AFAC/ACSS announce Research Program on Arts

Deadline: 31-Aug-21

The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and the Arab Council for Social Sciences (ACSS) are pleased to announce the fourth session of their joint program for research on arts.

The research grant from AFAC and the ACSS is a funding opportunity to support research that addresses all artistic practices across disciplines and methodological approaches on major topics of interest and revolve in the Arab region.

The Arts Research Program aims to promote and develop research on the arts in the Arab region – a geographical and cultural space rich in artistic heritage and contemporary art practices that awaits research and analysis. The program seeks to enable the production of various types of academic and technical knowledge that give additional value to this field.

The Arts Research Program open to artists, art practitioners, and academics encourages artists, humanities and social sciences scholars to conduct critical research on different aspects of the arts, using empirical approaches that seek to create new openings in understanding art and culture in the region ( Arts Research Program Selection Committee for the year 2020).

This program supports research on the arts and is concerned with what this research reveals about aesthetics, as well as what it reveals about society and the interaction between them. Social, economic, and political contexts matter, and social science scholars and artists are encouraged to work collaboratively with others or independently to engage with the surrounding environment and consider the role of artists and the arts in the broader community. They are also interested in research that dismantles art as a subject of study, in addition to the role of social, economic, and political processes in shaping artistic practices, their production and distribution, and vice versa.

Areas

Examples of areas that could be addressed include, but are not limited to:

Arts as part of everyday life
Historical and Contemporary Art Practices
Spatial and temporal art practices and associated knowledge production
art history
folk arts
Arts and the environment
Research on archives related to art
Art and the state
pop culture
The meaning and influence of the arts
Art in Exile
Types of technical writing
Forms and functions of artwork
Relationships between society and the arts
Marginalized and repressed artistic practices and histories
Production, publishing, artistic consumption and the public

Funding Information

This program is funded by AFAC and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Arab Council for the Social Sciences). Will be grants available for individual researchers (up value of each grant to $ 15,000 maximum) and research teams or research groups are active (Collectives) (up value of each grant to $ 25,000 maximum) and institutions (up value of each grant to $ 35,000 maximum).

Eligibility Criteria

Individual applicants must be nationals of an Arab country (by Arab state they mean a country affiliated with the League of Arab States) or a national of an Arab country (i.e. long-time residents of the region, even if they do not hold any nationality such as refugees or stateless), and be residing in the Arab region. In the case of research teams and active research groups, the team leader must be a citizen/national of an Arab country and reside in the Arab region. Research teams, activist research groups, and institutions may include Arab or non-Arab expatriates, but at least two of the team/group/institution members must be citizens/nationals of an Arab state and residing in the Arab region. For institutions, the institution must be based in the Arab region and be registered there (branches of foreign international organizations are not eligible to apply).
The Research Grants Program is open to scholars with diverse backgrounds in the arts, humanities, social sciences and allied fields. The Arts and Humanities majors include: art history, comparative literature, contemporary art, curatorial studies, fine arts, graphic design, architecture, languages and literature, folklore studies, media studies, music, performing arts, and visual arts. Core social science fields include disciplines such as anthropology, demography, economics, history, political science, psychology, and sociology. Associated fields include education, gender studies, cultural studies and urban studies. They encourage interdisciplinary proposals.
This program is open to individual researchers/artists/art practitioners, research teams, activist research groups, and institutions (universities, research centers, arts centers, research NGOs, etc.). For this call for applications:
- Researchers can be academic individuals or art practitioners.
- Research teams include researchers from different or identical institutions, regions, and disciplines, as well as a mix of researchers, artists, and art critics interested in conducting interdisciplinary research on the subject of the arts.
- An active research group is an independent group of researchers, artists, and/or teams comprising a mix of researchers and artists who have collaborated and continue to work on a specific topic over the years and share a specific mission, set of practices or outputs that reflect the group’s identity and goals.
- An institution may be a university, a university department, a think tank, a research institution, a research NGO, an arts and culture institution, etc.
- Research teams, activist groups, and institutions must submit their applications in teams of up to four people, including the principal investigator and co-researchers.