Center for Public Service awards Community-Engaged Research Grants to Tulane faculty

Two Tulane professors have received Faculty Community-Engaged Research Grants from the university’s Center for Public Service (CPS): Jana Lipman, PhD, professor in the Department of History at the School of Liberal Arts, and Clare Daniel, PhD, administrative associate professor of Women’s Leadership and assistant director of Community Engagement at Newcomb Institute.

Jana Lipman was awarded a $10,000 grant over 18 months for her project titled “Black Workers Matter: New Orleans Black Worker Organizing History.” Lipman will be collaborating with the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which spearheaded the project several years ago but had to put it on hold as a result of the pandemic. The project will conduct archival research and oral histories to produce a mobile, physical exhibit on the history of Black labor organizing in New Orleans. The New Orleans Black Workers Organizing History Project (NOBWOH) will be a traveling, interactive exhibit hosted by Tulane’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. NOBWOH will document and showcase historical narratives of Black-led labor organizing from antebellum New Orleans through the late 19th and 20th centuries, culminating in contemporary labor campaigns.

The project seeks to engage visitors in primary source data that highlights the rich yet underrepresented history of Black-led labor organizing in New Orleans.

CPS Faculty Community-Engaged Research Grants are awarded annually to faculty whose research engages community partners in reciprocal relationships to co-produce knowledge, resulting in public value and recognizable scholarly impacts in their field(s) of inquiry.

Clare Daniel received a $6,000 grant over 18 months for her project “Creating an Evidence-Based Childbirth Education Series as a Tool for Birth and Reproductive Justice.” The project is a collaboration among Newcomb Institute, Professor of Practice Casey Beck in Digital Media Practices in the School of Liberal Arts, and Birthmark Doula Collective and aims to create a recorded version of Birthmark’s childbirth education classes that can be made available to Birthmark clientele who cannot attend an in-person or virtual course. Many of Birthmark’s clients face barriers to attending education classes, including work schedules, childcare issues, travel difficulties and unstable internet. Recorded childbirth education courses would provide them with a convenient alternative to navigating these barriers all at once.

CPS launched the Faculty Community-Engaged Project Grant this year to support non-research focused projects from faculty whose work engages community partners in reciprocal relationships to enhance communities’ well-being and more broadly, the public good.