CISS Announces Call for 2025-26 Faculty Pilot Grants
The CISS Faculty 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 theme of social inequalities. 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 grants of up to $5,000 each (total costs), with a funding period of July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026, with the possibility of a one-year no-cost extension.
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 have not already received CISS 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 with the potential to attract external funding. CISS will hold a Zoom informational session on Thursday, January 23, 2025 from 3-4 pm. Potential applicants 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. The Center director will also answer general questions regarding the pilot grant program. Please register via Zoom.
Review Process
Each application will be reviewed by a member of the CISS Steering Committee, the Center director, and a CISS affiliate with relevant substantive or methodological expertise. Proposals will be evaluated on the basis of the significance of the topic, innovation, quality and feasibility of analytic plan, evidence of a commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives, potential to yield external funding and high-impact research outputs, and investigator need. Application deadline is February 17, 2025. Selected applicants will be notified no later than March 30, 2025. Projects must have IRB approval before funding will begin.
Please direct questions to Deborah Carr, Center Director (carrds@bu.edu) or Shannon Landis, Center Administrator (ciss@bu.edu).
Previous Awardees
2024
How Subjugated Mothers Theorize School and Family Policing. Spencer Piston (CAS/Political Science). While research on policing in the American politics subfield has proliferated in recent years, it has focused narrowly on street-level policing. As a result, it misses critical avenues through which women, particularly women of color and women in poverty, are policed. In this project, Piston and colleagues examine the experiences and perspectives of twenty Boston-area mothers who are policed through two institutions working in concert, the child welfare system and the school system.
Linking Voter Registration and Health Insurance Claims Data to Facilitate Novel Analyses of Politics and Health. Paul Shafer (SPH/Health Law, Policy & Management). To date, limited research has examined how political partisanship correlates with health care use and health outcomes. Shafer and colleagues propose to fill this gap by creating a first-of-its-kind dataset that links voter registration with all-payer health insurance claims data. Its construction will create opportunities to study a host of important research questions on how politicization of health affects demand for health care as well as provider practice patterns.
Civic Fronts: Rethinking Resilience and Inequality in Latin America. Ana Villarreal (CAS/Sociology)This grant will fund fieldwork in Medellín, Colombia for her new project Civic Fronts: Rethinking Resilience and Inequality in Latin America. This project will make a novel contribution to debates around criminal violence and civic engagement by closely examining the prominent role the private sector can play in stirring forms of civic engagement closest to their economic interests.
2023
Transnational Populism: Religion and the Radical Right among Brazilian Migrants. Faculty investigator Taylor Boas (CAS/Political Science) examined why Brazilian migrants to the Boston area, as well as their sending communities back home, have been disproportionately supportive of right-wing populists such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump.
Improving Healthcare Services for Gay and Bisexual Latino and Black Male Sexual Assault Survivors in Boston. Faculty investigators Daniel Jacobson López (School of Social Work) and Steven Meanly (University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing) explored what current protocols are available and being implemented for gay and bisexual Black and/or Latino male sexual assault survivors who are seeking medical care services in Boston.
Stigma, Care, and End-Stage Kidney Disease (ESKD) in Racialized Boston Communities Fighting the Syndemic Sequelae of COVID-19. Faculty investigators Merav Shohet (CAS/Anthropology) and Insa Marie Schmidt (School of Medicine/Boston Medical Center) built on stigma research and combines in-person and remote ethnographic and epidemiological research methods to explore the dynamics of racism, illness, and care for residents of underprivileged urban communities who suffer end-stage kidney disease (ESKD).
A Gendered Examination of Political Instability in Northern Ireland. Faculty investigator Sandra McEvoy (CAS/Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Political Science) documented the essential role that women played in service to Loyalist paramilitary organizations during the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles,” and provided clarity about how Loyalists understand themselves in a complex political moment in Northern Ireland.
2022
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.