Deadline: 15-Feb-22
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to invite applications for Digital Justice Seed Grants, which are made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants are designed to promote and provide resources for newly formulated projects that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.
This program addresses the inequities in the distribution of access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects. It promotes inclusion and sustainability by extending the opportunity to participate in the digital transformation of humanistic inquiry to a greater number of humanities scholars and projects at the beginning stages of development.
ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants offer scholars and project leaders general financial planning coaching from the Nonprofit Finance Fund. Such an opportunity provides a foundation upon which grant recipients can envision the possible long-term financial options for supporting their digital projects.
Funding Information
ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants range in the amount of $10,000-$25,000. Seed grants may be held for 12-18 months.
Eligible Activities
ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants support projects that pursue any of the following activities:
- Engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people.
- Explore or experiment with new materials, methodologies, and research agendas by way of planning workshops, prototyping, and/or testing products.
- Cultivate greater openness to new sources of knowledge and strategic approaches to content building and knowledge dissemination.
Eligibility Criteria
- Projects must be hosted by an institution of higher education in the United States.
- Project’s principal investigator must be a scholar in a field of the humanities or of the interpretative social sciences.
- Project must be within the start-up or prototyping phase of development.
Evaluation Criteria
Peer reviewers in this program are asked to evaluate all eligible proposals on the following criteria:
- The project’s engagement with understudied, underfunded, or otherwise marginalized topics of scholarly inquiry.
- The project’s capacity to advance justice and equity by addressing subjects and materials of significance for society and scholarship.
- The feasibility of the project plans, as well as a realistic assessment of how risks and challenges will be managed.
- The project’s positive potential contribution with respect to its respective field(s).
- The project’s clarity about intended audiences and its plans for how the project team will engage those constituencies.
For more information, visit https://www.acls.org/competitions/acls-digital-justice-seed-grants/