FAS/SEAS/OSP Deadline: September 16, 2020
Sponsor Deadline: September 23, 2020
Award Amount: up to $5M over 2-3 years
Harvard University has been invited to submit proposals to the Mellon Just Futures Initiative. Proposals are invited from multi-disciplinary teams that include scholars from the humanities, arts, and humanities-inflected social sciences. The program will provide funding to support visionary, unconventional, experimental, and groundbreaking projects in order to address the long-existing fault lines of racism, inequality, and injustice that tear at the fabric of democracy and civil society. This call for proposals seeks to support teams whose work focuses specifically on and addresses racial inequality and its many manifestations. Grants of up to $5 million with a 2-3 year duration will be awarded to multi-disciplinary teams with the intention of generating innovative research, projects, pedagogies, and curricula. The Foundation encourages the formation of multi-institutional teams that may include partners from across the sectors of higher education and from outside the academy. This call seeks visionary proposals that begin with expertise based in the humanities and utilize a multi-disciplinary approach to addressing racial justice, asking questions such as (but not limited to):
- What might we learn from the study of past periods of crisis and disruption, and how might those lessons lead us to cultural and social transformation in the present?
- What are the future possibilities for structures that elevate, make visible, liberate, and help individuals and communities to thrive?
- How might the humanities and higher education more generally be productively transformed to achieve greater and more equitable access, demographic transformation, and to support new ways of knowing and new modes of knowledge production? And how might those transformations be linked to the generation of a more just and equitable society?
