With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, DEFCon will be offering $100,000 in grants to support course and curriculum development in digital ethnic studies. An additional $75,000 will be offered to hire mentors to support grant recipients.
On December 13, 2021 at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific, Roopika Risam (Consortium Director) and Keja Valens (Consortium Associate Director) will hold an informational webinar on our funding opportunities. Register now!
These funding opportunities are central to our goals of developing and seeding a network of social justice-engaged digital humanities practitioners in ethnic studies fields and increasing national capacity for digital humanities curriculum engaged with minoritized communities. We are committed to supporting teaching in digital humanities that emphasizes the importance of reciprocal and redistributive relationship with communities though digital humanities praxis and that resists mono-directional power dynamics of knowledge production where the university is the arbiter of expertise. In doing so, our aim is to build the next generation of scholars in social justice-engaged digital humanities by offering students opportunities to better understand the field and begin developing their own expertise, drawing on their cultural wealth.
DEFCon Fellowships
In 2022, we are offering two types of grants:
DEFCon Teaching Fellowships: 8-month fellowships that support course design with the goal of positioning recipients to subsequently apply for a DEFCon Capacity Building Fellowship the following year. DEFCon Teaching Fellows receive a stipend of $2,500 (50 hours @ $50/hour), which can be used as compensation for work time, to pay for childcare, and/or offset the costs of attending digital humanities training institutes, such as the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT), and DREAMLab.
DEFCon Capacity Building Fellowships: These 8-month fellowships support curricular design. DEFCon Capacity Building Fellows receive a stipend of $5,000 (100 hours @ $50/hour), which can be used as compensation for work time, to pay for childcare, and/or pay for professional development for faculty colleagues who will teach in the program being developed.
DEFCon Mentors
Along with their stipends, fellowship recipients receive mentorship from pracitioners. Therefore, we are also accepting applications for DEFCon Mentors. Faculty, librarians, technologists, and staff with expertise in digital humanities will be selected to mentor recipients of DEFCon Teaching and Capacity Building Fellowships on topics such as curricular development, project management in the classroom, data management, sustainability of classroom digital humanities projects, and sunsetting to regrantees. Mentors will receive stipends of $2,500 for eight months (50 hours @ $50/hr). They will meet bi-weekly for an hour with their assigned regrantee and provide additional consultation, offering advice, review, and feedback on syllabi, assignments, or curriculum design. The Consortium Director will also meet bi-monthly with mentors to support their work and troubleshoot challenges they may encounter.
Eligibility
Recipients of funding must be members of DEFCon. Joining DEFCon is free and easy! See our Join page for details.
Fellowships are earmarked for faculty (tenure-line and contingent) and librarians at public colleges and universities (excluding R1s).
Given the terms of our award from the Mellon Foundation, recipients of DEFCon funding must reside in the U.S. or a U.S. territory.
For full details and application information, please visit our Grants page. Please direct questions to Roopika Risam (Consortium Director) at digitalethnicfutures [at] gmail [dot] com.
