The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grants. This program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
The ACLS Digital Justice Grants Program funds digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. With an increased focus on capacity building, the program also prioritizes projects that bolster the local ecosystem of digital humanities at their academic, community, or cultural heritage institutions, thereby creating opportunities for scholars, especially those within historically underfunded fields, to pursue innovative, diverse digital scholarship.
For 2025, eight start-up projects have been awarded ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants of up to $25,000, and seven established projects have been awarded ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants of up to $100,000. All grantees will have the opportunity to collaborate with the Nonprofit Finance Fund on developing a long-term financial plan for their projects.
The 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grantees mobilize a variety of cutting-edge digital methods, including the ethical development of tools like generative artificial intelligence and augmented reality. The third cohort of this program includes diverse projects that extend the international reach of these grants to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nigeria, and Syria, as well as projects lead by scholars along a wide spectrum of career stages and institutional affiliations.
“ACLS is proud that this year’s Digital Justice Grants include advanced doctoral students and postdocs among the principal investigators and lead scholars on the awarded projects,” said Keyanah Nurse, ACLS Senior Program Officer of Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) Programs. “This is an encouraging signal of the growing capacity of pipelines, mentorship networks, and skills-training for those pursuing digital work earlier in their academic careers.”