slavery

The University of Maryland's Division of Research announced four New Directions Fund awards, supporting new faculty research projects in Education, History, and Psychology.

The New Directions Fund awards are part of the Maryland Catalyst Fund program, an internal faculty research support program designed to seed and expand research activity, visibility and impact. The program is designed to enable innovative research, incentivize the pursuit of large, complex, and high-impact research initiatives, and help UMD faculty to be more competitive for extramural research awards. The Maryland Catalyst Fund program is overseen by the Vice President for Research (VPR) and managed by the VPR’s Research Development Office, in coordination with UMD academic units and the Provost.

The four awards will support the following projects:

Exploring the Impact of an Inclusive Higher Education Program for Students With Intellectual And/or Developmental Disability

PI: Yewon Lee, Assistant Clinical Professor; EDUC-Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education

Individuals with intellectual and/or developmental disability (I/DD) have one of the lowest employment rates in the U.S. This is largely due to a lack of inclusive postsecondary education (PSE) options for people with I/DD. To help address this issue, the Center for Transition & Career Innovation (CTCI), nested in the College of Education, launched the TerpsEXCEED (EXperiencing College for Education and Employment Discovery) Program in 2021. This 2-year inclusive PSE program prepares students with I/DD for competitive employment and independent living. There are very few inclusive higher education programs across the nation and their outcomes and impact are under-researched. Our project explores how an inclusive PSE program impacts students with I/DD, their families, and the campus community through a case study. Our findings will inform the conceptual development of a replicable inclusive PSE model and serve as a seed for future federal funding opportunities and investments (e.g., Transition and Postsecondary Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities [TIPSID]). We believe that our work will contribute to disrupting systemic exclusion of people with I/DD by challenging traditional beliefs and practices of higher education.

Slavery, Law, and Power: Debating Justice and Democracy in Early America and the British Empire

PI: Holly Brewer, Associate Professor; ARHU-History

The Slavery, Law, & Power project sets up a system for sharing manuscript materials that connect slavery with processes of law and power, with a focus on the early British empire and the mainland that would become the United States. We now live in an era where it is not enough for experts in any given field to weigh in and pronounce truths that everyone can believe. To understand issues such as those surrounding the emergence of slavery, of empire, and of theories and practices of absolute monarchy, at the same time as theories and practices of human rights, democracy and supposed enlightenment–raises many questions about the connections between them. This project tries to fill a gap in existing collaborative projects related to slavery (e.g. those on the slave trade such as Slave Voyages, and on individual lives such as Enslaved.org) to focus on the connections between the emergence of slavery and the way it was supported by larger power structures, including judicial decisions and laws, in the midst of complex debates about justice. By making the evidence accessible, it enables users whether scholars, students, or interested members of the public– to not only understand the past but also the legacies of that past in the present.

The CARE Youth Internship Program at the University of Maryland

PI: Ariana Gard, Assistant Professor; BSOS-Psychology

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is an innovative equity-focused form of Community Based Participatory Research in which youth are trained to identify and analyze social issues relevant to their lives (Ginwright, 2007). With support from the 2022 Maryland Catalyst New Directions Funds, the Community And Resilient Environments (CARE) Youth Internship Program will empower youth of marginalized identities to conduct qualitative and quantitative research in their own communities. Youth participants will assess social and physical features of neighborhood blocks in NE Washington DC, collect physiological and air pollution data using wearable sensors, describe the implications of environmental quality on health and wellbeing, and receive training in research principles and ethics, basic research methods, and how to present study findings to local community leaders and members. This project represents a new research direction for Dr. Arianna Gard, whose work thus far has focused on examining the impacts of environmental adversity on youth neurobehavioral development using more traditional researcher-driven quantitative methods. By training and empowering youth to become researchers in their own communities, the Growth And Resilience across Development (GARD) Lab is working towards advocating for community-driven methods in developmental science.

Interaction Detection in Context-Aware Physical Classroom Spaces: Understanding Individual Children’s Classroom Experiences

PI: Jason Chow, Associate Professor; EDUC-Counseling, Higher Education and Special Education

A rich language environment is essential for children to be successful in the preschool classroom and beyond. Adult language input is a fundamental component of the environment and enables the acquisition of these skills. These tenets, recognizing the importance of the environment and the role of adult responsiveness to children, are central components of the transactional theory of language development. This proof-of-concept project aims to pilot the novel application of interaction-detection technology. We will partner with the College of Education's Center for Young Children and use interaction-detection technology to understand the real-time relations between teacher language input, child language development, engagement, and peer interactions. We will test the usability of interaction-detection technology linked with audio data to capture children’s learning experiences and the distribution of teacher’s attention and engagement in real time. This project will extend current research on average experiences and begin to unpack variation in individual learning experiences; findings will lead to data-supported external funding applications to federal agencies that support this line of inquiry.

For more information about the Maryland Catalyst Fund and New Directions Awards, visit the Division of Research website. 

By Jessica Weiss ’05

As New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones prepared to publish “The 1619 Project” in August 2019, she expected it to ignite controversy. An exploration of the legacy of slavery timed to the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia, it offers a new American origin story—one that doesn’t begin with the Pilgrims or the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But Hannah-Jones never imagined that The New York Times Magazine project—now transformed into a book—would draw such ferocious opposition that it would be outlawed in schools in a number of states, and even used in former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trials and the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court. Intended as a work of journalism “that uses history to explain the way slavery is shaping our society today,” critics have accused Hannah-Jones of rewriting history itself.

On Tuesday evening, Hannah-Jones, the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in commentary for her essay on the project, took the stage at the Kay Theatre in The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to discuss the project’s goals and impact and the incredible backlash it generated.

“Of course we’ve all largely only learned one story: that we were the freest, greatest country in the history of the world, the only country founded on an idea, the only country founded with a constitution that professes to imbue us all with inalienable rights,” she told the animated crowd. “If you read the project, you can’t see your country the same way. And that’s a powerful thing.”

Hannah-Jones’ visit was the latest installment of the College of Arts and Humanities’ Dean’s Lecture Series, co-presented by the Colvin Institute of Real Estate Development at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and HAND, the Housing Association of Nonprofit Developers. She was in conversation with ARHU Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill, a pioneering scholar of intersectionality. It was Thornton Dill’s final Dean’s Lecture Series event; she will step down next month after 11 years at the helm and over 30 years at UMD.

Here are some of the takeaways from the discussion:

The United States has more than one story: “We [called the project] a new origin story, not the new origin story for a reason. There could never be one, there should never be one, especially in a multiracial society like we live in. You could certainly tell the story of America through Indigenous people, and it would tell you a very different side and give you a different depth. You could tell it through women, through the LGBTQ+ community. We have to question the histories we’ve been taught: Who do they serve and who do they leave out?”

Black contributions have been systematically excluded: “So much of my desire to bring ‘The 1619 Project’ into the world began as my quest as a child to see myself in the story. I kind of believed we weren’t being taught anything about Black people because we must not have done much. They talk about slavery because they have to discuss the Civil War and then we disappear for 100 years and show up in the March on Washington, and there’s nothing in between. As a 16-year old, when I took my first Black studies class as a high school elective … I became empowered by the knowledge that there was history, there was literature, there was art, but also really angry that people had made the decision not to teach it to us.”

Inequities in housing and education are part of the legacy of slavery: “Housing and schools are the two areas of civil rights we’ve made the least progress on because they’re the two areas that are the most intimate. And they’re tied together, they feed each other. And this is where white progressive support for equality falls off. If you want to see how many progressives actually live their values, talk about building some affordable housing in their neighborhood. And schools are even more segregated than housing. Black Americans are the most segregated group in housing and schools to this day, and that is because we descend from slavery. And we don’t talk about it that way.”

So-called “critical race theory” (CRT) laws are part of a larger push for power: “I call these anti-history laws, anti-memory laws, anti-Black laws, but not anti-CRT laws because that’s not what they are. These laws are about driving a wedge, about stoking white resentment to justify other regressive policies. The same states that are passing these anti-history laws are also passing laws to overturn Roe, they’re also passing laws against trans children, the LGBT community, targeting disfavored groups to pave the way for power.”

The Supreme Court may be headed down a dark path: “We are in a scary period. And if we sit still… you think they’re done? There’s already talk about challenges to gay marriage. The Supreme Court is seeing the case that will overturn affirmative action. So, we’re going to have to decide what kind of country we’re going to accept.”

Hannah-Jones doesn’t plan to stop doing this work: “I spend a lot of time thinking about my grandma, born in 1926 on a cotton plantation in Mississippi. She had a fourth-grade education. When my father was 2 years old, she packed him and his older brother up and got on a train, determined that her children were never gonna pick cotton. She ended up in Iowa [and] she wasn’t to have that American dream, but she planted seeds. She wasn’t able to see the future she wanted, but she produced it. It’s easy for me to do what I do, because every day I feel so incredibly blessed. On my worst day, I know an iota of what she went through, or what most of our ancestors went through. But instead I get to read, I get to think and I get to write things that I hope will move people to build a better country. And I can’t imagine a better life.”