Project AROS

Action-research · justice · memory · technology

Turning research on justice into public knowledge.

Project AROS began by making digital archives public. It now connects a wider body of student-driven, policy-facing research across transitional and climate justice, human rights, memory politics, and technology, plus the visual work it produces.

PROJECT HISTORY · 2015 Digital Methods @ Montclair 2020 Project AROS 2023 Project AROS Lab Today's Research Ecosystem

§01 · Experiential research

Students learn justice by researching it.

Working alongside faculty and partners, students take on real questions in transitional and climate justice, human rights, and memory politics, then carry them through archives, fieldwork, data, and visualization into work that reaches policy and the public.

In the lab

University research

Students work within Project AROS Lab and affiliated programs at Montclair State: mentored, collaborative, and partner-driven.

In the field

Independent inquiry

Transitional and climate justice, human rights, and the politics of artificial intelligence, pursued hands-on across cases and regions.

In public

Visual scholarship

Findings become interactive ArcGIS Story Maps: public, navigable narratives on rights, memory, and the environment.

§02 · Lines of inquiry

Four threads run through everything.

Distinct themes, one stance: research built with students and designed to reach beyond the academy into policy and the public.

01 · Justice

Governance, Justice & Policy Innovation

Transitional justice, alternative and informal justice mechanisms, and policymaking across global and local contexts.

02 · Technology

AI, Digital Societies & Higher Education

The societal impact of artificial intelligence and digital methods on governance, healthcare, activism, and scholarly work.

03 · Climate

Climate, Sustainability & Resilience

Climate governance, gender-inclusive and Indigenous adaptation, environmental risk, and social-enterprise responses.

04 · Memory

Identity, Memory & Cultural Resistance

Memory politics, performative justice, queer geographies, youth activism, and the arts as engines of social movements.

§03 · Research, visualized

From research to visualization to story.

Each project moves from research to data visualization to a navigable public narrative, built with ArcGIS StoryMaps as the tool. The mostly student-led work is grouped into three collections below; each card opens its story in a new tab, hosted on ArcGIS and indexed here.

§04 · Network

Where the work is anchored.

Project AROS sits alongside the university lab rather than inside it, linking out to the institutions that host the research, so the umbrella stays stable even as their addresses change.

Montclair State

Project AROS Lab

The university research lab and its internship and scholarship programs.

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Montclair State

RIGS

Affiliated research initiative at Montclair State University.

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§05 · Lineage

Where this came from.

The current work rests on a decade of digital-humanities and archival research. These predecessors are preserved here so the trajectory stays visible, and so existing citations keep resolving.

2020 · origin

Project AROS: Visualizing Digital Archives

The original initiative to expand and open the Wilson Center Digital Archive through histograph: exploring links between people, places, and concepts across time.

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2015 · predecessor

Digital Methods @ Montclair

Early work on mapping and visualizing digital and digitized data, with C2DH Luxembourg, Sciences Po, and partners in Rijeka and Graz.

Open the archive ↗