Public health is in crisis – but now is the time to prepare for its recovery. As CDC loses thousands of employees and entire divisions are eliminated, the need to track the resulting damage grows more urgent. This pilot study will document and analyze the cascading impact of the Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) and the Domestic Violence Prevention Enhancement and Leadership Through Alliances (DELTA) program closures at the federal, state, and local levels using three focus groups and 30 confidential semi-structured interviews. Working in partnership with former CDC professionals, this study will illuminate the impact of the crisis CDC is facing for scholarly and public audiences as a step toward building the necessary foundation to rebuild public health infrastructure in the U.S. and ensure the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations in the US, including Indigenous and other women of color. 

Faculty project director: Katherine A. Mason, associate professor of anthropology

This project re-presents the contributions of gender-marginalized and disabled people to the history of technology. Drawing on scholarship from and beyond women’s gender and sexuality studies, the history of technology, critical disability studies, and computer science, we propose a suite of interactive digital experiences that build out a body of historical scholarship into accessible public knowledge. By centering disabled innovators, this project demonstrates the centrality of accessibility to technological progress, and pushes back against framings of accessibility as peripheral or optional to the lives we live today. Funding from this project will support three interdisciplinary workshops that are open to all members of the Brown community that are interested, and will contribute to the development of a publicly accessible digital humanities resource that is grounded in feminist disability scholarship on technology. 

Faculty project director: Kim Fernandes, assistant professor of anthropology

Team members: Suresh Venkatasubramanian, professor of data science and computer science; Meredith Mendola, program manager at the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR).