Winter 2026 Award Winners

March 6, 2026

The IHC is pleased to announce the results of its Winter 2026 awards competition. Congratulations to the winners of IHC Graduate Collaborative and Visual, Performing, and Media Arts Awards!

GRADUATE COLLABORATIVE AWARD
Awards of up $1,500 to support graduate student collaboration beyond the confines of particular departments and disciplines, both within the arts and humanities and between the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences

INTERDISCIPLINARY SYMPOSIUM ON SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES: A Graduate Student Conference for Scholars of South Asian Studies
Tannishtha Bhattacharjee, History
Maisnam Arnapal, Feminist Studies
Akhil Goswami, Film and Media Studies

ISSAS UCSB is a platform for interdisciplinary intellectual exchanges among graduate students at UCSB working on topics in South Asian studies. Over the past decade, UCSB has witnessed an expansion of its graduate student community engaging with South Asia as a diverse, dynamic, and differential space. Spanning disciplines such as history, anthropology, feminist studies, film and media studies, global studies, literature, environmental studies, and political science, UCSB offers a rich arena to develop eclectic ideas and careful engagement with the region. Tied through temporal links, spatial affinities, and thematic resonances, ISSAS will feature 16 graduate student projects from UCSB.

Contemporary Organizing and Digital Tools: California’s Alter-Securities
Akira Swan, Global Studies
Brittany Rose, Sociology
Hoai-An Nguyen, Sociology
Pieter Derksen, Physics

This project is coordinated by students across Global Studies, Sociology, and Physics. Centering the role of digital activism, this project explores how activists leverage online organizing for political communication and to mediate material practices of survival, solidarity, and resistance against state violence and militarism. Guest speakers will join for a public-facing event meant to encourage community engagement by highlighting a variety of alter-securities operating within California. The originality of this project lies in its deliberate positioning of campus-based STEM research, cultural production, and community defense within a shared analytic space, bridging approaches to activism, pedagogy, and scholarship.

VISUAL, PERFORMING, AND MEDIA ARTS AWARD
Awards of up $1,000 to support creative work that uses its artistic medium in innovative ways to explore topics of humanistic concern

Tá nìkìtsàà-yù (‘When I arrived’): A Mixtec-language documentary
Catherine Scanlon, Linguistics

The aim of this project is to produce a short Mixtec-language documentary about the experiences of Indigenous Mixtec immigrants to California’s Central Coast. The starting point is the experiences of those who immigrated from remote villages in the mountains of Oaxaca to Santa Maria in the 1980s to work in agriculture, speaking only Mixteco. From there, the project will engage with more recent arrivals, putting their experiences in conversation with those who came before. The film will be entirely in Sà’án Sàvǐ ñà Ñuù Xnúvíkó,

Microbial Mindscapes (Reconfigured)
Sabina Hyoju Ahn, Media Arts and Technology

Microbial Mindscapes (Reconfigured) is an installation that models mood as a self-regulating ecosystem rather than a direct input–output interaction. A soft-body sculptural form representing the gut–brain axis expands and contracts through a pneumatic system, translating internal regulation into physical motion.
Five sensory stimulus samples—light, touch (tactile input), taste, smell, and frequency—are physically connected as environmental inputs. The system responds through delayed and non-linear feedback (not immediate causality), emphasizing microbial regulation and the emergence of unpredictable emotional states.

Weathering the Picturesque
Xue Gao, Media Arts and Technology

Weathering the Picturesque is a visual research project that reimagines historical landscape painting as an ongoing environmental process. Drawing from British picturesque landscapes and publicly accessible historical climate data, the project develops a time-based digital artwork in which images gradually transform under the influence of environmental forces such as temperature, precipitation, wind, and light. Rather than presenting landscape as a static scene, the project foregrounds slow change, accumulation, and material response. By engaging art history, environmental humanities, and visual media practice, the project explores how environmental agency can be made perceptible through aesthetic experience.

Visit here to learn more about IHC funding opportunities.