Humanities Strategic Investment Fund

03 Jul 2024

Empowering Research: Faculty Investment Boosts Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Last year the Faculty launched a major new investment initiative to support ambitious research projects via a number of competitive funding schemes. The resulting awards continue to support activity ranging from individual fellowships through to large collaborative research teams.

The awards were particularly designed to encourage collaboration across different departments by offering funding for Faculty-based interdisciplinary teams, while also strengthening alignment with the Faculty priority research themes of Digital Futures, Sustainable Futures, Creativity, Global Inequalities, and Post-Covid Society.

Sample funded projects from round one included a study from Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, a Lecturer in the Philosophy department in SoSS, on ‘Rebuilding Trust in Public Discourse: The Good Speech Project’. This is an interdisciplinary project which seeks to explain how public discourse can generate significant social harms and makes recommendations as to how to mend them. In particular, it will focus on oppressive speech and how it spreads online.

Another project headed by Professor Gerardo Serra, a Presidential Fellow in the History department in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC), looks at ‘Inequality and Crisis in West African Economic Thought, 1870-2022’. The obsession with ‘development’ as the main framework through which ‘Africa’ is constructed and appraised, silences and makes invisible the rich discursive and conceptual resources through which African thinkers have interpreted, and tried to change, the world. To rectify this state of affairs, this project analyses how West African intellectuals have articulated and mobilised discourses of ‘inequality’ and ‘crisis’ from the late 19th century to the present.