Source: Office of the Vice President for Research
Downtown Detroit. Photo by Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.
Downtown Detroit. Photo by Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography.
The Office of the Vice President for Research has awarded nearly $450,000 in grants across seven research teams — including two for Detroit teams — to investigate the effects of systemic racism and inform strategies to combat them.
OVPR designed its Research Catalyst and Innovation Program, in part, to support research and scholarship that address complex societal racial inequalities, with a goal to inform actions that achieve equity and justice.
Since the program launched in 2021, OVPR has awarded $1.4 million in anti-racism grants to diverse teams of researchers from across the University of Michigan.
“These grants allow interdisciplinary teams of U-M researchers to extensively study the effects of structural racism across southeast Michigan, which has far-reaching implications for communities across the country,” said Trachette Jackson, assistant vice president for research – diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and a University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor and professor of mathematics in LSA.
Of the seven selected OVPR anti-racism research projects, two focus on Detroit projects:
Unraveling and Mitigating the Impact of Structural Racial (“Redlining”) on Chronic Disease Burden in Detroit using Geospatial and Mediation Analysis
Team leads: Jennifer Bragg- Gresham, Yun Han (Medical School), Rajiv Saran (Medical School, School of Public Health), Tiffany Veinot (School of Information)
Goal: This project aims to identify the social and environmental determinants of health affected by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Detroit, made in 1939 that previously redlined majority Black districts of Detroit, and determine how these factors affect the health of current residents.
Sankofa Community Research
Team leads: Stephen Ward, Rita Chin and Earl Lewis (LSA), Emily Kutil (A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning) and David Goldberg (Wayne State University) partnered with Black Bottom Archives
Goal: By bringing together oral histories, census records, business records, historic maps and other sources, this community-led project will study the multigenerational impact of displacement on Detroit’s Black Bottom community, focusing on the perspectives of Black Bottom survivors and Black Detroiters.
