Notes Toward a Scyborg Philanthropy: Educational Grant-Making and the Pursuit of Spatial Justice

• In Event: Philanthropy and Education SIG (#148) Paper Session

Abstract

Like many institutions in the United States, foundation philanthropy experienced a “racial reckoning” in 2020-2021 that accelerated existing efforts to interrogate, diversify, and reimagine the grant-making process. This phenomenological study draws on interviews with faculty grant-seekers and foundation program officers to explore what equity-minded grant-making looks like today, and what it has the potential to become in the future. These interviews are placed in conversation with la paperson’s concept of scyborg sabotage and Harney and Moten’s theorizing of “fugitive planning” to explore the radical and resistant strategies that participants employed as they navigated the complex and contradictory tensions of equity-minded grant-making within institutional contexts marked by racialized and neoliberal values, norms, and evaluative criteria.

Author

• Ali Watts, University of Utah