CISS Announces Call for 2022-23 Faculty Pilot Grants
The CISS Pilot Grant program is designed to provide funding for innovative research projects that explore cutting-edge social issues, especially those that align with the Center themes of inequalities and sustainability. Applicants are encouraged to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, such as integrating concepts or methods from multiple academic disciplines, or collaborating with a co-investigator representing a distinctive methodology or field of study. Funded projects should have the potential to attract subsequent external funding, and should yield concrete products at the end of the funding period, such as peer-reviewed journal articles or a book proposal. The Center will award four grants of $5,000 each (total costs), with a funding period of January through December 2023.
Eligibility, Funding Guidelines, and Applying
All faculty and full-time lecturers in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and CISS faculty affiliates from any unit are eligible to serve as principal investigators. Grant funds may be used to hire graduate or undergraduate research assistants; for research-related expenses specific to the funded project such as software, data collection, transcription service, compensation for research participants; or travel to research sites. Faculty salary support is not allowable, although faculty may provide summer salary support to graduate students (plus fringe). The CAS faculty research account guidelines provide details on other allowable and unallowable expenses. Priority will be given to tenure-track faculty and faculty members who do not already have external funding.
For more information and to apply, see our webpage here.
Informational Session
A goal of the pilot grant program is to facilitate collaborative interdisciplinary work. CISS will hold a Zoom informational session on Tuesday October 11 from 2:30-3:30 pm are invited to share their research ideas with one another, and the Center director and Steering Committee members will help to facilitate potential collaborations among investigators seeking research partners who bring a new disciplinary or methodological lens to the project. Please register here.
Please direct questions to Deborah Carr, Center Director (carrds@bu.edu) or Diána Hughes, Center Administrator (ciss@bu.edu)
Previous Awardees
The Future of Sino-Western Relations is in their Past. Faculty investigators Daryl Ireland (STH Mission) and Eugenio Menegon (CAS History). The grant supported the expansion of the China Historical Christian Database (CHCD), a platform which provides users tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, lab, museum, orphanage, publishing house, and other important locations were situated in China.
Moving from Precarity Towards Prosperity: An Abductive Analysis of Precarity Management in Service Sector Employment. Faculty investigator Makarand Mody (SHA Hospitality Marketing). The grant will support the investigation of strategies that workers in precarious service occupations in the hospitality and long-term care sectors develop and implement to combat the adverse outcomes of precarious employment (PE) for worker well-being and quality of life.