Announcing the 2026 Rackham Public Scholarship Grants

Rackham is pleased to announce its 2026 Public Scholarship Grant awards for graduate students. These awards will enable students to apply their research to collaborative projects designed with community partner organizations to create public goods that serve communities locally and globally.

This year’s award recipients will complete their work in the United States, India, Kenya, Réunion Island, Pakistan, and Turkey. Three of the awarded projects seek to support local organizations with the creation of multifaceted community archives. Facilitating collaborations with local filmmakers to document student experiences with an enduring opioid epidemic and the practice of “glacier marriage,” respectively, is the focus of two other projects. A sixth project will assist a housing advocacy organization with mapping LGBTQ-affirming senior affordable housing developments across the United States.       

The successful student applicants demonstrated sustainable social, cultural, and environmental impact beyond the academy. Their projects stood out from a competitive application pool for their equitable partnerships, sustainability for local communities, and innovative and inclusive use of community knowledge in their doctoral research.

“This year’s public engagement projects illustrate the global impact of U-M graduate research. By working with communities to solve real-world problems, these projects both contribute to the creation of new knowledge and contribute to the world in tangible ways,” says Emily Swafford, assistant dean at Rackham. “As a public university, this is central to our mission.”

By choosing to make public engagement a part of their graduate education, this year’s cohort will be able to make distinct contributions to the community needs they serve, the practice of publicly engaged scholarship, and their research fields.

The Rackham Program in Public Scholarship has supported public scholarship on campus since 1998, when it began as the former Arts of Citizenship Program. Its mission is to support collaborative scholarly and creative endeavors that engage communities and co-create public goods while enhancing students’ professional development around public engagement and community-engaged learning.

Students interested in applying for next year’s application cycle can learn more and view deadlines on Rackham’s website.

This year’s grant recipients and their projects are:

Manvinder Gill

Ph.D. Student, Social Work and Anthropology

“Digital Storytelling Workshops about the Opioid Epidemic in Punjab, India” 

The project supports the opioid addiction education, prevention, and awareness efforts of Malwa Public School, located in Khiala Kalan in Punjab, India. In collaboration with local filmmakers and feminist think tank Third Eye Portal, the project aims to organize a series of digital storytelling workshops where students of Malwa Public School can discuss their experiences with the enduring opioid epidemic in the region. Together, we will create short multimedia narratives with the students which will be used in the school’s educational efforts and will inform a planned long-form documentary on the opioid epidemic in Punjab by Indian filmmakers Sadia Rao and Karanjit Singh.

Kristi Petersen-Rhead

Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology and History

“Live from the Archive: Co-Curating Radio FreeDom’s Sonic Heritage through On-Air Anthropology”

Radio FreeDom on Réunion Island has amassed an expansive sonic archive of everyday life through its unscripted call-in shows over the last four decades. In collaboration with the station and its listeners, Kristi Petersen-Rhead intends to co-curate a public-facing archive by broadcasting historical recordings for live community interpretation and collective debate, then preserving these exchanges as podcast episodes. Réunion’s history has often been told through French state institutions, despite the island’s distinct histories of slavery, indenture, migration, Creole language, and political life in the Indian Ocean. Radio FreeDom’s archive preserves a different kind of historical record: the voices—often in Réunion Creole—of ordinary listeners reasoning aloud about crisis, bureaucracy, family, politics, solidarity, and belonging. By treating unscripted speech as vital historical evidence, the initiative challenges colonial archival exclusions and centers the community in the production of its own history.

Eda Bozkurt

Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture 

“Spaces That Remember: Building a Digital Community Archive with Mamak Halkevi”

“Spaces That Remember” is a collaborative initiative in the Mamak district in Ankara, Turkey. The project intends to preserve community-authored knowledge and historical records threatened by large-scale urban renewal and displacement. Through a partnership between the community organization Mamak Halkevi (Mamak People’s House), doctoral researcher Eda Bozkurt seeks to create a digital archive consisting of newsletters, oral histories, resident photographs, and participatory documentation of changes in the neighborhood. The archive is meant to function as a shared space for residents to contextualize their experiences of housing struggles and mutual aid, asserting the legitimacy of local perspectives over official planning narratives. Ultimately, the project seeks to establish a durable, community-centered site that empowers residents to maintain authority over how their histories are recorded and shared amid ongoing urban transformation and displacement.

Kambi Gathesha

Ph.D. Student, History

“Heritage as Resistance, Culture for Peace: The Traditions and Histories of the Mijikenda Peoples of Coastal Kenya”

Kambi Gathesha and the Kenyan nonprofit cultural preservation organization Malindi District Cultural Association (MADCA) seek to co-create an oral history archive of the Ngoma performance histories of the Mijikenda people. They aim to collect oral testimony from Mijikenda elders on aspects pertaining to Mijikenda performance history, including drumming, dancing, folklore, storytelling, and music.

Due to contemporary pressures like urbanization, social marginalization, and economic hardship, social ties among Mijikenda communities have fractured. A lack of infrastructure as regards archiving and documentation has rendered these traditions vulnerable to loss. Both parties seek to create a repository of the living histories in an effort to promote intergenerational dialogue and communion within the coastal communities.

Sophia Spence

Ph.D. Candidate, Urban and Regional Planning

“Aging in Community: LGBTQ-Affirming Senior Affordable Housing Developments across the U.S.”

Recognizing housing as a vital determinant of health, SAGE USA’s Elder Housing Initiative supports the development of affordable, LGBTQ-affirming senior housing to combat structural inequalities and improve queer and trans elders’ quality of life as they age. Sophia Spence partners with the Elder Housing Initiative to conduct a multiple-case study of LGBTQ-affirming affordable housing projects across the US, filling a critical research gap by identifying the practical facilitators and barriers to developing LGBTQ-affirming living spaces for older adults. Through semi-structured interviews with both housing providers and residents, the project seeks to document how these environments influence health outcomes in order to inform future organizational practices. Ultimately, Sophia seeks to produce accessible data and materials to bolster SAGE USA’s advocacy, fundraising, and technical assistance to future housing providers.

Saifullah Nasar

Ph.D. Candidate,  Anthropology 

“Glacier Marriages: Documenting and Promoting Indigenous Environment Management in Pakistan’s High Mountains” 

High mountain communities in Pakistan’s Himalayas are currently battling severe water scarcity and the threat of displacement due to rapidly receding glaciers. To survive at these extreme altitudes, residents perform “glacier marriages”—a remarkable ice-grafting ritual that creates new ice bodies to ensure a reliable summer water supply. In collaboration with local filmmakers, Saifullah Nasar seeks to support residents of Pakistan’s high mountain communities by producing a documentary to preserve their intricate and labor-intensive water management traditions for future generations. The film is meant to function as a fundraising tool to help cover the high costs of grafting and protect these resilient communities from displacement.