The era of visual communication and oral histories: CAL Microgrant winners discuss the importance of project funding
Fall 2025 microgrants awarded to 21 faculty members to support research projects and educational resources across CAL departments.
The College of Arts and Letters dispenses monetary awards of up to $500 to eligible faculty, offsetting the cost of research assistance, fieldwork, equipment, travel to collections, and other items not covered by university, college, or departmental sources. These awards are available once a semester.
In fall 2025, 21 CAL faculty members received a $500 microgrant. The money provides financial backing for various research projects across departments. Among the awardees are Jennifer Sheppard from the department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and Zamira Abman in Comparative International Studies.
Understanding changing workplace expectations for writers
The microgrant supports Sheppard’s work on an upcoming project titled “Visual Communication in the Workplace Revisited: Evolving Multimodal Responsibilities and Emerging Tools in Professional Communication.”
Sheppard is revisiting Eva Brumberger’s 2007 survey of the visual communication that technical writers performed alongside their lexical duties to understand how the expectations of professional writers have changed. While the original study retains resonance, “the lines between writer and designer have really blurred,” she said.
As everyday communication has become increasingly multimodal, the workplace has adapted accordingly. “You are responsible for so much more of the communication than people might think. It’s not just the writing of the words, it’s thinking about how it’s presented,” Sheppard said.
Sheppard intends to account for the evolving definition of writer by seeking a wider perspective of the workplace, calling for survey replies from professional communicators of all specialties rather than just those classified as technical writers.
Sheppard will utilize the data she gathers to assess the knowledge gap between student and professional writers, hoping to bridge it through adjusted curriculums. “It’s important to update our courses and we can’t do that without understanding what is going on in the workplace.”
Documenting long-hidden histories of the Chala community
The microgrant will support Abman in documenting the hidden stories of the Chala – Jewish-Muslim community in a project titled, “Bridging Worlds: The History of the Chala – Jewish-Muslims in Soviet Tajikistan.”
Chala, a derogatory term meaning “half” or “incomplete,” refers to the descendants of Bukharan, Iranian, and Afghan Jews in Central Asia who converted to Islam under coercion during the 18th and 19th centuries. Marginalized by Jews and Muslims, the community exists in a “fraught space between belonging and exclusion.”
Abman’s ultimate goal rests on overarching power of story, hoping to “record the history of Chala before it is entirely erased and forgotten.” Thus, oral histories will be the primary research material for this project.
Moving with the awareness of their deliberate privacy as an act of survival, Abman will interview Chala families and pull from archival sources to document and understand how the intersections of their history has shaped their cultural and personal minority identities.
Abman is looking to the future, determined to take this research far and wide — a testament to her commitment to not simply understand Chala stories, but to preserve and document Chala history. “These living testimonies have not only informed this research, they have defined its very purpose and direction,” she said.
Here are the other CAL microgrant awardees:
Ryan Abman (Economics): Software
Andres Aguilar (Chicana/Chicano Studies): Denver Aztec Dance Oral History Project
Rosalva Alamillo (Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures): “Community Voices and the Presence of Spanish in a Border Hispanic-Serving Institution”
Carlos Figueroa Beltran (Center for Latin American Studies): Phase II of “Buttressing Oaxacan Community Identity by Strengthening Ties to the Ancestral Past at Home and among Migrant Communities in Mexico and California, USA”
Kristal Bivona (Classics and Humanities): “Memory of the Mariana Disaster in Paracatu de Baixo, MG”
Edward Blum (History): “A Republic That Counts: How Numbers Made and Almost Destroyed the United States”
Suzanne Bordelon (Rhetoric and Writing Studies): “Education without Humiliation: Transborder Resistance and the Segregation of Mexican-Origin Children in California and Texas, 1900-1947”
Michael Caldwell (Classics and Humanities): “Charles McPherson Memoir - Let's Stop Saying Goodbye: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles McPherson”
Keith Chan (Anthropology): Equipment
David Cline (History): Assessing the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” Executive Order at the Smithsonian Institution
Matthew Fowler (American Indian Studies): Writing residency
Alvin Henry (Asian American Studies): “First-Generation Asian American and Pacific Islander Exposure to AI Education”
Hye-Kyoung Kwon (Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages): “Historicizing K-beauty: Gender, Labor, and Multimedia, Post-1945”
Brenda Lara (Chicana/Chicano Studies & English and Comparative Literature): “Haunting Hope: The Archival Afterlives of José Muñoz”
Clark Lundberg (Economics): “Trade Costs and the Value of Relational Contracts”
Ramona Perez (Latin American Studies): “Making Public the Mesoamerican Masks”
Candice Simmons (Rhetoric and Writing Studies): “Finnish Happiness: A mid-summer state of mind”
Dan Sousa (Geography): Wildfire research
Chiou-Ling Yeh (History): “‘Bad Chinese Lads Become Good Men’: Orientalism, Christian Manliness, and the Chung Mei Home for Chinese Boys, 1923-1954”