll be presenting a case study about teaching Anthropology of AI.
The Pulitzer microgrant also funded Caroline in creating a conversation on social media (TikTok and Instagram) about AI that runs parallel to the online Anthro of AI course she is teaching for U+ and has also interwoven AI accountability journalism on the U+ course syllabus as a way to put current events reporting in conversation with academic scholarship.
Congratulations Caroline!