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News Celebrating Cohort 2: Resilience, Commitment, and a focus on Underrepresented Voices

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MEAP is proud to announce that all Cohort 2 projects are now completed, resulting in 10 published inventories and 11 digitized collections representing cultural heritage material from 16 countries. The Cohort 2 projects were funded in 2020, launching during the early days of the global Covid-19 pandemic and forced to navigate the unexpected and sometimes extensive delays that came with quarantining and local restrictions. While some projects were able to work quickly, others were delayed by years, facing multiple starts and stops that hindered their progress. Nonetheless, we can see in this set of projects the deep commitment of project teams that has pushed each initiative to completion.

Reflecting on the work of Cohort 2 allows us to highlight a set of themes that connect multiple projects from different countries as well as projects across MEAP cohorts. We can recognize that Cohort 2 helped our team and our panel stake out themes that remain core connective threads across all MEAP projects, including community activism; art as a form of resistance; and global political narratives.

At the same time, looking back helps us see how the program has grown and supported deep networks of knowledge that push cultural heritage preservation forward around the world. In particular, 4 Planning Grants from Cohort 2 expanded into funded Project Grants in later cohorts. The trajectories of these efforts helps us see the potential of MEAP as a program that can spark digitization and create opportunities for knowledge sharing beyond one funded project.

The accomplishments of all Cohort 2 projects are now available for open access, highlighting a wide array of cultures and communities. We encourage you to explore their work and consider how these collections might inform your research, teaching, and understanding of the world.


Community Activism

Two MEAP funded projects in Peru illuminate the history of peasant activism in the country and highlight efforts against the Shining Path.

  • Memories from No-Man's Land resulted in a collection survey of the Central Headquarter of the Self-Defense Committee of the Apurímac-Ene Valley located in the town of Pichiwillca, department of Ayacucho, Peru. The collection report is available online in English and Spanish with some parts in Quechua to enable local engagement as well.
  • The Peruvian Peasant Confederation Archive project digitized archival materials from the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP), an organization that has been active in defense of peasants and indigenous people since 1947. Their archive documents the organized efforts of rural and indigenous people in Peru during the 20th century, including the 1969 agrarian reform and the conflict with the Shining Path (1980-1992), and is now available online.

Cohort 2 projects also highlighted women’s movements across Africa, documenting collections that speak to women’s experiences as activists in Sudan and Mali. These projects reflect the importance of representing women in the historical narrative.

  • The Archives of the Women’s Movement in Sudan surveyed 9 organizational and individual collections to sketch out the extent of women’s activism in the country. The project team worked in the homes of activists to survey what kinds of materials were still available while the collections remain under threat.
  • Projet Archives des Femmes, Mali similarly worked with material that documented women’s activism in Mali. The digital collection created through this effort preserves more than a thousand documents and photographs belonging to a generation of Malian women who undertook anti-colonial activism in the 1950s and feminist social reform projects in the following decades. The collection, created in partnership with Centre National d'Information et de Documentation sur la Femme et l'Enfant (CNDIFE) of Mali, is now available online.

Art as a Form of Resistance

  • Digital Archive of Chile's Graphic Resistance catalogued posters created at the Tallersol Cultural Centre in support of the resistance movement in Chile against the local dictatorship. The project team published 150 initial digitized posters created by Antonio Kadima and is now conducting additional digitization to expand access to more materials created at Tallersol.
  • Playing Relative resulted in the creation of Finding Aids, surveys, and reports from the collection of three Malaysian artists. The project highlighted local artists, photo media artist Yee I-Lann, performance artist, educator Ray Lagenbach and writer-photographer Bernice Chauly. These efforts offer multiple entry-points to understanding resistance against the state’s cultural ethos.

New Media and Historical Memory

MEAP funded projects to preserve media collections for the first time in Cohort 2. Beyond print, manuscripts, and photography, MEAP funded projects to digitize film and document social media content, expanding our programmatic support and developing norms and practices for a variety of 20th and 21st century media collections.

  • Film Collection of the News Program "El Mundo al Dia" has digitized “El Mundo al Día,” a daily broadcast that aired on the first television station in the Dominican Republic from 1954-1996. During those years, "El Mundo al Día" captured and documented significant events in the Dominican Republic throughout the 20th Century. The digital collection is now available online, creating access to nearly 400 films.
  • Preserving Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis focused on social media groups and worked to explore the role of social media platforms, like Facebook, to preserve the cultural heritage and memory of Aleppo and Syrians displaced by violence and war. The resulting report found that Facebook groups are used to hold space for places and communities that have been lost and impacted by the war and considered five technical possibilities for “archiving the archive” on these private interfaces.

Explore all MEAP Cohort 2 Projects

Project Grants


Planning Grants