The Faculty Collaboratory Fellows Program supports UC Davis faculty engaging in feminist collaboration that exemplifies FRI’s four values of inclusivity, intersectionality, justice, and transformation. We are particularly interested in collaborations that challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge. Collaborations may include feminist-informed community-based research, productions or events, team science, convergence research, or research exploring citational and/or archival practices as collaboration. Currently, the Fellows Program supports faculty members with up to $10k in research funds, as well as all of the benefits that come from an affiliation with FRI--access to a collaborative working space, research networks, and a team of FRI staff committed to helping amplify feminist research on campus and beyond.

Applications for 2020-2021 will be posted Winter quarter.

Project Summaries

Tracking Ida is an educational game inspired by the pioneering investigative journalism of Ida B. Wells. Players uncover Wells’ crusade in the 1890s against lynching, and use her strategies to investigate police killings in their neighborhood. The game is designed for Black youth, and will eventually be tested in underserved Sacramento public K-12 schools. The Feminist Research Institute Fellowship will fund the expansion of an award-winning two-part pilot launched in Watts, Los Angeles.

The interactive game combines elements of contemporary “escape rooms” (players use newspaper articles and evidence from Wells’ investigations into lynchings to solve puzzles and unlock fictional historical artifacts) with a storytelling component, in which students interview families affected by police violence, activists, and historians, then edit video highlights and post them on social media. Long term, Dr. Lishan AZ hopes to make a series of transformative games about stories in Black women’s history, test them with Sacramento youth, and exhibit them together.

Fellow:

Lishan AZ
Assistant Professor
Cinema and Digital Media Department
LishanAZ.com

Advancing Sustainable Futurities via Indigenous Feminist Logics: Perspectives from the North Pacific Crescent

This collaborative project, led by an intergenerational research team of Indigenous women researchers from the North Pacific Crescent (NPC) region, is rooted in forward-looking and sustainable matrifocal epistemologies/ontologies, what we are calling Indigenous Feminist Logics (IFL). The team will seek to address the following guiding questions:

• What are the histories and contemporary examples of IFL-rooted research and activism in the NPC?
• What confluences exist, or need to be brought into being, between Indigenous and feminist thought leaders and activists?
• What are the opportunities and challenges facing the creation of an IFL/NPC collective? 

The Feminist Reseach Institute fellowship will fund the launch of a year-long series of transdisciplinary convergence research activities, such as a multimedia website, curated writing and action workshops, and collaborative envisioning of the future of the project.

Fellow:

Jessica Perea
Assistant Professor, Department of Native American Studies
www.jbperea.faculty.ucdavis.edu

Instrumental: The Elayne Jones Project // creative and critical perspectives on inclusion in Western classical music

There is a burgeoning movement in Western classical music to upend traditional hierarchies and reimagine this cultural field as inclusive. African American percussionist Elayne Jones is a key figure whose life work of linking musical advocacy with social justice prefigures this current movement. Instrumental: The Elayne Jones Project uses this artist’s life, work, and fight for inclusion within the historically elitist enclave of classical music to examine the dynamics of race, gender, and social justice. The Feminist Research Institute Fellowship will fund the collaboration between American Studies scholar Grace Wang and feminist documentary filmmaker Julie Wyman, which consists of scholarly writing, a short documentary portrait, and a web-based archive of personal photographs and documents intended to preserve, historicize, and extend access to future researchers.

Fellows:

Julie Wyman
Associate Professor
Cinema and Digital Media Department

Grace Wang
Associate Professor
American Studies Department