Public Humanities Award Recipients 2025

The Public Humanities Network Award for Leadership in Practice and Community recognizes and celebrates exemplary public humanities work engaged with communities. The CHCI Public Humanities Network is proud to announce the two recipients of the 2025 Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Community:

The Institute Project on Decoloniality 2021-2024 run by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh; and Writing Tamayame run by the Pueblo of Santa Ana tribal council and Tyler Peterson at Arizona State University. Additionally, there are two honorable mentions: Black Ecologies Lab by J.T. Roane and Teona Williams at Rutgers University; and The Zombified Podcast by Athena Aktipis at Arizona State University.

Awardee centers and institute and their community partnerships will be recognized at the upcoming Annual Meeting.

Awards

The Institute Project on Decoloniality 2021-2024 by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh

IPD '24 was a three-year research and public engagement project run by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. This project offered £750,000 in funding for scholars from around the world to visit Edinburgh and conduct research on themes such as decolonising the curriculum, the British Empire, slavery, contemporary inequalities and reparations. The project aimed to address the privileging of White scholars and Whiteness in the arts, humanities and the social sciences in many institutions of higher education across the global north, and the ways in which indigenous knowledges were generally overlooked in favour of hegemonic Western thought. In doing so, a key objective was to explore how the learning from the sponsored research could be used to shape a praxis (the fusion of knowledge with action) to support more just social orders.

Writing Tamayame by the Pueblo of Santa Ana tribal council and Tyler Peterson at Arizona State University.

Tamayame is the name of the Keres language spoken in the Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico. Although there are no official numbers, it is estimated that there are fewer than 75 people that still speak Tamayame fluently, most of whom are in their 60s and older.

As such, in 2019 the Pueblo of Santa Ana tribal council charged the Language and Culture Department with the task of creating a practical, official orthography – a writing system – for Tamayame. Through a collaboration with Tyler Peterson, a linguist at Arizona State University, this project was successfully completed in the summer of 2024. With the orthography in place, the project can now embark upon the next stages of Tamayame language reclamation in earnest: the creation of a dictionary, core grammar, and set of analyzed texts. These documents will play a key role in mitigating the rapid loss of the Tamayame language by directly serving the community in their language and teaching efforts. Importantly, many in the community feel that these documents are crucial in expressing and maintaining their unique identity within the Keres speaking world. In fact, a project like this may help other Keresan languages, which are also poorly documented.

Black Ecologies Lab by J.T. Roane and Teona Williams (Rutgers University) , Justin Hosbey (UC Berkeley), Jayson M. Porter (University of Maryland), and Danielle Purifoy (UNC-Chapel Hill)

The project’s mission is the transformation of scholarly and public discussion of climate destabilization from the vantage of critical Africana Studies transdisciplinarity and liberationist ethics. To date, we have hosted two “field school” gatherings.

Black Ecologies brought together Black and Indigenous geographers, anthropologists, historians, artists, K-12 educators, local youth, community organizers and activists, and farmers in Tappahannock, Virginia for an intensive collective landscape literacy exercise and a People’s University style workshop series co-organized by Just Harvest—Tidewater that attracted more than eighty residents of a rural Tidewater, Virginia community into discussions of environmental justice and food sovereignty along with music, dance, and an art gallery opening. Justin Hosbey organized and hosted the second Black ecologies field school in New Orleans organized around the themes of educational infrastructure in the post-Katrina context, historical and contemporary forms of marronage, waterscapes, and carceral ecologies. We convened with community partners in the Lower 9th Ward, Algiers, and Plaquemines Parish and visited the Leona Tate Center and Solitary Gardens. We are working to develop the second iteration of the Black Ecologies Zine with methodological, historical, artistic, and other analyses of our collective experiences in Louisiana.

Based on the models for the pedagogical power of Black ecological analysis along with intensive landscape analysis across Tidewater, Virginia, Roane and Williams hosted a Black Ecologies Summer Institute (BESI).

The Zombified Podcast by Athena Aktipis at Arizona State University

Zombified is a podcast about how we are vulnerable to being hijacked by things that are not us. From microbes hijacking behavior, to humans influencing each other, to our brains being taken over by social media, we talk about why zombification happens, why we are susceptible to it, and what we can do about it. The project bridges the gap between science and the humanities by using conversation to explore issues important to society. Through engaging dialogue, it combines psychology, biology, philosophy, and popular culture to analyze the factors that shape human behavior—or "zombify" us, in the language of the podcast.

The podcast features expert guests who provide research-based perspectives on external influences on thought and decision-making. Guests include scientists, humanities scholars, comedians, filmmakers, disaster response experts, journalists, and science communicators, creating a rich and multifaceted conversation. The show highlights scientific analysis, explores social implications, and fosters interdisciplinary dialogue. Zombified has released 57 episodes and accumulated nearly 90,000 downloads. The podcast has a 4.8-star rating on Apple Podcasts, with positive listener feedback on its approach to discussing behavioral science and interdisciplinary topics.