2026 Grant Recipients

Matthew Clair (Sociology)

This project will produce a documentary about public defense navigators: layperson advocates who help criminal defendants navigate the court process and access social services. In the summer of 2024, researchers at Stanford collaborated with the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office to pilot an innovative navigator program. Three navigators—all Stanford students—worked with over 80 felony defendants in San Jose that summer.

The documentary All Rise will shed light on the ways that navigators can help to mitigate the structural adversities faced by criminal defendants in San Jose and improve their well-being. San Jose is a city of extremes. While the high-tech industry has resulted in unprecedented wealth for those at the top, most Silicon Valley residents, especially those of color, live modest lives. Nearly one in ten residents live in poverty. These unequal patterns are reflected in the city’s jails and courts. Since the 1980s, Black and Hispanic arrest rates in Santa Clara County have been at least four and two times, respectively, the White arrest rate. 

Tracing the contours of San Jose’s unequal criminal justice system and highlighting the value of collaboration between universities and local government institutions, All Rise will reveal how students and community members can help tackle the crisis of mass criminalization in the United States. The documentary will be screened on Stanford’s campus and freely available online. 

Duana Fullwiley (Anthropology)

The Blue Beyond chronicles two joined phenomena that currently represent stark economic extremes concerning how people imagine the ocean’s life-giving potential in Senegal, West Africa. At stake is how a small cadre of Senegalese scientists, politicians, and business leaders aim to reconstitute a cultural politics of hope that a “blue economy” might be developed in and through the spatial terrain of the sea—an economic salve largely focused on technology. This trend serves as a backdrop to everyday people’s larger struggles for survival amidst growing wealth inequality, poverty, and despair as the ocean wanes as a resource that once fed them. This is especially true for those who once made a living as fishermen before foreign industrial fishing put them out of work. Some have even called the over exploited ocean “a liquid desert.” Consequently, labor loss, food insecurity, extraction, and environmental degradation have now pushed thousands of everyday Senegalese to risk deadly forms of clandestine open sea migration from the Atlantic African coastline to southern Spain via the Canary Islands. Yet the sea—for those leaving—is also often framed as a salvific source of hope for a better life in Europe.

Through interviews and participant observation with actors in the blue economy sector as well with people who hope to migrate, or who have already left, this project details multiple registers of how humans connect with, and rely on, the ocean as a source of life and livelihood. This aspect of the research will be complemented by fieldwork with artists in both Senegal and Spain who are using their exhibits and various forms of public art (from film to photography to plastic arts) to raise awareness about the root causes of deadly migration affecting West Africans today.

Meg Cychosz (Linguistics), Matthew Fitzgerald (Otolaryngology)

Each year, thousands of families with children newly diagnosed with hearing loss must navigate a complex array of early intervention services. Families must do this despite limited access to research on child speech, language, and cognitive development that they can understand and apply to their lives. This project, a collaboration between the Departments of Linguistics and Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, bridges the gap between academic research and family knowledge by documenting how children who are deaf and hard-of-hearing develop language in their everyday environments. Working with families across California, including a partnership with the John Tracy Center in Los Angeles, the research team will move beyond purely clinic-based assessments of children’s language development to capture children's language as it naturally unfolds in homes and preschools. Beyond the basic science component of this program, our research team will also return individualized feedback to families, clinicians, and teachers to help them understand how their child’s language is developing in real time.

Beyond serving families who participate directly in the research, this project also translates research findings into accessible public resources for the broader pediatric deaf and hard-of-hearing community by addressing many questions families and community stakeholders commonly ask: How much should I talk to my child? What does language development look like for children who are deaf or hard-of-hearing? How can I support my child’s language development? These materials, developed in direct response to family needs, will be shared through family-facing workshops at the John Tracy Center and Stanford. The project will additionally generate public-facing reports that translate research findings into transparent language for families and practitioners.

Branislav Jakovljević (Theater and Performance Studies), Pavle Levi (Art and Art History), Srđan Keča (Art and Art History), Alberto Díaz-Cayeros (Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies) 

Since November 2024, Serbian university students have sustained a unique and remarkable pro-democracy movement, arguably the largest witnessed in 21st-century Europe—leaderless and organized through open assemblies. This interdisciplinary project combines humanities and social science methods to build a collaborative, "living" archive of the movement through reflective conversations with its participants, archival documentation of its rich audio-visual and performative culture, and a nationally representative survey of democratic attitudes and their connections to the movement's political and cultural expressions, conducted in partnership with the Democracy Action Lab. 

The resulting multimedia documentation—video, audio, transcripts, written reflections, and survey findings—will be made available via a website and through public presentations, offering a resource for scholars of democracy, practitioners seeking models for organizing and inspiring citizens, and the movement's own ongoing reflection.

Mark Algee-Hewitt (English) and Austin Anderson (English)

From Steven Bannon crediting #GamerGate as a central inspiration for his stewardship of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to supporters of Luigi Mangione posting online memes of Nintendo's Luigi to signal solidarity with Mangione’s manifesto about inequities in the American health care system, video games have become inextricable from contemporary political discourse, democratic crisis, and the formation of political identities. Yet despite video games serving as a cultural force shaping how millions of gamers understand citizenship, community, political agency, and belonging, humanities scholarship has only begun to examine this intersection. What role does gaming culture play in democratic crisis and political identity formation? How can games themselves be understood as political texts informed by questions of citizenship, community, and democracy? Is it possible to create games that explore liberatory futures?

“Gaming Citizenship” seeks to answer these questions by establishing the CESTA Critical Game Studies Lab—a research infrastructure enabling humanistic study of games as political and cultural phenomena. Through collaborative research using Stanford's unique game archives (the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection, David Wolinsky Papers, and the Silicon Valley Archives), partnership with Gameheads (a Bay Area organization training youth of color in game development), and convening a major public symposium on the intersection between gaming and citizenship, this initiative positions Stanford as the leading institution examining games’ role in democratic life. The lab also serves as a collaborative space where faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, game designers, and community members can engage together in the critical study and close playing of games. 

Ethan Nowak (Philosophy), Yuliya Ilchuk (Slavic Languages and Literatures)

Language justice is an emerging subfield in philosophy that examines the social and political implications of the fact that people use language differently. To date, philosophical research on language justice has centered predominantly on the status of French in Canada, Welsh in the UK, and various minority European languages arising from the legacy of English colonialism and the language’s contemporary role as a global lingua franca. While questions of justice are universal, examining specific cases outside of Western societies can clarify their unique contours. This project deals with the distinctive sociolinguistic landscape of contemporary Ukraine as an especially valuable opportunity to advance philosophical and social thinking about what justice demands of states and individuals, and to foster a productive dialogue between philosophy and linguistics, literature, and civil society. 

Ukraine’s position as a functionally bilingual society allows questions of social identity and self-presentation to be separated from questions of basic communicative ability. The rapid shift in Ukrainians’ attitudes since 2022 toward the social meaning of speaking Russian or surzhyk (a Russian-inflected Ukrainian) offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine individual linguistic agency. In this context, the recent mass shift from Russian to Ukrainian among Russophone Ukrainians has been reconceptualized as a mechanism of justice—one through which speakers reclaim their rights to distinct identity and agency after centuries of Russian imperial oppression. 

To build a new intellectual network connecting Ukrainian philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists with counterparts at Stanford, this project will organize a week-long seminar on linguistic justice at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA). NaUKMA is one of Ukraine’s most renowned institutions of higher education and is the ideal locale for this seminar given its strong philosophy and sociology departments, its professional school of journalism, and its large, diverse community of displaced persons from occupied regions. The workshop in Kiev will also bring together writers, scholars, journalists, and students from other parts of Ukraine.

David B. Grusky (Sociology), Fred Turner (Communication) 

In any aspiring democracy, one might think that methods for listening to the "voices of the people" would be unusually well-developed, but in the case of the U.S. they fall dispiritingly short of what one would want. It's well known that social media platforms amplify extreme voices and that forced-choiced surveys are blunt tools that require survey designers to ask the right questions presciently. These conventional tools for monitoring what’s happening, as valuable as they are, don't meet the needs of our time. As the challenges of late modernity generate an ongoing stream of crises (e.g., recessions, pandemics, terrorism, protests), and as many Americans come to feel that we've lost our way, we need to develop new direct listening methods for finding out what people are really thinking, doing, and feeling.

The purpose of this project is to take on precisely this challenge by repurposing the American Voices Project (AVP) as a tool for real-time journalism. The AVP is based on a conversation–not a survey–in which people are asked to discuss their lives, what matters to them, their challenges and obstacles, and how they’re feeling about where they are and how the world is faring. Building on an earlier experimental fielding of the AVP, we’re unveiling a new, continuously-fielded variant of the AVP, one that makes it possible to listen to the voices of Americans every day. The team is also including a new module on current events that will allow interviewees to openly discuss not just their own lives but how they’re affected by what’s happening in the larger world. The team will be partnering with journalists across the country to use this new tool to build a complementary form of journalism that features the voices of the people rather than the amplified voices of the rich and powerful.