The Independent Social Research Foundation has announced details of funding for six projects covering timely topics including the rise of far right activism, border politics and transphobia.
As part of the ISRF’s latest Mid-Career Fellowships, awards have also been given to academics looking at the “greenwashing” of financial investments and the link between colonialism and urban planning.
Mid-Career Fellowships are one of the key ways in which the ISRF supports independent-minded researchers in exploring and presenting their original work.
It’s the seventh time the ISRF has run this particular funding competition, with academics from across Europe encouraged to apply for grants of up to €100,000.
Here’s everything you need to know about the new Fellows and the fascinating research projects that they will be working on over the next 12 months.
Transnational activism and queer imaginaries in the modern Middle East’
The Middle East and North Africa have, as Philip Ayoub explains, earned a reputation for being “repressive in the domain of gender and sexuality politics”.
However, this hasn't stopped LGBTQ movements from mobilising in innovative ways – including the rise of “transnational solidarity” and the creation of regional networks of queer resistance.
Ayoub plans to conduct interviews with activists in Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates to better understand homophobia and transphobia in the region.
As ethnic minorities from across the Commonwealth moved to British cities following the Second World War, the racial ideology and practices of colonialism made themselves felt through urban planning.
To understand this phenomenon, Yasminah Beebeejaun will examine government interventions in housing and development, as well as community organising and grassroots resistance.
Beebeejaun, who is currently under contract with University of California Press, will draw on a mix of archival research and oral histories to produce a book exploring this under-recognised legacy of the British Empire.
Metapolitics of the "good citizen": the far right and civic habitus in UK communities
Drag queens reading stories to children and 15-Minute Cities… these are just a couple of the flashpoints encompassed in Anthony Ince’s research into far right activism.
By exploring the idea of “metapolitics” – what becomes political and why – Ince will go beyond conventional political-economic and psychological understandings of the far right.
As part of this project, Ince wants to generate “innovative ways” to combat the far right, including working with community organisations to produce a toolkit for anti-fascist neighbourhoods.
Dematerialising Borders: border reopenings in an age of walls and fences
You probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint it on a map, but the Ferghana Valley might just hold the answer to the divisive question of how to deal with international borders.
Nick Megoran’s research focuses on this border between Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan, once a site of deadly conflict, which was reopened for trade and passage in 2017.
By conducting fieldwork in post-Soviet Central Asia, Megoran aims to generate practical knowledge of “how the 21st century’s proliferation of violent and exclusionary international borders can be reversed”.
Dirty Green Money: ESG Fraud, Greenwashing and Compliance in the Drive for Net Zero
Just how environmentally friendly are green investments anyway? Thomas Raymen’s research sets out to understand the complex issue of “greenwashing”.
The rise of this form of financial activity has been accompanied with concerns that “the environmental credentials of particular investment opportunities” are being intentionally misrepresented.
Raymen will investigate the regulation of this trillion-dollar industry, closely linked to the goal of Net Zero carbon emissions, which is considered so important in the fight against climate change.
Bureaucracy, opacity, border violence: (Un)doing secrecy in EU migration management
With long-standing connections to investigative journalists, Luděk Stavinoha is perfectly placed to shine a light on the “secrecy surrounding routine border violence”.
By interviewing these reporters, Stavinoha will illuminate how the “EU border bureaucracies that lie at the centre of efforts to deter, contain, criminalise, and expel ‘undesirable’ migrant populations remain shrouded by opacity”.
This project will also make use of Freedom of Information legislation to understand the “mundane bureaucratic practices” employed by Frontex and the European Commission.
Mid-Career Fellowships
As part of its mission to advance the social sciences through the promotion of new modes of inquiry, the ISRF regularly awards funding through a series of Grant Competitions.
This includes Mid-Career Fellowships, which are typically for researchers who are 10 years on from a PhD and currently hold a salaried position at a Higher Education Institution.
The award is intended to buy Fellows out of teaching and administration for up to 12 months, allowing them to focus on innovative and groundbreaking research.
