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The Social Science Research Council’s Media and Democracy Program announces four grantees for the Research AMP Partner Sites Program

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is pleased to announce the four grantees of the Research Area Mapping Platform (Research AMP) Partner Sites project, a year-long partnership to develop critical infrastructure for sharing their research using the SSRC’s Research AMP platform. The platform allows groups of users to collaborate on collecting and sharing information on a common platform, bringing Zotero, PressForward, and WordPress together. The project has been developed with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.

The grantees who will receive access to the platform are: 

  • The Three Rs – Refugees, Rights, and Resettlement, Mansha Mirza (PI), Yolanda Suarez-Balcazar (Co-PI), Amelia Brunskill, University of Illinois Chicago:
    With human displacement at a record high, public curiosity about refugees, their journeys, and how they can be best supported continues to grow. The Three Rs will use Research AMP to draw together a community of scholars and civil society representatives to compile information on the psychosocial and community participation needs of refugees during and after resettlement. 

  • The Common Denominator, Amy O’Hara (PI), Margaret Haughney, Max Brossy, Georgetown University: 
    This project will share expert perspectives on population data and connect academic and industry experts, helping them to generate awareness and discussion of methods to better measure the diverse US population. 

  • Play and Wellbeing, Lalitha Vasudevan (PI), Joe Riina-Ferrie (Co-PI), Haeny Yoon (Co-PI), Nathan Holbert (Co-PI), Christian Wu, Catherine Cheng-Stahl, Olu Animashaun, Teachers College at Columbia University: 
    The site will serve as an extension of Teachers’ College’s Pop and Play podcast, and in doing so will expand the public and scholarly imagination about play to include wellbeing and to challenge normative expectations for play in our academic work and lives.

  • Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism Research Collective, Rayya El Zein (PI), Chris Alen Sula, Cultural Studies Association
    The project will leverage the Research AMP platform’s capacities for organizing a network of scholars to identify and dismantle colorism and anti-Black racism. They will use PressForward to curate regional media and popular culture to use as both an archive and a tool to raise awareness, mobilize, and inform. 

Furthering its mission to mobilize necessary knowledge for the public good, the SSRC partnered with the Corporation for Digital Scholarship (CDS) to develop Research AMP, a platform that facilitates the curation and discovery of scholarship on topics of public concern.

The SSRC has launched two of its own Research AMP sites, MediaWell and Just Tech; building on the success of these platforms, the SSRC is developing the underlying software as a platform for generating new research across disciplines and linking researchers with policymakers and citizens. 

The grant competition was designed to develop the Research AMP platform for the broader research community. The award winners will have early access to the Research AMP suite prior to its free public release, and the SSRC will support the grantees’ development of their platforms. 

“We are excited about the possibilities of this project for offering research groups a new tool for organizing scholarship and giving access to their crucial insights to broader communities,” said Molly Laas, program director for Research AMP. “Research AMP will provide an expanded toolset and workflow so that researchers from across disciplines can share knowledge with broader publics, inform public discussion, and bridge academic research with public policy.” 

Research AMP is a plug-and-publish toolset, interlinking Zotero, PressForward, and WordPress to facilitate interdisciplinary communication, research mapping, and dialogue among policymakers, researchers, and the public. The platform brings together the capacity to aggregate scholarly literature with Zotero, gather newspaper articles, podcasts, and reports with PressForward, and organize a network of scholars and publish new content with WordPress. Through the Research AMP tool, scholars now have a more powerful way to organize a community of scholars and practitioners and garner new audiences for their work. 

About the Mellon Foundation

Established in 1969, the Mellon Foundation seeks to build just communities through grants in arts and culture, higher learning, humanities in place and public knowledge.

About the SSRC:

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an independent, international nonprofit with the mission of mobilizing social science for the public good. Founded in 1923, the SSRC fosters research innovation, nurtures new generations of researchers, deepens inquiry within and across disciplines, and catalyzes public knowledge on important public issues. Based in Brooklyn, NY, the SSRC currently administers 22 programs in the United States and around the world. For more information on the SSRC and its programs, please visit www.ssrc.org

About the Corporation for Digital Scholarship:

Designed by historians, the software and services produced by CDS–which includes Zotero, Omeka, Trophy, PressForward, and Sourcery–  make research, publishing, and cultural heritage work possible.