The Activist Research Grant Initiative is sponsored through a consortium of the DDCE’s Social Justice Institute, the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Center for Gender and Women’s Studies. Through the program, summer research grants are awarded to fulltime UT graduate students whose research projects serve as direct political engagement.

Three projects were selected during the summer of 2013:

Black Youth, Food and Gentrification: An Austin, Texas Case Study by Naya Jones, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Geography and the Environment. Jones conducted historical research and collaborated with the local non-profit Cooperation Texas to build youth workshops

 

Remembering as Resistance? Collective Memory in an Anti-Mining Movement in Oaxaca, Mexico by Tony Macias, M.A. student, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. Macias focused on community organizing against a large-scale silver and gold mine in the Oaxacan town of San Jose del Progreso.

Spaces of Belonging: Indigeneity and Diaspora in Guyana by Shanya Cordias, M.A./Ph.D. candidate, Departments of Anthropology, Native American and Indigenous Studies. Cordias examined indigenous mobilization against state-endorsed land appropriation and development projects that perpetuate indigenous marginalization and displacement.