ISRF Newsletter – September 2024
Though Summer is at an end, the ISRF is here to brighten up your inbox. Scroll down for a Director's Note, the First Book Grant launch announcement, events, posts, and news.
Contents
Director’s Note
Haunted by Propaganda
Christopher Newfield
As I was about to leave the kitchen with my second cup of coffee, my partner came downstairs. We hugged good morning, as we always do, and she told me how she’d stayed up late to finish a memoir she’d been reading by Grace M. Cho.
In Tastes Like War, Cho describes how her mother, a Korean bar hostess, was brought to rural Washington state by her American merchant marine husband. She tells how her mother taught her amazing cooking and served as her anchor and rock. But she also reveals how she gradually became schizophrenic and after much struggle passed away in 2008.
I felt overwhelmed by the sadness of the outside world. A Korean woman is hopeful about her new life and then goes slowly mad in empty America. Russia continues to invade and kill in Ukraine, Israel still destroys and kills in Gaza. There’s the war in Sudan…
New Competition: 2nd First Book Grant (FBG2)
Deadline: 5pm GMT (6pm CET), Friday 1st November 2024
Newly qualified post-docs (within three years of PhD award) are eligible to apply for support to convert their PhD thesis into a book.
Researchers may apply from across the social sciences and the humanities. The awards are intended to provide a research stipend (to cover living costs) for a period of up to twelve months, plus appropriate research expenses.
Book Launch: Revenant Ecologies, by Professor Audra Mitchell
Thursday 26 September, 5:30pm-7:00pm (BST). Online.
In Revenant Ecologies, Audra Mitchell argues that mainstream ecological conservation models not only ignore but also magnify forms of structural violence like colonialism, racism, genocide, extractivism, ableism, and heteronormativity, Drawing on diverse Indigenous and other marginalized knowledge systems, Mitchell offers an alternative framework, (bio)plurality, that focuses on nurturing unique, irreplaceable worlds, relations, and ecosystems. For this launch event, she will be joined by Sadiah Qureshi and Hugo Reinert.
Conference: Migration and Democracy in a Time of Climate Crisis
7-9 October, Warsaw, Poland.
Our three topics for this year’s ISRF Conference have become trapped in a vicious cycle. Climate crisis increases migration, which has triggered anti-democratic backlash, which reduces international cooperation on climate, which allows the climate crisis to intensify. Each of these relationships is real, and each is rooted in myth. The ISRF invites papers on any of these three topics, or any combination of them. How can we interrupt this cycle and even reverse it? How can we treat underlying causes rather than addressing symptoms?
For inquiries, contact lars.cornelissen@isrf.org
Recent Bulletin Posts
Everything You Need to Know About the Next ISRF Conference
With just over a month to go until the ISRF Conference in Warsaw, Poland, here are some of the key topics which will be discussed.
New Publication: Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture During Covid (forthcoming, Repeater Books)
Dr Joy White (ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow 2015-16 and Academic Advisor) explores how Black music and culture framed how we passed the time in the first 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
New Publication: Ek Khaale – Once Upon a Time
On this website, divided into nine chapters, ISRF Fellow Dr Greg Constantine offers a visual restoration of the history of the Rohingya. At present, seven chapters have been published. The other two will be published over the course of September.
New Publication: The sound of difference: Race, class and the politics of 'diversity' in classical music (2024, Manchester University Press)
Dr Kristina Kolbe (ISRF Early Career Fellow 2023) critically examines how discourses of ‘diversity’ in the classical music, a sector that is notably implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and legacies of imperialism.
2nd First Book Grant (FBG2)
Now live—deadline: Friday 1st November 2024
Newly qualified post-docs (within three years of PhD award) are eligible to apply for support to convert their PhD thesis into a book.
11th Flexible Grants for Small Groups Competition (FG11)
Launching autumn 2024 (date to be confirmed)
Funding support for small groups (2-10 scholars) to complete a piece of research or undertake face-to-face joint group work.
7th Mid-Career Fellowship (MCF7)
Closed on 28th March 2024
Scholars more than ten years post-PhD were eligible to apply for support to complete a one-year piece of original research. Award announcements are expected in the summer.