The Transmedia Story Lab (TSL) has been awarded a $110,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a historical transmedia project that illustrates how a climate of structural violence has impacted the health and wellbeing of black adolescents on Chicago’s South Side.

The project, “Transmedia Collage: Histories of Violence and Futures of Health on Chicago’s South Side,” is being led by TSL’s co-founder, Patrick Jagoda, Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema & Media Studies, and Jennifer Brier, Associate Professor in History and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Relying on faculty, staff, two graduate students in the humanities and sciences, and technical expertise from TSL, the team will collaborate with black South Side adolescents and adults to create Transmedia Collage. This project will use transmedia practices and the telling of a single story through multiple media forms and platforms to reframe research, policy, and public discourse about Chicago’s South Side.

“We believe that the humanities can play a leading role in creative interventions that address structural violence on the South Side by providing a platform for residents to inform those not native to the area about its history and to develop new visions for its future,” said Dr. Jagoda.

“Our hope is to create an ongoing conversation among researchers, artists, policy makers, and African American youth, who are rarely, if ever, welcomed as thought partners on how to better their communities.”

The award is a part of Humanities Without Walls’ highly competitive grand research challenge: “The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate.” Humanities Without Walls is a 15-member consortium based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the UIC Institute for the Humanities.

One of three labs housed within UChicago’s Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3), the Transmedia Story Lab designs, produces, and studies immersive storytelling experiences.