Jan 8, 2026 Spring 2026 Awardee Anouncement

Faculty Fellows

AI’s Societal Threats in Support for AI Research and AI Regulation

Isabelle Freiling (Associate Professor, Department of Communication )

My Digital Matters research project, titled “AI’s Societal Threats in Support for AI Research and AI Regulation,” will examine public perceptions of and reactions to different threats that AI poses to society, coming from both foreign and domestic actors. Examples of such threats are AI being used to spread disinformation or AI causing mass job losses. Specifically, this project uses an online experiment to test how perceptions of those threats influence risk and benefit perceptions, as well as public support for further AI research and regulation.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Examine the Oral Histories of 10,000 Veterans

Matt Basso (Associate Professor, History and Ethic, Gender and Disabilities Studies )

This project uses artificial intelligence to build and analyze a database of approximately 10,000 oral history interviews with U.S. military veterans who served between 1945 and 2023. While oral histories are invaluable for understanding the lived experiences of soldiers, they are typically difficult to access and interpret at scale. Drawing on recent advances in digitization and large language models, this project develops new methods for searching, organizing, and analyzing veteran interviews across archives nationwide. By combining AI-driven analysis with historical expertise, the project aims to generate new insights into military culture, gender, and the “warrior ethos,” while advancing innovative methodologies for oral history and the humanities.

Graduate Fellows

Working Title “Afterboom”

Meagan Arthur (PhD Student, English and Creative Writing)

My project is a novel-in-progress that follows a lineage of science and climate fiction, centering an unexplained and unexplainable nuclear disaster. The novel features a future world with rethought and refigured boundaries between the natural and the urban, the individual and the collective, the past and the present. In this futuristic world, resource management has been restructured: tracks replace highways, with trains weaving between cities and communities; co-op work structures allow for work-trade resource exchange; communities each manage their own care labor. Without an internet structured around advertising, this new generation grapples with the central question: what is left to be consumed? Narrative takes center stage on the virtual planes of the novel’s “interface,” with storytelling as the primary mechanism and purpose for the internet technology.

Creating a Digital Community with the Utah Prison Education Project 

Daycy Gomez (PhD Student, Sociology)

The Utah Prison Education Project (UPEP) is launching an initiative to help prison education projects around the country launch their own students tutoring centers. An important part of this endeavor is to establish effective communication mechanisms between UPEP and potential higher education in prison practitioners across the country. My project will help build a community on a digital platform that holds online training materials, modules, graphics, etc. to engage with those interested in developing their own prison education student centers.