Community Engaged Undergraduate Research involves both graduate and undergraduate researchers through several community-engaged research programs.
The Center for Africana Studies and Culture works with the Olaniyan Scholars Program to promote the development of community-engaged undergraduate research focused on Black populations across disciplines. This program also engages high school-aged youth to participate in summer camp research experiences that introduce them to research and how it can benefit populations of color. Olaniyan projects are based on participatory social justice research-based in community need, such as a recent project that studied how COVID-19 has affected Black communities.
One of the projects in which the Olaniyan Scholars have engaged is the Echo’s in the Black Atlantic Digital Humanities Project. The project utilizes autoethnography to engage students in “mapping” their proximity to the lasting effects of enslavement and colonialism. The use of scholarly research and interactive opportunities for discourse will guide the student researcher’s interpretation and analysis of the context of slavery in the building of global institutions, economies, policies, and social structures that uphold white supremacy. The core focus of the project will be framed in explorations that do not privilege a proximity to whiteness, but a center of an Afrocentric consciousness of remembrance that confronts empire as a paramount theme. The student researchers are tracing the routes of the slave trade and their connections to its residual effects through the lens of interdisciplinary themes that relate to and center the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS).
Each year, two Africana Studies students will be selected as Bundles Scholars and will engage in scholarly research of Black issues with mentorship from Bundles and other Africana Studies faculty.
The Bundles Scholars program, named for the inaugural prestigious fellow, A’Lelia Bundles, was announced in February 2022. Watch for more information to come on the Scholars and their research.
The Through Their Eyes Scholars Program, which provides educational and research opportunities for Black and Native and Indigenous youth, is based in an effort to honor the displacement of Black and Indigenous populations who occupied the lands on which IUPUI’s campus now stands.
The Heritage and Humanities Scholars Program, which promotes community-engaged graduate and undergraduate research, creates and establishes knowledge bases for real estate and city developers working within areas significant to Black cultural heritage and history.
Contact Les Etienne, Founding Executive Director of CASC.
