Arizona State University (ASU) and a consortium of other colleges will share in a $310,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create public projects highlighting key social matters, ASU officials reported recently.

Officially the grant was allotted to Humanities Action Lab, also known as “HAL,” a 20-university alliance. The support will finance a multimedia and traveling exhibit about mass incarceration in the schools’ respective communities. According to ASU, the United States has reached an all-time high on the number of imprisoned individuals across a variety of settings.

The project, "States of Incarceration: A National Dialogue of Local Histories," will educate the public as the display, which debuted in New York City in April 2016, gradually wends its way across the U.S., with plans to show it in Phoenix’s Burton Barr Central Library in September 2018.

Locally, the grant will also support a Phoenix-based Mass Story Lab project, through which impacted individuals will engage the public through storytelling and dialogue about immigrant detention.

“With this grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities … we will continue to provide opportunities to collectively reframe current debates and open new forms of dialogue about the future of the US criminal justice system,” HAL director Liz Sevcenko said in a press release.