Professors Awarded 2024 ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant

York College is proud to announce that professors Emily Verla Bovino (Project Lead, Performing and Fine Arts) and Dawn Roberts-Semple (Co-Investigator, Earth and Physical Sciences) are part of a project team that has been awarded a 2024 ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant.

Project team members also include Barbara Brown (Chairperson, Eastern Queens Alliance, Inc.) and András Blazsek (Doctoral Fellow, SUNY Buffalo, Department of Media Study). The project will include community participation through Eastern Queens Alliance, Inc. (EQA), a federation of civic associations advocating for a sustainable Southeast Queens.

EQA operates the Idlewild Environmental Center located in Springfield Gardens, Queens located at 222-02 149th Avenue in Springfield Gardens, Queens. The creation of the center and the restoration of Idlewild Park Preserve are its major initiatives.

Dr. Bovino and Dr. Roberts-Semple met in working group meetings of the Yamecah Food Forest Initiative, an agro-forestry project and public art project for York College, led by Professor Nina Buxenbaum (Performing and Fine Arts). The ACLS project is an example of a transdisciplinary collaboration made possible by the Yamecah Food Forest initiative.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grants Program supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

The project team will receive approximately $25,000 to work on 'Sounding Data Justice for Environmental Liberation in Southeast Queens', one of ten start-up projects awarded. It initiates university-based, transdisciplinary support for a community-run digital justice initiative in data literacy, data ethics, and environmental awareness.

In response to EQA's interest in art-science initiatives, the project transforms data into sound to develop new ways of sharing the air quality and aircraft noise data collected by EQA. In workshops and listening sessions with community members, the project translates extrapolated values into sound and images to explore correlations between measurements.

The aim is to grow data literacy and foster environmental equity through liberation science and ecological art. To learn more about the project, mail ebovino@york.cuny.edu.

According to ACLS Program Officer of IDEA Programs Keyanah Nurse, “This year’s awarded projects go above and beyond simply centering marginalized communities in their digital outputs. They offer critical perspectives that name how systems of power and privilege function, creatively mobilizing digital tools to imagine–and actualize–more ethical, intentional, and just ways of producing knowledge, fostering collaborations, and advancing social equity.”

This year’s competition, saw a 140% increase in applications, introduced the new priority of capacity building, seeking to fund projects that bolster the local ecosystem of digital humanities at their respective academic, community, or cultural heritage institutions. This addition furthers the program’s broader redistributive aim of supporting scholars based at institutions with fewer resources available for this type of work.