The iSchools Sponsored Research Fund supports research by the iSchool community through grants of up to $5,000. Grant applications were previously considered twice a year, but the submission date is changing to October so that the evaluation committee can meet to discuss all proposals face-to-face at the iConference. The committee consists of iSchools officers and Board members.
The applicant should have a teaching position at a member-iSchool or be an iSchools doctoral student. The range of topics is open, and projects involving doctoral research or outreach to underrepresented regions are especially encouraged. Applications with external matching funds are a plus, but not a requirement.
Decisions were recently announced for grant applications received through 1 March 2022. Of the six proposals received, the following three were selected for funding.
One grant went to Henria Aton of the University of Toronto. In a proposal titled Tamil in the Archival Multiverse: Power, Memory, and Loss in Contemporary Sri Lankan Archives, Aton requested support for a two-month dissertation research trip to Sri Lanka. Her goal is to excavate “the entanglement of archives with politics in Sri Lanka, from the postcolonial moment to the present.”
A second grant was awarded to Haley Bryant, also with the University of Toronto, for a proposal titled Digital Memory Work. Bryant will research “digital memory work: the assemblage of people, practices, protocols, knowledge, and technologies that enables digital cultural heritage projects in museums.”
A third grant went to Heather Moulaison Sandy, Brian Dobreski, and Karen Snow from the University of Missouri, the University of Tennessee, and Dominican University, respectively, for their proposal entitled LGBTQ+ Identity, Code-Switching, and User Studies of Information Retrieval Systems. They investigate how “members of a marginalized community (e.g., LGBTQ+) engage in ‘code-switching’ to adjust the terminology they use regarding identity.”
The next Sponsored Research Fund application deadline is 15 December 2022. Visit the Sponsored Research Fund webpage for more information, including judging criteria and an application form.