OU Researchers Sherri Irvin, Karlos Hill, and Jeong-Nam Kim were recently awarded the OU Small-Scale Grant GRA Match award for their project “Social Media, Race, and Community Knowledge Construction.”
The Small-Scale Grant GRA Match Program is intended to stimulate and enhance OU research and creative activity through partial support for a graduate research assistant position on small-scale, externally funded institutional grants. The program is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships, the Data Institute for Societal Challenges (DISC), the Institute for Community and Society Transformation (ICAST), and the OU Arts and Humanities Forum.
If successfully funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project team will convene a live-streamed conference to examine the possibilities and pitfalls of digital construction of shared knowledge, especially at the meeting place of social media and race. These topics connect to longstanding humanistic discussions of narrative, image interpretation, rhetoric, and the theory of knowledge. The proceedings of this conference will be published as a special issue. The Small-Scale Grant GRA Match Program will provide matching funds for a graduate research assistant in support of this funded project.
Irvin is a Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy and the director of the project. Hill, the project co-director, is the advisor to the President for community engagement and a Regents’ associate professor of African and African American Studies. Kim is a professor and the Gaylord Family Chair of Public Relations/Strategic Communication in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. This project is an extension of the team’s 2021 Big Idea Challenge award which encouraged the formation of transdisciplinary, convergent research teams focused on solving global grand challenges.
