ISRC team helps Graham obtain NSF Grant

With assistance from the Iowa Social Science Research Center’s (ISRC) Grant Development team, Laura R. Graham and a team of U.S. and Brazil-based scholars received a 3-year NSF collaborative research award to study the afterlives of digital scientific objects produced through scholarly research carried out among the A'uwẽ-Xavante, a highly studied Indigenous people in central Brazil. Working as part of an Indigenous and non-Indigenous team, Graham, professor of anthropology, will develop an online archive that returns digital copies of researcher-produced content to the communities they document. The digital repository will be grounded in Native knowledge-sharing practices and governed by an Indigenous Oversight Committee.

The project seeks to establish and test a methodology for collaborative, community-based work to document and understand subjects’ experience of scientific research and the afterlives of scientific objects produced. It also investigates digital returns of scientific materials as a means for reparative justice and a concrete way to support community-defined research futures.  Graham’s extensive collection of audio materials, recorded during 40+ years of original field research, will be part of the digital archive.  Hers and other scholarly products will be used in local schools for education and in cultural revitalization efforts. Graham will serve as co-PI on the award in collaboration with researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Emory University, and the National School of Public Health in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They'll be working with the A'uwẽ-Xavante communities of Pimentel Barbosa, Etênhiritipá, Paraíso, Santa Vitoria, and Wederã. 

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