Deadline: 15 March 2017
Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) has announced a competition for reporting grants for Media Fellows who will join a new initiative on “Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence.”
Supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, this project seeks to bring together an international community of scholars, practitioners, journalists, and activists to study the role of religion in naming, framing, and governing gendered violence, with a focus on the Middle East and South Asia.
Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW)––or more recently, the expansive term “gender-based violence” (GBV)––has come to prominence as a highly visible and powerful agenda across a range of local, national, and global domains. By embedding gender violence in a complex matrix of international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and post-conflict situations. Here, religion (sometimes in the guise of ethnicity) is regularly linked to gendered violence, entire religious traditions sometimes accused of promoting “cultures of violence.” The crucial question of how religious difference intersects with the VAW/GBV agenda has hardly begun to be considered. Why and when is religion invoked in global responses to VAW/GBV? What categories of the religious become seen as credible and acceptable, and are empowered as anti-GBV actors? Who pays a price and who benefits from the ways religion is used to frame global understandings of VAW/GBV? This program seeks to work with promising journalists who want to go beyond or look behind the powerful “common sense” that assumes a straightforward relation between gender violence and religion.
Funding Details
The total grant amount is $5000. This includes a stipend of $2000 and up to $3000 in reimbursed expenses for travel, visa, and accommodation connected with the fellow’s participation in the workshop in Amman in September 2017 and the research stay in the region that follows.
Eligibility Criteria
- Journalists from anywhere in the world, are eligible to apply.
- Professional journalism must be the applicant’s primary profession.
- Applicants must have three or more years of professional journalism experience with a strong background in reporting on gender issues.
How to Apply
Applications include the following:
- A description of the proposed project, including dissemination plan, in no more than 250 words.
- Three samples of published work, either print, broadcast or digital.
- Phone number and email address of two professional references. Letters of recommendation are not required.
- A copy of your curriculum vitae with current contact information.
Applications must be submitted via email.
For more information, please visit Call for Proposals.