Projects involving College of Media faculty, doctoral students receive funding from Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Program

Two faculty members in the College of Media were named recipients of the 2024-25 Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Program to address system bias and social injustice through cross-disciplinary research. This year, the program focuses on areas that span domestic, international, and transnational spaces.

Victor Font, a lecturer in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, is collaborating on a project called “Co-creating Knowledge for Antiracist and Transnational Solidarities through Radical Practices of Care, Hope and Human Urbanisms.” His team will receive $99,560.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the School of Information Sciences and in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, received $100,000 for a project she leads called “Activating a Peer-to-Peer Train the Trainers Network for Digital Equity Network in East Central Illinois: Advancing Racial Justice in Non-Profit Digital Navigation Programs.” Doctoral students at the College of Media’s Institute of Communications Research, Jorge Rojas Alvarez and Jiwon Oh, will also work on this initiative.

In its third year, the Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Program will distribute $1.2 million in funding to 11 research projects that support the vision of the University’s Campus-Community Compact to Accelerate Social Justice and partner with community organizations to solve and/or understand historical and current social injustices as they intersect with race.

Learn more about the College of Media-affiliated projects below. Read a full list of the projects funded for 2024-25.

Co-creating Knowledge for Antiracist and Transnational Solidarities through Radical Practices of Care, Hope, and Humane Urbanisms

This project aims co-create non-hierarchical learning spaces for our long-time collaborators, working across campus-community and social-spatial divides, to share social justice pedagogies and digital media methods as pathways for realizing antiracist, transnational solidarities we wish to forge across global color lines.

We build on decades-long relations of trust that faculty members at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have nurtured with academics and community groups in the U.S., South Africa, and Brazil to co-create knowledge about everyday practices of care and reciprocity that marginalized urban communities use to struggle beyond dominant divisive lines of race, gender, class, ethnicity and nationality. We refer to such ideals as humane urbanism, where life, not profit, is centered.

Using traditional action research along with emerging digital humanities methodologies, we host digital stories online through a multilingual multimedia website and host activist-in-residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus to gather direct narratives and counter-narratives of urban activists, and uncover how concealed daily practices of radical care and reciprocity in marginalized communities nurture hope and activate imagination of an alternative just future.

The goal of this project facilitating knowledge co-production among academics and community-based organizers is to learn possible paths and pragmatic strategies toward shared ideals of transnational justice.

Project leaders include Faranak Miraftab, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Ken Salo, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Helen Neville, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Magdalena Novoa, College of Fine and Applied Arts; Victor Font, College of Media; Teresa Barnes, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Atyeh Ashtari University of Memphis; Ricardo Nascimento UNILABE, Brazil; Efadul Hug, Smith College; Sarah Bassett, Arizona State University; Koni Benson, University of Western Cape; Greg Ruiters, University of Western Cape; Clarissa Freitas, Federal University of Ceara; Jose Ricardo Vargas de Faria, Federal University of Paraná; Giselle Tanaka, Federal University of Rio de Janeiroc. Community Members: Rob Robinson, Partners for Dignity and Rights; Dawn Blackman, Randolph Street Community Garden; James Kilgore, First Followers; Ann Rasmus, University of YMCA.

Activating a Peer-to-Peer Train the Trainers Network for Digital Equity Network in East Central Illinois: Advancing Racial Justice in Non-Profit Digital Navigation Programs

The “Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Train-the-Trainers for Broadband Equity” Digital Navigators Program is a collaborative initiative jointly led by the Community Data Clinic at UIUC and the Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (UC2B) non-profit to address persistent issues of Broadband and Digital Inequity in East Central Illinois EC-IL, particularly affecting historically marginalized and infrastructurally underserved populations.

Leveraging existing partnerships with five community organizations – the Housing Authority of Champaign County, Cunningham Township, Project Success of Vermilion County, Champaign-Urbana Public Health District and First Followers, this project aims to establish a Digital Navigators Network and seed a new EC-IL Broadband Equity Community Hub in Champaign Park District’s multi-purpose Martens Center.

The partnership network will support the development of a local Digital Navigators Program, training 36 new community-facing Digital Navigators, equipping them with new or refurbished laptops, and leveraging resources developed in two years of prior work around broadband equity education and programming with this network.

This project’s overarching goals will enhance affordable broadband adoption, empower community members with essential digital skills, and enhance access to community technology centers. By bringing together expertise from diverse organizations, the initiative seeks to bridge the digital divide and create opportunities for improved digital connectivity and inclusivity in EC-IL. This project was developed in alignment with and prior funding from the Illinois Office of Broadband’s Digital Equity + Inclusion Programming

In addition to Chan, project leaders include Tracy Smith, Technology Services; Paul Hixson, Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband Not-for-Profit; Julian Chin, School of Information Sciences; Jessica Black, Lead for America Fellowship Program. Doctoral students at the College of Media’s Institute of Communications Research, Jorge Rojas Alvarez and Jiwon Oh, will also work on this initiative.