IHR Competitive Seed Grant Program
The IHR seed grant program is designed to provide support for projects that advance the transdisciplinary*, collaborative, and issue-focused mission of the Institute and are sufficiently developed to be competitive for national grants. Seed grant funds are available for transdisciplinary projects for junior and senior humanities faculty members and/or collaborative teams. Funds may be requested for the purpose of conducting research and developing proposals for submission to external funding agencies. It is expected that with a year of support for planning and research, faculty will enhance the competitive nature of their grant proposals. The IHR will support projects that best address the mission of the IHR and that have strong prospects of receiving external funding. Please see our web page for further information and application materials.
Next deadline: October 27, 2008.
A seed grant workshop will be held on Thursday, 9/25, for potential applicants.
CURRENT AND ON-GOING SEED GRANT PROJECTS
Spring 2008 Seed Grant Projects
From the Volga to the Salt River: Christian and Muslim Spiritual Songs of Russia
Project Directors: Eugene Clay, Religious Studies; Agnes Kefeli, Religious Studies
Understanding Latent Religious Conflict: The Case of Frictions between the Greek Catholic and Orthodox Churches in Romania
Project Director: Ileana Orlich, School of International Letters and Cultures
Oxytocin: Fueling Music's Power in Human Emotions, Memory, and Restoration
Project Directors: Gary Hill, School of Music; Kay Norton, School of Music; Robin Rio, School of Music; Dana Rosdahl, College of Nursing; Lisa Ehlers, School of Music
Art and Ritual in the Creation of a Transnational Refugee Community
Project Director: Hjorleifur Jonsson, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Fall 2007 IHR Seed Grant Project
The Five Senses: Pleasure and Danger in Perception
Project Directors: Richard Newhauser, English; Corine Schleif, Herberger College of the Arts
Analyzing sensory perception as a cultural construction is a transdisciplinary endeavor connecting the humanities, biological sciences, and social sciences. Focusing on the place of perception in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this project aims to investigate hierarchies of the senses, the senses as sites of hegemonic contest, and the contours of a social history of sensual production and reception. Our findings will be presented as case studies in a faculty seminar, an interdisciplinary symposium involving outside contributors from the social and biological sciences, an NEH summer seminar for college und university teachers, and finally a volume of selected essays.
Spring 2007 Seed Grant Projects
Medicine and the Media: A Transdisciplinary Analysis of Social Constructions of Health and Illness
Project Directors: Peter Lehman, Film and Media Studies, Center for Film, Media, and Popular Culture; Daniel Sarewitz, School of Life Sciences and Dept. of Geological Sciences, Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes; Edward Sylvester, Cronkite School of Journalism
Our project will combine humanities and social science methods in a transdisciplinary analysis of how the media and medical science together construct representations of health and illness. We will explore how these constructions current ideological beliefs and values. Our goal is to create a new academic field—media medicine studies—that explores how various epistemological or ideological mechanisms create public knowledge about health and medical practices. Our objective is to understand how different representations of medicine and health become consumerized, that is commercially made “true” and “essential” to “good” health by way of various practices. Knowing how media participates in this process may help us better assess its role in determining social perceptions, behaviors and policies related to health and the medical sciences.
Transnational Adoption in Arizona
Project Directors: Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Assistant Professor of English, Women and Gender Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies;Karen Miller-Loessi, Associate Professor of Sociology, School Social Family Dynamics; Hyung Chol (Brandon) Yoo, Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies & School of Social and Family Dynamics
This project will examine the regional aspects of a relatively recent phenomenon that has its roots in the post-World War II period and that has accelerated dramatically since the early 1990s. Intercountry adoption predominantly moves children from second and third-world nations to the United States, Canada, and various Western European countries. The growth of this phenomenon constitutes another significant dimension of globalization, where growing inequities among countries around the globe produce large-scale migratory movements. A numerically small phenomenon when compared to migration by adult populations, transnational adoption nevertheless exemplifies an important new twist to these flows, particularly with respect to ongoing massive changes toward greater ethnic, racial, and national diversity within immigrant receiving nations like the United States. Compared to the large body of research on U.S. immigration, there exists relatively little work on transnational adoption in the United States, particularly in the humanities. In addition, there is virtually no scholarship on what is sometimes called “the quiet immigration” in the state of Arizona.
Fall 2006 IHR Seed Grant Projects
OLA (Online Arizona): Who, What, Where, When, and How
Participants: Noel Stowe, Professor and Chair, History Department; Senior Director, Public History Program; Kent Calder, Professor of Practice and Director, Scholarly Publishing Program
Abstract: This project will fuse the perspectives and expertise of various disciplines at Arizona State University and other stakeholders to plan the creation of the state’s first comprehensive electronic reference tool. A series of meetings will identify new scholarship opportunities, audiences, needs, content, technology, implementation strategies, and links with the Arizona Centennial 2012. The results will lead to proposals for funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, private foundations, and corporate sponsors.
PREVIOUSLY FUNDED PROJECTS