UCHRI Continues Operations and Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
We face a moment of unique unsettlements and challenges, of losses and remakings. The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) remains committed to our mission of supporting pivotal and pathbreaking research in service to our constituencies and the commons overall. Our enormously dedicated staff continues to support, in ongoing and novel ways, collaborative work across the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
We recognize that UCHRI-funded events, such as workshops and conferences, have been cancelled in the wake of directives from the University of California (UC) and state government to stem the spread of COVID-19, and that the normal flow of life and work has been disrupted in unprecedented ways. We want our grantees to know that we will work with you to ensure that your projects can be extended through the fall (and beyond, if necessary). Our staff is available throughout the coming weeks to talk with you about the best way to proceed with any grant projects that have been disrupted. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to Research Grants Manager Shana Melnysyn if you have questions or concerns.
We also want to thank everyone who has submitted grant and fellowship applications for the 2020-21 academic year. Applicants can rest assured that these competitions are moving forward as planned, and that we anticipate announcing award decisions in April and May, as originally scheduled.
The wide-angle view of the humanities will be needed in the coming weeks, months, and years, and UCHRI is here to support the continuation of vital contributions and collaborations from graduate students and faculty across the UC through our grants and programs, as well as on our digital publishing platform, Foundry. In the first installment of Boiling Point, a series that reflects in media res on contemporary crises around the world, Shiqi Lin lays bare the struggle of analysis under duress and the elusiveness of our objects of study.
I write not because I am free from confusion about our time, but because there are too many epistemic gaps that drive me to navigate through writing. […] With the epidemic situation changing rapidly every day, I am also challenged to think anew and refurbish a living archive, every day.
—Shiqi Lin, CUT! Community, Immunity, Vulnerability in the Time of Coronavirus
If you seek a creative outlet, join the conversation and submit a piece to Foundry.
At this time of unique social and collective challenge, it is worth dwelling on the reminder that the University is proving to be a key social infrastructure. It is a central node for medical research and treatment, for social housing and emergency hospitalization, for continuity in teaching and learning, and also for research into the social history, cultural representation, and impacts of pandemics, of living in the face of enormous challenges, and of the uneven capacities across populations to survive, remake, and flourish. The University is a site, too, for solidarity and service to communities and the commons more broadly. As collective needs and the call for mutual support multiply, it will help to remind ourselves of these capacities to craft anew, to contribute supportively, to remake surprisingly, and to renew creatively.
As we move forward together, UCHRI extends its wishes for the health and safety of students, faculty, staff, colleagues, and friends in California and beyond.
