Spring '26 Funded Grants and Events

Kate Dorrity, Staff Member

Using the book ‘The Storm and the Tide: Tragedy, Hope and Triumph in Tuscaloosa,’ this project aims to deepen the UMass Amherst Emergency Operation Center (EOC) Team’s ability to practice compassionate, equity-centered leadership, translating empathy into concrete communication strategies, operational changes, and policy commitments. The book is centered around themes of resilience and community, highlighting the experiences of those involved in the April 2011 Tornado that hit Tuscaloosa, Alabama. EOC’s goal is to mitigate risk, emergency response, and community recovery from emergencies that impact the community. To facilitate this, the EOC community will read the book and participate in dialogue facilitated by a qualified guest speaker focusing on how race, income, disability, language access, housing status, and other social factors produce disproportionate physical, financial, and psychological harms. As an institute and also campus leaders, EOC understands the value of connectedness and belonging and sees the importance of understanding how their programming, services, and decisions affect the most vulnerable of the UMass Amherst community. This project seeks to improve their operations to serve our campus community.

Michael Sakamoto, Staff Member

The Codemaker series allows performers at the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center to engage in dialogue with the audience of the show and general public. Welcoming four artists– Bill T. Jones, Sunny Jain, Maryna Krut, and Maria Mazzotta– this series creates dialogue by allowing the artists to talk about their performances that are centered around societal experiences, culture, politics, and more. In a time of increased social fracturing, political polarization, and ever more complicated federal immigration and foreign policies, this project seeks to present, frame, and explore issues relevant to a broad range of local, national, and international UMass students, faculty, staff, and community members. The four artist speakers represent a broad range of views on critical themes through varied lenses of culture, gender, race, sexual orientation, language, and geography. They speak alternately from queer African American, second-generation Indian American, wartime Ukrainian female and marginalized southern Italian female perspectives. During each event, artists will discuss these larger issues from their personal experience, creating understanding and belonging across the larger UMass Community. 

Jen Sandler, faculty

Young activist organizers have grown up amid constant movements to confront injustice, violence, and precarity–from the community support and mutual aid of the Covid-19 pandemic, to the uprisings of Black Lives that peaked in 2020, to the many climate crisis actions, to organizing to end school shooting, to encampments to support Palestine in the face of genocide, to the resistance to state violence against immigrants that is currently unfolding communities across the nation. This project aims to engage students and staff organizers across campus, local alumni, and community members in a vibrant intergenerational dialogue about how to sustain organizing lives and movements for the long haul. The dialogue will be guided and facilitated by a panel, small groups, and a Q&A discussion. The panelists will include a keynote speaker, faculty moderator, and graduate student moderator, also featuring UMass Alumnus and nationally recognized social movement leader, trainer, and organizer, Kandace Montgomery. She is a former Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Black Visions, organizer with Free MN Campaign, and Senior Fellow at Future Currents. With her support and expertise in supporting leaders through both crisis and expansion, this project will address organizing to protect communities under repeated crises of state violence, preparing for and sustaining the engagement of a broad range of people, and build communities that can support diverse organizers long term.  

Paul Collins, faculty

This project includes three mediated panel discussions–open to the entire UMass community and featuring a question and answer session at each panel– as a part of the 2026 Northeast Law and Society Retreat. Taking place October 2nd 2026, the panelists’ goals are to help people understand how to think about contentious issues facing democracy from diverse perspectives. Each panel will include qualified individuals in fields related to the topics of each discussion, including Migration and Democracy, Law and Political Representation, and Public Engagement. The panelists will model how to disagree without being disagreeable, while seeking to identify concrete steps that can be taken for those intervening in bolstering democracy. Given the contemporary relevance of these topics, we expect that the panels will generate a substantial amount of dialogue during and after the event, positively impacting our campus community at large. 

Mariana Chilton, faculty

The human rights approach to addressing hunger, food security, and sustainable agriculture can have a lasting impact on coordinated efforts to end hunger in Massachusetts. This project aims to have a 1-day dialogue among 30 UMass faculty, students, and staff, and 30 nonprofit leaders and legislators to learn more about the right to food approach, and how it may strengthen anti-hunger advocacy efforts on campus and across the commonwealth. Several speakers including Spencer Masterson, Jim McGovern, and many others will speak about the importance of anti-hunger efforts across Massachusetts. This dialogue will have many afternoon workshops to talk about the basic needs of students, ways to get involved, and more dialogue on food as a human right as enshrined in international law. 

Brennan Tierney, staff member

The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy will host Be Seriously Scared!—an immersive, interactive program that blends performance art, historical storytelling, documentary film, and structured dialogue to confront the ongoing danger of nuclear war and explore what democratic engagement requires in response. The program situates the 1954 Castle Bravo test within both historical and contemporary contexts, connecting Cold War nuclear testing to present-day geopolitical tensions and ongoing nuclear modernization. A monologue from Tish’s developing film project, Tickling the Dragon’s Tail, will be followed by a screening of the award-winning short documentary Appreciation: The Tomiko Morimoto West Story, introduced by filmmaker Michael Dwyer. The event concludes with a facilitated Q&A and open dialogue focused not only on the risks of nuclear weapons, but on constructive responses: how students can engage critically with public policy, support journalistic transparency, participate in democratic discourse, and pursue careers or scholarship related to peace and security. The goal is not simply to alarm, but to cultivate informed, reflective civic engagement.

Noy Holland, faculty

Poetry and Resistance brings people together in the spirit of shared hope and shared moral responsibility. Their mission is to animate—through art, science, and civic engagement—a collective response. This event will specifically respond to the ecological crises of our time, including flood, fire, hurricane, and heat. In the headwinds of the Trump Administration’s massive deregulation spree affecting ecological crises, as well as social and political crises, Poetry and Resistance insists that art needs to stand as a stone in the poisoned stream. In an age when courage is rare, this project aims to still be courageous in that challenge. To accomplish this, this project will bring poets, scientists, writers, and activists together to discuss ecological issues in interdisciplinary and intergenerational contexts, discussing topics ranging from Eco Poetics, regenerative practices, climate justice, and more. This will be a series of events designed to invite conversation and precipitate action, including five in person and one virtual event. Each gathering will welcome educated scholars and experts in the field to allow our campus community to gather, find strength in each other’s stories, reckon with despair, and move on with purpose, gratitude, joy, and love. 

Beyond Borders Reading Series was inaugurated in Fall 2024 with the support of the ACDD Grant, and gave the opportunity for an international writer to come to campus and guide an interdisciplinary, wide-ranging, humanistic conversation. In the current phase of the Beyond Borders Reading Series, this project will invite writers and translators whose work addressed major global issues of the day, including Suzanne Jill Levine and Elizabeth Lowe, whose work and impact ranges geographically, bringing up topics like immigration, border crossing, the relationship among North American and South American, the relationship between the Western World and Africa, and more. They will be invited for a reading and conversation about their work—novels and poetry—and the issues the work addresses. After each presentation, a Q&A will follow in which the UMass Community can directly engage in dialogue with the speaker as well as their literary translator. The opportunity to discuss a work with both the writer and translator is a unique feature of this series and offers exciting advantages such as the possibility of discussing how and why vital issues do or do not translate into English and specifically American discourses. Taking place April 16th, this event series created unique opportunities for presentations, conversations, and intercultural community exchange that are rare, memorable, and provide direct insight for UMass audiences into some of the matters that concern us the most. 

Narine Berberian, undergrad

This event is to commemorate Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day while fostering discussion surrounding current Armenian sociopolitical events. A screening of “My Sweet Land” will be shown, followed by an opportunity for conversation with the director, Sareen Hairabedian. The documentary covers the story of Vrej, an 11 year-old boy growing in post-Soviet Armenia and Artsakh, an Armenian territory under Azerbaijani control. The audience follows Vrej through interactions with family and friends and his struggle to leave Artsakh, his home, or stay and fight for his land. The documentary highlights the physical and emotional struggles faced by oppressed populations living in territories under foreign control. It opens the eyes of the audience to the struggles for geopolitical power in the Caucasus and the effects on the people living there. The documentary will be screened first to provide the audience with context and an understanding of the current situation. Next, Sareen will give a small talk about her experience in Armenia and her inspiration for the documentary. Lastly, the discussion will open up to the audience giving everyone the opportunity to ask questions and express opinions. 

Elana Casey, staff member

Every Day Work is a two-part public artist/scholar talk presenting selected artists from the Augusta Savage Gallery’s Contemporary Folkworks and AIR programs in dialogue with research fellows and scholars. The series pairs artists with academic perspectives to explore the themes, ideas, and symbolic languages present in their work and to situate artistic practice alongside interdisciplinary scholarship. Part 1 of this series will have artist Desmond Beach in a 20-minute artist presentation followed by a moderated conversation with a scholar or research fellow focused on historical memory, folk knowledge, ritual, and art as a site of healing and cultural preservation. Audience Q&A and a public reception will follow. Part 2 of this series will feature artist Jeffrey Meris in dialogue with a sociologist or criminology scholar whose research addresses policing, surveillance, racial profiling, or systems of criminalization. Centered on Meris’s exhibition When I’m Not Strong, the program will examine misrecognition, institutional bias, and the collapsing of Black individuality within systems of control. The event will include a 20-minute artist presentation followed by a moderated interdisciplinary conversation (30–40 minutes), audience Q&A, and a public reception. Together, the two programs frame “every day work” as the ongoing labor of memory, survival, visibility, and self-definition. 

Purna Venugopalan, staff member

The Asian and Asian American Arts and Cultures (AAAACP) program is co-presenting this two-day engagement with the Filipino Student Association by bringing Filipino-American rapper Ruby Ibarra and June Millington to lead discussions, perform at Bowker Auditorium, and a post-show Q&A co-moderated by an FSA student and Purna Venugopalan, Program Director of AAAACP. Throughout this program there will be discussions on Ibarra’s creative process, exploring how she balances her Filipino and American identities, incorporates Tagalog and Waray as acts of cultural preservation, and advocates through her music for issues both in the Philippines and the United States. A faculty panel will contextualize her work within diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian-American culture.

Chaia Leibowitz

2026 marks both the 250th anniversary of the United States and approximately 200 years since the invention of photography. Photography’s archival power resides in its accessibility and reproducibility, which have enabled working-class communities to record their existence, celebrate personal achievements, and preserve cultural practices for future generations. Photography has the power to reveal truths that pervade American society, preserve communities and political movements, and the lives of individuals. This symposium seeks a dialogue between scholarship and practicing artists who capture the places and people of America. Through this conversation, we will ask what approach photography should take going forward. We seek to create a space where the power of photography is both lauded and questioned in its capacity to depict American society, both its progress and decay. Attendees will be invited to engage in their own practices of preservation through a community art-making session with one of the invited artists.

Ishmael D. Hazelwood, undergrad

The POC Summit is a collaborative event hosted by UMass Brotherly Union (UBU) in partnership with BSU, NAACP, and NSBE. The summit is designed to create a platform for students, professionals, and community members to engage in meaningful conversations and share experiences as people of color across industries. The event will begin with opening remarks from the presidents of each collaborating organization, followed by the Navigating Industry as a POC panel featuring Black professionals discussing the climate of being Black in corporate spaces, professional development, and personal career journeys. The panel will include moderated questions and an open Q&A session. After a networking and dining break, the summit will feature a keynote address from Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who will speak on her experiences as a Black woman in politics and the intersections of race and gender in leadership. The event will conclude with a final networking session aimed at fostering connection, collaboration, and mentorship.

Monika Valečić, staff member

Academic environments increasingly depend on grants and regulatory compliance, yet the knowledge required to move effectively within various funding systems often remains part of a hidden curriculum. Those without prior exposure (e.g. first-generation scholars, contingent faculty, staff, students, and community collaborators) may experience these processes as opaque or exclusionary. At the same time, broader public debates about institutional trust underscore the importance of transparency and democratic practice within higher education. This proposal would create an open forum for examining how bureaucratic systems shape participation in the university, and for equipping faculty, staff, and students with the tools to navigate them more confidently. This initiative would also have workshops paired with critical reading while connecting everyday administrative experience to larger questions of democracy, authority, and access. 

Jad El Auoji, undergrad

UMass4CCCL proposes to host a campus-wide dialogue event titled Standing Together: Cancer, Community, and Compassion. This free event will create an open space for students, faculty, and staff to reflect on how cancer impacts individuals, families, and communities, and to discuss how we can better support one another in times of serious illness. The goal of this initiative is to provide a welcoming and structured environment where members of the UMass community can share experiences, ask questions, and learn from healthcare perspectives about the emotional and social dimensions of cancer. Rather than focusing on fundraising, this event centers awareness, empathy, and dialogue. Cancer is not only a medical condition but a social experience that affects relationships, mental health, and community resilience. By creating space for honest and respectful conversation, we encourage students to think critically about how communities respond to illness, how support systems function, and how compassion can be practiced in daily life. Time will be dedicated to brief framing remarks, open dialogue and guided small group discussions so participants can reflect collectively and exchange perspectives in a respectful setting. 

Sindiso Mnisi, Faculty

On university campuses and in broader society, we are witnessing a moment of profound social fragmentation popularly described as one of “deep polarization.” This is particularly impactful for students in their first year on college campuses, as they are particularly vulnerable to feelings of isolation and the false relief offered by ideological hardening. To help confront this, this project pilots a “Cohesion Laboratory” embedded within First-Year Seminars and Residential Academic Programs. The goal is the operationalization, on our campus, of the African humanization principle “Ubuntu” as a practical tool for community repair centered around social healing and de-Westernizing connection. Simply, this tool facilitates the collective cultivation of belonging, trust, and resilience. By embedding “Ubu-Ntu” into first-year curriculum, this project intervenes precisely when students are forming their social networks and civic identities. The format centers on the Ten Toast Dinners (RAP Small Groups). This structure is like a game of 8-12 people dining together, allowing students to share their stories and experiences and for listeners to learn more about people in their groups. Aiming to address the crisis of social division and profound fragmentation, Ten Toasts Dinners make genuine engagement, realness, and deep connection rapidly possible. After this activity, participants will reflect using the principle of “Ubu-Ntu” to generate new insights on social repair and connection.

Jack Schneider, Faculty

When we think of democracy, we tend to focus on elections and government. Yet, the daily life of democracy happens in towns across America as ordinary people, forgotten to history, that stepped up to serve their communities. In the form of a public lecture by Professor Johann Neem of Western Washington University, the goal of this project is to bring members of the campus community together, particularly across disciples, to consider the daily work of democracy— as distinct from election-related components to democratic government. This is particularly oriented towards two audiences: students and faculty, both of whom will be interested in the content and can recognize mutual interest as a way to facilitate collaboration. This talk will focus on “ordinary acts of citizenship” and how co-producing public services, volunteering, and being a good neighbor are essential to the formation of civic habits necessary to work together despite division. At a time of intense partisan conflict, it is worth remembering that our democracy depends not just on those with the loudest voices, but equally on those who take time out of their busy lives simply to do what needs to be done in their communities. By making democracy approachable and accessible, the intention of this project is to encourage people to get more involved and to build more connections with others at a time when experts have documented more Americans are spending time alone or online. 

Uladzislau Voinich, graduate student

“Spaces of Exception” is a film by Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny that juxtaposes the conditions of Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank and Native Americans on reservations in the United States of America. In a dialogue fashion, the filmmakers discuss the ways in which state-sanctioned oppression is enacted in these contexts, addressing systematic injustices and also pointing out pathways for solidarity between the marginalized. The film also addressed settled colonialism and was itself a dialogical process: the filmmakers traveled back and forth between refugee camps and reservations, establishing a dialogue between the inhabitants of these spaces not only on screen, but also in real life. Matt Peterson, one of the two directors, will come to UMass Amherst campus to do a screening of the film and participate in a Q&A session afterwards. In addition to talking about the process of making this film, Matt is going to share with the audience the challenges that the filmmakers faced and the censorship that they have endured. Tackling topics such as displacement, confinement, racial inequality, freedom of speech, and cross-culture solidarity, the goal of the screening is to encourage students and community members to learn more about the intertwined nature of systems that are based on dominance and oppression to shed light on ongoing human rights violations and to encourage critical thinking about power structures.  

Carlotta Mele, graduate student

Hosted by the Organization of Graduate Students in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst, this project will welcome renowned literary and cultural theorist Leila Gandhi, a John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, to give a speech within the context of Crossroads VIII, a Graduate Conference hosted by the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature. Her work is centered in postcolonial theory—a body of thought that is interested in investigating the way literature is received and produced in former colonies, focusing on deconstructing representations of non-Western people, places and cultures. The event will allow current students and faculty members to gain precious insight from a scholar at another institution and will foster an interdisciplinary discussion within the community of students and faculty in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The speech will be followed by a Q&A session and will conclude with refreshments and networking of the attendees of the event as well as Dr. Gandhi themself. This project engages significant global and domestic questions concerning political violence, ethical resistance, and the role of cultural narratives in shaping public life within plural societies. Across diverse geopolitical contexts, debates surrounding religion, national identity, historical memory, and minority rights continue to influence social and political discourse. Institutions of higher education are uniquely positioned to provide critical, historically grounded analysis of these issues through rigorous scholarly inquiry. This project aims to cultivate critical inquiry into how cultural narratives shape collective life and how scholarly reflection can illuminate pathways toward more equitable and humane forms of engagement. 

Ella Ford undergrad

Annually, the Specialization in Developmental Disabilities and Human Services (DDHS) Program at UMass Amherst has hosted a Neurodiversity and Disability Studies Summit. The purpose of this summit has been to bring together students within the DDHS Program—including students majoring in Psychology, Education, Speech Language and Hearing Science and others— other students, and the general public to educate them on a specific topic within the field of Disability Studies as well as promote advocacy and discussion among these individuals. In the past, the Summit has welcomed keynote speakers educated and respected in the field of Disability Studies, and this year, this project is welcoming Jina Kim, a current Assistant Professor at Smith College. Her work focuses on feminism, disability, and queer-of-color critique. During the 45 minute poster session, there will be breakfast available to attendees and lunch provided after the lunch during a Q&A session. Attendees will be broken into breakout groups to discuss the presentation and the topics are addressed within a supported and guided space. 

Aaria Prakash, undergrad

This workshop is a campus-based initiative in partnership with Concord Prison Outreach and hosted by MedConnect designed to engage the UMass Amherst community in meaningful dialogue about the challenges faced by individuals reentering society after incarceration. Many formerly incarcerated individuals encounter barriers to housing, employment, healthcare, and mental health resources, making reintegration difficult. Through this interactive workshop, participants will gain insight into the structural and personal challenges faced by this population while contributing directly to their support through the creation of welcome backpacks filled with essentials. This project welcomes Sam Williams, Executive Director of Concord Prison Outreach, who will provide an expert perspective on healthcare delivery within correctional facilities, addictions and the drug crisis in prisons, the psychological impacts of incarceration, and the role of restorative justice in promoting successful community reintegration. By combining expert-led discussion with an interactive, service-based component, the workshop creates a holistic learning experience that emphasizes both understanding and action. The goals of this workshop are to foster open dialogue, encourage engagement, support formerly incarcerated individuals, and build collaborative relationships. The workshop will begin with a presentation by Sam Williams, followed by an interactive question-and-answer segment where attendees can engage directly with the speaker. 

Catherine Wan, undergrad

Chat for change is held by the Asian American Student Association (AASA), in collaboration with the South Asian Student Association (SASA), and the Arab Culture Association (ACA). The goal of Chat for Change is for attendees to be educated on an important topic happening in America. For this event, the chat will focus on the topic of immigration. Given the current upheaval across the country regarding deportations and actions by ICE agents, AASA, SASA, and ACA want to educate attendees about immigrant history in America and current immigrant rights. This is a sensitive subject, and as such, they want to bring in experts from the History Department, Legal Studies Department, and SLSO to speak. This project aims to create a safe space to engage in respectful conversations. The event will be held in the Black Box Theatre and feature a panel of educational speakers, followed by an activity. To start, student organizers from AASA, SASA, and ACA will present the topic being discussed through a short slide deck presentation to prime the attendees on the subject, followed by prepared lectures of experts. As experts, they will educate attendees on different facets of immigration, nuances, and overall discourse. To end the event, there will be group discussions facilitated by AASA, SASA, and ACA as well as an activity relevant to immigration. The benefit of the discussion is that attendees are encouraged to talk to each other about personal opinions and experiences they might have about the issue. At the same time, through the activity, they often work in collaboration with each other to create something physical they can take away from the event, which relates back to the topic. The event will also provide Asian American, South Asian, and Arabic food and refreshments for attendees throughout the entirety of the event. In times like these, it is essential we remain educated on our rights as citizens and people in this country, and this event aims to give attendees the space to process, converse, and collaborate over a topic crucial to the current climate.