A Hub for Global Research

“Before CGII, there was no center at UVA around which global research could coalesce,” said Professor Brian Owensby, who has directed CGII since its inception. “The idea that colleagues in music, architecture, environmental science, religious studies, sociology, engineering, education, astronomy might work across deep disciplinary divides together on a project was still novel.” Establishing CGII meant not only funding projects but also bringing together researchers to do essential interdisciplinary research to address the great global challenges of our time, such as climate change, inequality, democracy, migration.

Project Spotlight: Funding the Crisis in Ukraine Against the Russian Invasion

Politics professor James Savage has received multiple CGII grants for research on migration and refugee crises in the European Union. In 2024, he received a grant to analyze how the European Union has budgeted and provided financial aid to Ukraine since Russia's 2022 invasion. 

“This funding for Ukraine comes at a time when the EU has been greatly pressured financially and economically by the Syrian refugee crisis, Covid, and the uncertainty of funding by the United States to assist Ukraine,” explained Savage. Nevertheless, the EU’s funding has held steady, surpassing even U.S. support. 

Assessing how Europe responds to the Ukrainian crisis allows insight into not only EU priorities, but also how Europe and its neighbors may respond to potential future crises. Savage credits CGII with providing “critical funding” that has allowed his research to evolve over multiple grant cycles, with one project laying the foundation for the next.

Since 2013, CGII has awarded more than $3.5 million to nearly 500 projects led by faculty and graduate students. The projects range from symposium proposals to funding to bring undergraduate students to global research locations over the summer. The research spans nearly 100 countries across every continent except Antarctica.

CGII’s largest grants, the Global Programs of Distinction (GPODs), fund ambitious global research initiatives with awards from $25,000 to $100,000. The first GPOD, Food, Fuel, and Forests, led by Environmental Sciences Professor Deborah Lawrence, examined how climate change affects land use and asked: Can we live in the future that is coming? If not, how can we change it? In 2014, fellow environmental scientist Herman Shugart received a GPOD to develop a simulator predicting the future of boreal and temperate forests down to individual trees. Both projects made significant contributions to what was then the accelerating science of climate modeling, enabling policy makers to model different possible outcomes across time. Shugart's research led to his appointment to an advisory team for the European Space Agency's Biomass mission. This mission has launched a €420 million satellite to measure the world’s forest biomass from space, leading to a better understanding of the state of Earth’s forests, how they are changing over time, and advancing knowledge of the carbon cycle.

Expanding the Definition of Global Research

CGII-funded research isn't limited to projects requiring international travel. CGII has defined “global” research as work that pushes beyond traditional frameworks that isolate localities, nation-states, and disciplines. Thus, CGII supports research that emphasizes connections and relationships across different dimensions of experience. This research requires a willingness to do the hard work of seeing the world from multiple perspectives simultaneously.

Project Spotlight: Indigenous Communities and Tallgrass Prairie Resilience

UVA has longstanding ties with Nis'to, a nonprofit serving Indigenous youth led by Dustina Gill and located on the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. These connections were accelerated by a 2018 CGII grant, followed by a 2023 grant for the restoration of native tallgrass prairie. The project, led by David Edmunds (Global Studies), Phoebe Crisman (Global Studies, Architecture), and Howie Epstein (Environmental Sciences), integrates ecological study with Indigenous environmental knowledge, reintroducing traditional understandings of medicinal plants that had to be hidden during much of 20th century through the Bundle Carriers’ Camp for local youth. Crisman brought in her design background to help plan a building based in local materials and architectural traditions where the camp could take place.

“A lot of times people think that global research means going to a far-flung location, but more local US locations are also part of the globe!” commented Crisman. “Working with the community on a reservation is a different autonomous nation and means having a different native approach to relations with land, environment, economy.”

Over the years, many undergraduate and graduate students have participated in summer and school-break research residencies at Lake Traverse. Henry Chin, who traveled to South Dakota during his second year at UVA, credits the trip with cultivating a “deep appreciation for truly transformative educational experiences.” Now a middle school environmental science educator, he applies the skills, knowledge, and experiences he gained working with students from Nis’to to piedmont prairie restoration in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area.

Marisa Yamamoto, a third-year Architecture major, also found her experience in South Dakota deeply rewarding. She co-led a rammed earth construction project with Nis’to, gaining hands-on experience in material experimentation and collaborative design. “Every person I met was eager to share their story and generously welcomed me into their community,” she said. “It reinforced the importance of working closely with communities to create meaningful, locally driven architecture.”

“If you do community-based research right, it’s an incredible experience for all,” said Edmunds, adding that these encounters have also been impactful for the Lake Traverse youth, giving them a chance to imagine alternative and broader futures for themselves.

The team emphasized how CGII’s support has been essential to sustaining this collaboration over time. Unlike many academic-community partnerships that operate on short funding cycles, CGII has enabled the kind of long-term engagement necessary for ethical, reciprocal work. “This is what decolonization in practice looks like,” said Epstein. “We’re centering Dakota people and repairing relationships.”

Project Spotlight: Sound Justice Lab

Sound Justice Lab (SJL) was founded in 2021 with a GPOD grant awarded to Nomi Dave (Music), Anne Coughlin (Law), Bremen Donovan (Anthropology), Bonnie Gordon (Music), and Liezl Vergara (Anthropology). The lab bridges law and the humanities, engaging directly with issues of democracy and justice, considering how artists, lawyers, and activists around the world respond to legal failure. ‘Sound Justice’ refers both to justice that is thorough and well-reasoned, and to connections between the law and auditory or other non-textual media. Their work focuses on gender and sexual justice, freedom of expression, and responses to violence across cultural contexts.

Building off their initial CGII grant, SJL has now secured nearly $300,000 in additional grants and produced six academic publications, a documentary film, podcast and radio episodes, a blog, a local issue of the Mala Leche zine, and public writing in outlets like The Washington Post and The Conversation. They support independent journalism in the Republic of Guinea and the U.S. through collaborations like the Big Mouth project and work with local journalist Molly Conger.

In 2022, SJL established Cville Tulips, a space for recently arrived Afghan women to gather and build community. Adult participants attend English and Health Learning Circles while kids of all ages enjoy soccer, games, visual arts, and drumming. Interpreters, hired from the Cville Tulips community of women, help bridge linguistic and cultural differences.

In 2024, SJL hosted the Technologies of Silence conference, bringing together experts on reproductive rights in India and the U.S. to examine how legal systems suppress voices and narratives.

“These projects and perspectives allow us to understand at various local levels what ‘justice’ means to people, how they engage with the courts and the erosion of judicial independence, and what avenues they use to voice the stories that formal process omits,” Dave said.

Even beyond the funding, Dave credits CGII’s support for allowing Sound Justice Lab to build a community at UVA and in Charlottesville, playing a crucial role in sustaining the lab’s ethical, interdisciplinary work and its practical implications. “Through the application process itself, we received important feedback and suggestions about making our work more cohesive and connected with others at UVA,” she said. “Through our activities, we were then able to think and plan beyond our initial core group and invite others to join us.”

Project Spotlight: Digital Democracy

Over the course of a two-year collaboration, Fall 2021 GPOD recipients Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner (Politics & Global Studies), David Nemer (Media Studies), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Media Studies), and Sayan Banerjee (Deliberative Media Lab) examined the uses and misuses of technology and digital media in democracies, with a focus on three of the world’s most diverse but also unequal democracies: India, Brazil, and the United States.

“All three countries are grappling with the challenges of inequality, polarization, and the threat of democratic erosion. All three are also home to rapidly changing technology and media environments,” explained Kruks-Wisner. “The emergence of new digital technologies has provoked a ground shift in both the production and consumption of information, which has moved beyond established media houses and into the hands of individuals (citizens, politicians, communities).”

The work centered around three interconnected themes: 1. social media, intergroup relations, and public opinion; 2. misinformation, trust, and local media; and 3. community media, participation, and accountability. They aim to answer the big question of how the power of the digital age can be harnessed to promote greater equality, voice, and representation in contexts marked by rising political polarization and social inequality.

After carrying out initial individual research projects looking at citizens’ consumption and use of media and technology through surveys done in India and Brazil, the group convened a 2-day symposium where they presented the findings of our research, alongside others working on similar themes in the fields of media studies and journalism; political science, and anthropology.

“CGII enabled us to explore the interdisciplinary and comparative connections between our research,” said Kruks-Wisner. “This afforded us the space for deep reflection, thinking outside of and across our disciplinary fields.”

Investing in the Future

Whether providing a $1,500 dissertation research grant or a $100,000 multidisciplinary project grant, CGII’s funding serves as a launching pad. Owensby envisions projects using CGII support as a stepping stone to securing larger funding opportunities, expanding their impact, and reinforcing UVA's role in global research. This bet has often paid off, with multiple CGII-funded projects later securing multimillion-dollar grants.

Project Spotlight: Arctic Design

Professors Leena Cho (Landscape Architecture) and Matthew Jull (Architecture) received their first CGII grant in 2013 to develop an exhibition on Arctic research. Their collaboration expanded in 2018 when Howie Epstein (Environmental Sciences) joined them to plan a conference bridging science, art, design, and community in the Arctic.

In 2019, they secured a $100,000 CGII grant to install environmental sensors to measure and interpret landscape changes in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, in collaboration with Inupiaq residents. Caitlin Wylie (Engineering & Society) later joined the team to study researcher-community dynamics. This foundational work helped the team secure a $3 million National Science Foundation grant in 2020 to continue their work for another five years. They are currently working with various stakeholders in Northern cities in Alaska, Canada, and Sweden to look at how design and planning can mitigate socio-environmental impact of climate change.

Looking back, the team credits CGII with their success. “Brian took a risk on us,” said Cho. “CGII provides seed funding to kick-start research—you don’t always know yet whether a project will be successful.”

The Future of CGII

As CGII enters its next decade, its mission remains more vital than ever. “As humans, we face enormous problems that can only be grasped and acted on globally—climate change, migration, challenges to democracy, towering and growing inequality, a creeping sense that our economic systems are in need of rethinking, a sense that the values of modernity are not serving everyone, indeed, may be leaving many out, to name just a few,” commented Owensby. These are not isolated challenges—they are interconnected, requiring scholarship that is as expansive as the problems themselves.

“Of course, the idea of the global itself changes over time,” noted Owensby. After World War II, the focus was on the relation between states in a bipolar world. During the 1980s through the early 2000s, emphasis was on global trade and business. “The rise of mega-challenges—climate change, global inequality, global migration, threats to democracy from authoritarianism—calls for new reflection and a recalibrating of why the global remains vital to human prospects in the balance of the 21st century.”

CGII’s future lies in creating opportunities for scholars to tackle these pressing issues with the same breadth of vision that has defined its first decade. This commitment is reflected in the growing enthusiasm among students, particularly in the Global Studies major, but also across disciplines.

“Scholars can only respond to this generation of students’ curiosity and urgency if they are engaged in research that asks the same sharp, necessary questions,” said Owensby. CGII remains committed to making this possible—funding ambitious projects, forging new collaborations, and sustaining the global conversations that will shape our world.