The University of California Irvine (UCI) announced that it will fund 19 projects aimed at advancing equity in the age of COVID-19. An initiative by the Office of Inclusive Excellence’s Confronting Extremism Program, the awards will support interdisciplinary approaches to inequities highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic.
UCI sought out projects that “explore the meaning(s) of the pandemic from a broad cross section of fields, disciplines, methodologies or theoretical perspectives,” wrote Dr. Douglas M. Haynes, chief diversity officer and vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion in his call for project proposals. “Using COVID-19 as a lens through which to explore fault lines of inequities, proposers are therefore encouraged to interrogate the uneven effects and realities of the pandemic on people, communities, societies, nation-states, state systems or global or planetary conditions.”
Thirteen individual and team faculty projects won funding out of 25 submissions, and six resource center projects earned awards out of 10 proposals. The projects span disciplines – including computer science, education, nursing, sociology and more – and tackle a variety of inequalities from equitable contact tracing in the university’s surrounding county to distance support for historically Black colleges and Hispanic serving institutions.
Next spring, winners will come together for a forum to present their research.
“I love my work being able to be in a broader community,” said assistant professor of education Dr. Constance Iloh, a grant winner.
The award will fund her research on how low-income Black and Latinx students make decisions about college amid the pandemic, using a model she developed called the “Iloh Model of College-Going Decisions and Trajectories.” Her approach is “rooted in the context of [each] individual” by taking into account three major components – time, information and opportunity – in analyzing students’ decisions, consumer behavior and pathways.
