Planting a seed of research success
Three UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media faculty members were awarded a total of $15,000 in seed grants for promising research projects.
Associate Professor Trevy McDonald, Associate Professor Terence Oliver and Assistant Professor Amanda Reid are the recipients of the 2020 school-sponsored grants to help faculty conduct formative, exploratory or innovative research projects that match with the funding priorities of external funding agencies and programs.
UNC Hussman Dean Susan King created the seed grant program in 2012. “As our faculty have new ideas and the passion to pursue them, we want to provide early support to help get their projects up and running and ready to scale up,” said King. “I’m excited to see where Trevy, Terence and Amanda will take their research and creative work with the help of these seed grants.”
• Trevy McDonald
“Multimedia Project: Jefferson L. Edmonds’ Liberator and Black Migration in the Early Twentieth Century”
McDonald will create a multimedia project examining how the Los Angeles Liberator empowered African Americans socially, politically, economically and educationally during the early 20th century’s Great Migration period. Created by Mississippi-born Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, the Liberator is credited with helping quadruple Los Angeles’ African-American population during the first 10 years of its 1900-1914 publication. McDonald’s multimedia project will incorporate video interviews with experts on the topic — such as a museum curator and librarians — as well as Edmonds’ family, along with images from the Liberator. “This research seed grant will enable me to create a multimedia project to be used as an educational tool and advance knowledge while filling a void in scholarship about the Black Press and Black Migration,” McDonald noted in her grant proposal.
• Terence Oliver
“Exploring Medical Communication with Virtual Reality and Motion Graphics”
Oliver will develop an innovative 360-degree communications program that will help the UNC Kidney Center’s efforts to educate and orient new kidney patients as they navigate through kidney dialysis facilities and procedures. This will build on similar work he has already done with the UNC Kidney Center. The goals of the project include exploring ways that would allow the users to enter a 3D world via an immersive experience, in which they can use a computer or a virtual reality headset to explore and interact with content. “Resources like the seed grant here at Hussman allow educators and researchers a springboard to test out rough ideas on a small scale and ultimately build a bridge that could lead to more refined ideas, greater support and opportunities to make significant impact,” Oliver said.
• Amanda Reid
“Music Matters: Music Therapy and Copyright Law”
Reid, a longtime student of copyright law in both her academic and legal career, will develop a survey for music therapy clinicians about the obstacles current copyright law creates in their work and whether a policy change is needed to make it more accessible. Current copyright law allows a rightsholder to demand a license when someone makes copies of music or publicly performs music, which can be an impractical and prohibitive process for music therapy clinicians, Reid notes in her proposal. “In our lifetime, none of our contemporary works will ever be available in the public domain,” Reid said of how copyright laws have strengthened in past decades. “This locks up creative expression for longer than it ever did before.”
“This range of projects showcases the different types of innovation that coexist within our school — all of which have great potential to contribute to the school’s thought leadership and to enrich the education of our students,” said Academic Dean Francesca Dillman Carpentier.