The College of New Jersey was awarded a grant of $500,000 by the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning program.
The grant will provide funding for Undocumented. Black. Citizen., a three-year, collaborative multi-disciplinary project that aims to co-create teaching resources about citizenship, belonging, migration, and Blackness centering the experiences of Black undocumented immigrants in and beyond Trenton, New Jersey.
Led by Marla Jaksch, professor and chair of TCNJ’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the project aims to bring together, in the city of Trenton, community actors, scholars, artists, and activists to collaborate through a series of lectures, dialogues, classes, and a summer freedom school.
“It will look at Trenton as a site of globalized border crossings through the people and stories that inhabit it, and the legacies and histories they bring with them as migrants
and descendants of colonized and enslaved people,” Jaksch said.
The project is glocal in scope — setting off from the local to think about the global — and is concerned with bridging the gap between the college and the community that surrounds it.
“We will build connections between TCNJ, Princeton, and Trenton communities and organizations,” Jaksch said. “The different parts of the project seek to build on each other to create dialogues that allow us to talk across while also building tangible resources for teaching and learning.”
Jaksch will work alongside co-principaI investigators Lorgia García Peña, professor of Latinx Studies at the Effron Center and African American Studies Department at Princeton University, and Medhin Paolos, filmmaker and professional specialist in visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
One element of the project will include developing a cross-institution project-based course between TCNJ and Princeton University students, in which students learn about and cultivate methods of community archiving, particularly around the ethical implications of working within a community.
About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.
— Emily W. Dodd ’03