Seed Grant Program

Overview Funded Projects Grant Recipients Upcoming Events

About

The DTD Lab supports projects from UVA faculty connected to the DTD Lab’s mission of understanding the intersections of democracy and digital technology, including how rapidly evolving digital technologies and artificial intelligence can challenge but also fortify democratic institutions and practices.

Tenured/tenure-track faculty at UVA should serve as lead PIs/researchers, while Academic General Faculty Members and postdocs are eligible as co-PIs.

Large Grants: Projects with prospects to leverage findings to secure external funding for research or creative activities. Collaborative proposals are encouraged, especially those spanning departments/schools or career ranks or stages. Project duration is one year with an interim report due in six months and a final report at year’s end. Funding requests may be up to $40K per project.

– LOI deadline: January 23, 2026, 5pm
– Full proposal deadline: March 20, 2026, 5pm

Small Grants: Projects requiring a smaller investment to initiate research and develop collaborations. Project duration is one year with an interim report due in six months and a final report at year’s end. Funding requests may be up to $15K per project.

– Proposal deadline: March 20, 2026, 5pm

Funded Projects

Cryptocurrency & Democracy

This project will examine the relationship between democratic institutes and cryptocurrency technologies and industries and will track cryptocurrency-related policy and market developments.

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Setting the Data Free

This project aims to identify and address the power asymmetries in resources and capacity that undermine descendant control over data used to construct historical narratives and land-use policies that support the survival of historic Black towns and settlements.

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Grant Recipients

DTD Lab Seed Grant Recipient

Andrea Roberts

Affiliation

Associate Professor, Urban + Environmental Planning
Director, Center for Cultural Landscapes

Bio

Dr. Andrea Roberts is an advocate, educator, and scholar of Black placemaking histories and practices in the Americas, and a descendant of the founders of historic Black settlements in Texas. Her 12 years of professional experience in housing, government, and advocacy inform her scholarly efforts to bring marginalized, historic Black communities to the center of planning practice and research. She is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) and is an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Architectural History. She is also the owner of the consultancy, Freedom Colonies Project, LLC, through which she provides creative research design for civic art & landscape design projects, coaches emerging preservationists, and gives keynote lectures. Her peer-reviewed and public scholarship on Black placemaking and placekeeping frame these concepts as part of a long tradition of resistance and freedom-seeking in the Americas. She’s published in The Journal of Planning History, Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, Planning Theory & Practice, and Environmental Justice. She has received awards for her engaged scholarship from The Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Urban Affairs Association.

She created The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Grassroots Preservation Study in 2014 to identify and map disappearing settlements and their historic properties through participatory heritage conservation and community storytelling. The Project has become a vehicle through which students, advocates, and volunteers record locations and stories about 533 Black settlements in the state. Under the auspices of the CCL, she now leads the Mellon Foundation-supported Outsider Preservation Initiative, which will expand The Project beyond Texas to support projects in Louisiana, Virginia, California, and Canada. She is currently authoring a book, Never Sell the Land: Place Persistence as Resistance, about her experiences recording place origin stories and grassroots Black preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience, which has been accepted for publication by The University of Texas Press.

Planners and researchers throughout the US have applied her approaches to challenge the invisibility of Black settlements and to promote recognition. She has received awards and fellowships for her engaged research methods and scholarship and serves on various boards and research teams. Dr. Roberts was Co-Project Director for the 2022 and 2024 NEH Summer Institutes for Higher Education Faculty—"Towards a People's History of Landscape: Black & Indigenous Histories.” Dr. Roberts serves on PolicyLink’s Spatial Futures Fellowship Advisory Committee and the Urban Landscape Studies Advisory Board at Dumbarton Oaks and is a steering committee member for the Black Experiences with Planning in Canada partnership and research study. Dr. Roberts is an advisory council member of the Oatlands National Trust for Historic Preservation Site. She supports the Aya Symposium, an annual Texas Freedom Colonies conference created for and by descendants.

Dr. Roberts holds a Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), an M.A. in Government Administration and Public Finance from the University of Pennsylvania (2006), and a B.A. in Political Science from Vassar College (1996).