ISRF Newsletter – June 2024
ISRF Newsletter – June 2024
The days are getting longer, and so is our Director’s Note. Welcome back! Read on for a Director's Note, recent Bulletin articles, upcoming events, Fellows news, and our upcoming competition schedule.
Contents
Director’s Note
Bringing a Tennis Racket to the Premier League
Christopher Newfield
Is it okay for the social sciences, humanities and arts to have a fraction of the funding of science and engineering (S&E)? With apologies for the sports metaphor, it seems like those working in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are playing top-tier professional football while the social scientist shows up with their own tennis racket and hopes that someone has set up the net.
This may sound a little extreme. But I still remember the email that brought home to me the budget gulf between S&E on the one hand and the qualitative social sciences and humanities on the other…
Book Launch: Disability and Political Representation, by Elizabeth Evans and Stefanie Reher
Thursday 20 June, 5pm-6:30pm (BST). Barnard's Inn Hall, Holborn London C1N 2HH. In-person only.
In Disability and Political Representation, Elizabeth Evans and Stefanie Reher show how the representative process works and doesn’t work for disabled people – and also how thinking about disability can help us develop and improve our ideas about political representation in general.
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?
To enquire about attendance contact lars.cornelissen@isrf.org.
Recent Bulletin Posts
Empire Was Racist and Had To End but Decolonisation Is Often a ‘Disappointment’ – Historian Explains Why
In his ambitious new book, ISRF Fellow Martin Thomas provides a compelling account of how the decline of empire is inextricably linked to the rise of globalisation.
Gifts from the Arms Trade
ISRF Fellow, Jill Gibbon, and photographer, Ricky Adam, are working on a photo book of gifts collected during a decade infiltrating the international arms trade.
New Publication: Disability and Political Representation (2024, Oxford University Press)
Professor Elizabeth Evans (ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2021) and Dr Stefanie Reher offer the first systematic discussion of the political representation of disabled people.
Call for Papers: Civil Wars: Narratives, Memories, Identities (Kastoria, Greece, 14-15 December 2024)
This conference (supported by an ISRF Flexi Grant) will explore the lived experiences of those who lived through civil wars during the twentieth century.
Video: Book Launch for Martin Thomas, The End of Empires and a World Remade (2024)
On the 24th of May, the ISRF hosted a book launch to celebrate the publication of Martin Thomas’s important new book, The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization. We were joined by Natalya Benkhaled-Vince and Tarak Barkawi.
Video: Julia Laite, Possible Maps: Ways of Knowing and Unknowing at the Edge of Empire (Newfoundland)
On the 3rd of May, ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Julia Laite gave a public lecture for the Royal Historical Society exploring some official and unofficial, and colonial and Indigenous, ways of mapping and knowing the colonial hinterland of Newfoundland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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.
2nd First Book Grant (FBG2)
Launching on 2nd September 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.