Critical issues projects have been funded on a yearly bases with rolling deadlines since 2017. Here are a few winning projects.

  • A Good Boy –  A music theater piece in progress with music by AJ Layague and Marc Callahan (Assistant Professor of Music) with texts by Lynden Harris (Hidden Voices)—all in collaboration with stage director Kathy Hunter Williams (Dept. of Drama). The libretto draws on Harris’s interviews with the mothers, sisters, and children of men living on Death Row–men with whom the creative team has formed relationships over the years.
  • Dialogue and Transformation: Bringing Philosophy to Juvenile Justice Centers in North Carolina – Led by Director of Outreach in the Philosophy Department, Michael Vazquez, this project will integrate philosophy and university resources in Juvenile Justice education programs. The first pilot program will be a weekly philosophy discussion group centering on Plato’s Republic for students housed at Cabarrus Youth Development Center in Concord, NC.
  • #FreeNseRamon: Human Rights and the Art of Resistance – Faculty affiliated with the UNC Global Initiative produced a series of program on political prisoners around the world ranging from outreach visits to schools to a series of presentations on campus for students, faculty, and our different outreach communities. This project sought to bring Carolina into conversation with one of Africa’s top political artists, political cartoonist Nsé Ramón Esono Ebalé, as well as with a robust coalition of international organizations focused on freedom of expression, political cartooning, and human rights.
  • Hear Us Now Lobby Activation Project – Staff at the Playmakers Repertory created digital and interpersonal “pop-ups” to use the lobby for audience engagement with recent local immigration history during the fall 2019 run of the show Ragtime.
  • Jane Austen Summer Program: Pride and Prejudice and its Migrations – The Jane Austen Summer Program (“JASP”) is designed to appeal to established scholars, middle and high school teachers, graduate students, undergraduate students, and anyone with a passion for all things Austen. The majority of attendees are members of the community, unaffiliated with any institution of higher learning. The award-winning four day summer symposium has usually focused on one of Austen’s works. In addition to focusing on a novel, we explore the historical and social conditions of the time and the novel’s connection with other arts.
  • Migration Stories: Linguistics and Belonging among Refugees from Burma – More than 1,000 refugees from Burma live in the Triangle, migrants who relocated here as part of a U.N. resettlement program first instituted in 2005. Although often referred to as Burmese, this diverse group in fact includes a range of populations who speak different Southeast Asian languages depending on their family histories and migration patterns. Numerous local organizations have worked to support refugees’ adaptation to life in North Carolina, but many community needs remain, including improved access to and use of resources for physical and mental wellbeing. This project aims to amplify the voices of the diverse population of refugees from Burma based in the Triangle. Our interdisciplinary team of community leaders, historians, linguists, and social work professionals will collect and preserve oral histories and from the community, with special attention to past and present community needs. In the process, we will develop an ethical and empowering digital toolkit for the community—and other refugee communities around the country—to continue the work of collecting and preserving the voices of their friends and family members. The project interweaves the work of two campus projects. First is Southern Mix, a collaborative effort to collect oral histories from Asian and Asian American residents of the South, run by the Carolina Asia Center and the Southern Oral History Program. Second is the Burma Refugee Working Group, hosted by the Carolina Asia Center and including faculty from Asian Studies, Linguistics, and Social Work, as well as graduate students from Linguistics and refugee community members.
  • New Roots in Hyde County/Nuevas Raíces en el Condado de Hyde -“New Roots in Hyde County, NC” is a public history project that engages youth in documenting and celebrating community heritage in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo, Mexico. The project is a collaboration between the non-profit organization Ocracoke Alive, the Festival Latino, and the New Roots/ Nuevas Raíces initiative of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, the Southern Oral History Program, and the University Libraries at UNC Chapel Hill.
  • National High School Ethics Bowl: BRIDGES – The NHSEB BRIDGES Project aims to develop online tools and resources that facilitate knowledge-sharing and community-building interactions among the thousands of people involved in the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB) program nationwide.
  • Pickin’ for Progress – A documentary and community project focused on immigrant laborers on North Carolina farms, their struggle, the union organizers fighting against their exploitation, and the inspiring folk music that has long been the soul of the movement. This is a project of Chair of Music Professor David Garcia, musician Joe Troop, filmmaker Rode Diaz (Iximche Media), organizer Emily Rhyne (Witness for Peace),  Institute for the Study of the Americas Associate Director Hannah Gill, and producers and documentarians Anthony Simpkins and Tim Duggan of GemsOnVHS.
  • Process Series Storytelling Festival – Recognizing the power and potential of storytelling in its many forms at this pivotal moment in American culture and politics, the Process Series in partnership with UNC’s Department of American Studies will present a Storytelling Festival February 17-21 2021. Featuring performances and workshops features thirteen Native American, African American, Asian American, Latinx and European American Storytellers.
  • Race and the Regency – A special six-month web series produced by the Jane Austen Summer Program featuring Q&As, lectures by scholars, and engaged practices with the Jane Austen fandom to explore the role of race in the novels and the author’s legacy.
  • A Red Record– Initially driven by original, digital research and analysis by undergraduate students, A Red Record is a cartographic representation of historic lynchings in the Carolinas. This Critical Issues Project expands and develops A Red Record’s contribution to pressing public conversations about race, violence, and power through aesthetic reimagination, contributions from historians, expansion of the project’s scope to include the entire former Confederacy, and inclusion of lesson plans and training modules for high school teachers. Carolina K-12 and School of Education faculty collaborated to help teachers bring this essential history into 11th and 12th grade classrooms.
  • Southern Cultures’ The Abolitionist South – An expansion on the themes and resources of the Southern Cultures Journal’s upcoming Abolitionist South Fall 2020 Issue (special guest edited by Garrett Felber and Dionne Bailey). This project will include an extended print-run of issues for incarcerated individuals, a series of public programs and a one credit course for grad students themed on modern abolition movements.
  • Stories to Save Lives: Using Oral History to Improve Health and Medical Care in North Carolina – Launched in Fall 2017, this engaged oral history research project spanned 12 rural counties across North Carolina and Virginia to build data on the implications of oral history methodology for public health research. Students from Southern Oral History Program (SOHP), Gillings School of Public Health, and UNC’s School of Nursing interviewed people about their experiences and perceptions of health care in the rural American South. The project fostered community collaboration in places such as Warrenton, NC and CommWell Health Clinic in Harnett County, NC, as well as interdisciplinary partnerships across/between Gillings, UNC Medical School, and UNC’s School of Nursing. Fieldwork concluded with 175 oral histories collected over a two-year period. During the 2020-2021 academic year, a team of five Gillings MPH Capstone Team students are actively working with SOHP to analyze and build deliverables with the 40 oral histories from CommWell Health Clinic.
  • Teachers, Artisans, and Entrepreneurs: Black Work and Community in a Southern Town – This project sought to recognize and archive the ingenuity necessary to creating and sustaining a thriving economy in the historically Black community known as Northside, in Chapel Hill, NC. Through the digitization of documents that reflect the full spectrum of community life, this project preserved and advanced the legacy of work in Northside.
  • UndocuCarolina – In collaboration with UNC DACA/Undocumented Resource Team and the Im/migration, Illegality, and Citizenship Working Group, UndocuCarolina has built upon and extended the resources of the Undocuments website into a set of workshops, film screenings, programs, and interdisciplinary learning opportunities intended to examine and better appreciate the contours of present day immigration policy and build community understanding of the causes and consequences of living undocumented. To date, the group have trained over 400 people across 25 on campus departments in the issues surrounding undocumented student life.
  • Warren County 1921 Project – A public reenactment and engagement project around the 1921 trial of the Norlina 16, a group of Black men imprisoned after battling an armed white mob that was intent on terrorizing Norlina’s Black community in Warren County. This program is a project of American Studies professor Glenn Hinson, Warren County’s 1921 Project, that county’s SPARK (Seeking Peace and Reconciling Kinship) racial justice coalition, the Warren County NAACP, the Warren County African American History Collective, and UNC’s Institute for African American Research.