The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $5 million to fund an interdisciplinary, multi-year project to advance anti-racist practices and pedagogy in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM).
The project is based at UW–Madison, and Maxine McKinney de Royston, an assistant professor in the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, is on the project team.
Selected as one of 16 winning projects in the Mellon Foundation’s “Just Futures Initiative” competition, the “Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine” project will bring together faculty, students, community members, and Tribal partners to address a lack of awareness of histories of racism in academic disciplines, especially in scientific disciplines, and a lack of diverse representation in STEMM across sectors, from academia to industry.
Elizabeth Hennessy, a UW–Madison professor in the History Department and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, will lead UW’s project. Other team members include: Christy Clark-Pujara, a professor of history and Afro-American studies; R. Justin Hougham, associate professor and director of UW–Extension’s Upham Woods Outdoor Learning Center; Erika Marín-Spiotta, a professor of geography; Monica White, a professor in Community and Environmental Sociology and the Nelson Institute; Cheryl Bauer-Armstrong, director of the Earth Partnership program in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture; Todd Michelson-Ambelang, a senior academic librarian at UW–Madison; Robin Rider, a historian of science and curator of UW Special Collections; and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, an assistant professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington.
The Mellon Foundation is the largest funder of the arts and humanities in the U.S. The foundation’s “Just Futures Initiative” will provide funding over a three-year period to support multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaborative teams contributing to public understanding of past racism and leading to the creation of socially just futures.
Hennessy, who teaches in UW’s history of science program, had been wanting to respond to the inequities she knew existed across academia. The Black Lives Matter protest movement following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020 motivated her and other colleagues.
“The history of science faculty started brainstorming about how we could increase the teaching we do on histories of race in the sciences and medicine,” she says. “When I saw Mellon’s call for proposals, I knew that colleagues and I could develop something. I reached out to Erika Marín-Spiotta, who has been working on equity and diversity issues in the geosciences for years, and she was excited about it as well. It was the perfect time to put this together.”
UW’s team is cross-university, and even inter-institutional, with a co-PI from the University of Washington, another collaborator at Duke University, and several community partners.
Learn more about the project, here.