Current Funding Opportunities
- Research Networking
- Fellowships
Please see below for details.
Theme overview
The arts and humanities research communities are uniquely placed to lead debates about alternative future visions and pathways for sustainable communities, processes of change, how we balance current needs with those of future generations and ways to enhance our quality of life. Key issues include understanding changing cultural values, improving the way historical knowledge and experience informs future policy, and enhancing the stewardship of cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations.
Research in the arts and humanities can shape perspectives and visions of the future, and the aspirations and fears that accompany these visions. This colours many contemporary debates, for instance about major global challenges such as environmental change, long-term policy and investment choices, and emerging technologies. Understanding and harnessing the power of this shaping role is critical to moving forward public debates and addressing major societal challenges.
Future thinking and horizon scanning, as well as learning from past successes and failures, are vital to the long-term strategic planning for governments and international agencies, and a wide range of organisations in the private, public and voluntary sectors. Although many specialist organisations have emerged to support this activity, inadequate engagement with historical, philosophical, cultural and creative perspectives has often hampered the effectiveness of such strategic planning for the future. These perspectives are also crucial in framing the ways that we approach the many challenges we face in balancing the needs of current and future generations. In turn, these can lead to associated issues of values, rights, responsibilities, and justice and intergenerational equity, for example in exploiting natural resources, mitigating future environmental change, sustainability and conserving our cultural heritage for the future.
Arts and humanities research under this theme can contribute to new thinking about future ethical, moral, cultural and social landscapes. For example, it could address major societal challenges such as perceptions of the erosion of trust, personal responsibility and civility and of problems such as crime and ‘anti-social behaviour’; major constitutional, democratic and institutional reforms; debates about the role of the state and increasing emphasis on the roles of philanthropy, voluntarism, caring, active citizenship and social enterprise; concerns about the impacts of globalisation and technological change; and global challenges such as climate and environmental change.
Research in the arts and humanities also offers potentially unique insights to the processes of change which are shaping both the present and the future. For example, debates about current and future legal and constitutional issues need to be informed by an understanding of the cumulative processes of legislation, interpretation and precedent through which they have developed. Global conflicts can only be understood through and understanding of the ideas, beliefs, history and cultures that underlie them and changing public values, and controversies about the future direction for society need to be understood in terms of the impact of lived experience, memory, tradition, different interpretations of history, fiction and folklore and the evolution of ideas and systems of belief.
Effective custodianship of our cultural heritage is essential for the future growth of our creative, cultural and tourism industries, and our future well-being. However, as public interest in our cultural heritage increases, research is needed to address the many challenges this heritage faces. In addition, as people recognise different heritage, and as pressures from economic development, globalisation and environmental change increase, we need to ensure that we take advantage of new opportunities as innovative ways to use and interpret this heritage emerge from the creative industries, and through digital and other technological advances.
Partnerships between universities and other organisations will be crucial in taking full advantage of the insights this research can generate. Engagement with government departments and agencies, including the Cabinet Office and Foresight Programme, local authorities, voluntary, minority and other community groups, the private sector, the museum, archive, library and heritage sectors, and the professions, among others, will promote understanding of significant future intellectual, cultural, legal and ethical issues and their implications for future markets, risks, resilience, service expectations, public controversies, attitudes and behaviours.
Theme development
AHRC identified Care for the Future as one of four priority themes. This theme is still developing, and we are at a very early stage of scoping out both the focus of our activity and the mechanisms by which any activity will be delivered.
Examples of research issues that could be addressed under this theme and contribute to its development include:
- What do diverse communities, families and individuals value; how have these values been shaped by experience and changed and been transmitted over time; and how do these values and aspirations impact upon their future quality of life?
- How are perceptions changing of rights and responsibilities, social and inter-generational justice, civic values, community self-reliance and care, altruism, patronage, co-operation, entrepreneurialism and competition, and what are the implications for the future development of communities?
- How can historical knowledge, through, for example, narratives, literature, and experience, inform us of how communities survived, thrived and changed? What can we learn about past communities that could inform future policy?
- How can we better exploit the potential of the past to be used as a lens for looking to the future; how can narratives, images and representations of the past, present and future better inform current ideological, ethical and moral debates; how do different experiences of lived time, educational approaches, cultural and religious perspectives, beliefs, utopian and dystopian visions frame debates and perspectives about the future; how can the creative potential of the arts and humanities be harnessed to imagine and envision alternative futures and pathways, and inform public debates about these?
- How can we further develop the role of cultural institutions, including museums, libraries, archives, heritage agencies , and the creative and performing arts in leading public engagement with the key future challenges and choices faced by communities and society as a whole?
- How can research in the arts and humanities help shift perception, engagement and action by individuals and communities engaging with issues around climate change?
- How can research methodologies from the arts and humanities frame the critical research questions on the conservation of our cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible?
- How can the research approaches of arts and humanities provide a framework for decisions around cultural heritage, its value to communities and its importance for future well-being?
- How can working across disciplines enhance our understanding of the cultural heritage and its values, thereby engendering greater awareness of its importance to society as well as improved management of the resource?
An Advisory Group has been established to assist with the further development of this theme. A full list of members can be found below.
Care for the Future Advisory Group (pdf 12kb)
Current funding opportunities
Research Networking and Fellowships
The AHRC’s Research Networking and Fellowships schemes currently have highlight notices for Care for the Future. The highlight notice for the fellowships scheme has been extended until October 2011. The highlight notice for the networking shceme has been extended until the end of July 2012. Proposals should have arts and humanities research at their core although collaboration with disciplines or organisations outside the arts and humanities will be welcomed where appropriate.
Proposals under the highlight notices for this theme should involve a range of collaborative activities with an organisation(s) in the public, private or third sectors. For example, proposed activities could provide an arts and humanities research perspective to how that organisation(s) thinks about its future vision and strategy, how it could engage creatively with different publics about future societal challenges or how it could engage with future ethical, moral, cultural and social landscapes. Activities addressing issues around the stewardship of cultural heritage could involve collaboration with a cultural institution.
Finally, proposals involving collaboration with community organisations may be relevant to both this highlight notice and the Connected Communities highlight notice.
Further information is available on the highlight notices page.
Supplementary notes on highlight, May 2011
Learning from the past in addressing environmental challenges
One initial area under this theme in which we wish to encourage applications through the highlight notice is the potential to learn from the past in tackling environmental challenges. For example, two potential inter-related research areas are:
• the role of historical approaches and/or records in enhancing our understanding of environmental change (in its broadest sense including climate change, environmental hazards, agriculture and food security, landscape and natural resources) and changing environmental values, and
• the potential to learn from the past in mitigating or adapting to contemporary and/or future environmental challenges and/or in responding to potential environmental hazards or disasters.
There may be significant opportunities in these areas under the research networking and fellowships scheme highlight notices to develop international collaborations, cross-disciplinary approaches and engagement with partners outside academia and to enhance the AHRC’s contribution to the Living with Environmental Change Programme (LWEC), building AHRC’s current Researching Environmental Change Networks. A recent example of the potential for work in this area was a highly successful cross-disciplinary workshop on ‘South Asian Historical Records and Climate’ on 4 & 5th March 2011 at the Divecha Centre for Climate Change in Bangalore, organised by the AHRC in collaboration with the Higher Education Cell in India and the British Library and also involving the UK Met Office.