Current Funding Opportunities
- Research Networking
- Fellowships
- Research Grants – Environmental Change and Sustainability
- Theme Leadership Fellowships
Please see below for details.
Theme overview
‘Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past’ affords an opportunity for researchers in the arts and humanities to generate new novel understandings of the relationship between the past and the future, and the challenges and opportunities of the present through a temporally inflected lens. Importantly, it offers academic researchers in these fields the opportunity to facilitate and activate collaborations with partners including those outside HEIs in the cultural and creative sectors both in the UK and internationally.
There are a number of core elements that are relevant to Care for the Future, such as an exploration of the values and beliefs of individuals, communities and institutions. These include questions around what is meaningful about continuity and change, and the role that narratives, experiences, visualisations, performances and stories have to play in these processes. Issues around understanding modes of cultural learning and intergenerational equity, as well as questions relating to authority, ownership and justice within and across time, may help inform understanding of current and future global challenges faced by society today. Technological development, alternative lifestyle movements, and the nature of ideological and philosophical, ethical and creative, historicised and imagined perspectives jostle for attention and require a diversity of approaches and disciplinary engagements for the theme to reach its full potential.
Care for the Future’s relationship with other strategic programmes/themes
Research funded under the Care for the Future theme will explore new areas and will build upon existing research, including that funded under previous AHRC funded initiatives such as the Landscape and Environment, Science and Heritage, and the Museums and Galleries Research programmes. Care for the Future will also engage with current strategic and cross-Council initiatives including Connected Communities and Living with Environmental Change.
However, Care for the Future also offers an opportunity to think beyond the parameters of these existing programmes. While individual projects may seek to build on earlier work, Care for the Future will further such engagements in distinctive ways, and engage in complementing the AHRC’s other emerging themes: ‘Digital Transformations’, ‘Science in Culture’ and ‘Translating Cultures’.
Full details on the Care for the Future Theme can be found in the specification document below.
Care for the Future Specification (pdf 123kb)
Theme Delivery
Potential sites of engagement
Informed by consultation with the Care for the Future Advisory Group and conversations with the wider research community, the following elements have been identified as in particular need of address through the initial stages of the Care for the Future theme:
• changing families and communities
• cultures and heritage; adapting for the future
• environmental change and sustainability
• global trauma/conflict and transitions to new futures
• cultural notions of the future
We are not providing a prescriptive description of these themes. The example locations for questions relating to these broad issues are provided in the Care for the Future Document and are designed to problematise the topics and stimulate researchers to come forward with their own perspectives and priorities for investigation. Work that places these core elements into international and comparative cultural contexts is particularly welcomed, alongside projects working in partnership with non-HEIs in the co-production of new knowledge and ideas.
Proposals highlighting the Care for the Future theme must demonstrate a clear arts and humanities research approach. Disciplines across the whole range of the AHRC’s subject remit are encouraged under the theme. We recognise that each subject area can bring its own distinctive intellectual expertise to the theme, and that collaboration across disciplines (inside and outside the arts and humanities) can add strength and diversity to the capability and capacity of the research generated.
The Advisory Group was 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
Call for Theme Leadership Fellowships
The AHRC invites applications from leading researchers in the arts and humanities to take forward the next phase of the Care for the Future theme.
The Fellowships are prestigious and high profile appointments. Fellows will provide intellectual leadership and play an important role in the shaping and development of research activities within and across themes. The AHRC is looking for effective communicators who are passionate and articulate about their research and committed to leadership development within the arts and humanities. Combining personal research activities and a proactive position as advocate for an individual theme within the research community, Fellows will have the opportunity to develop partnerships, public engagement work, collaborations within and outside the academy as well as providing direct and high-level advice on theme development to the AHRC's Director of Research and senior staff across the Programmes Directorate teams. This is an opportunity to stimulate and support your own world-leading research development alongside the interests of a range of researchers and disciplinary perspectives funded under the themes. The funding package available is flexible including support for research assistance and administration relating to work on the theme. Fellows will dedicate between 40% and 80% of their time for up to 3 years, with at least 40% of that time spent on theme leadership activities. We plan to make one Fellowship award under each theme.
Further information and details of how to apply can be found here.
The closing date for applications is 4pm, Friday 23rd March 2012.
Call for Research Networking proposals
The AHRC’s Research Networking Scheme currently has a highlight notice for Care for the Future. The highlight notice for the networking scheme has been extended until the end of July 2012.
There may be significant opportunities under the research networking scheme highlight notice 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).
Call for Research Fellowship proposals
There is also a highlight notice for Care for the Future under AHRC’s revised Fellowships scheme (including the early career route) which will end in December 2012. Fellowships funded under this highlight notice will be expected to play an important leadership role in developing specific areas or cross-cutting themes under care for the Future.
Call for Research Grant - Environmental Change and Sustainability: Thinking forward through the past proposals
There is also a highlight notice for Care for the Future under the Research Grants Scheme. Applications for up to £1.5m (full economic cost) are invited under this highlight notice in AHRC’s standard and early career research grants routes. The highlight notice addresses the ‘Environmental Change and Sustainability’ area within the Care for the Future theme, full details can be found in the call document below. The highlight notice is open until 30 October 2012.
Environmental Change and Sustainability Call Document (pdf 45kb)
Further information is available on the highlight notices page.
Research opportunity: UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK NEA) follow-on phase
The UK NEA is inviting suitably experienced individuals from a variety of disciplines (including economics, environmental science, geography, political science, arts, humanities and social science) and organisations to register an expression of interest for involvement in the research component of the UK NEA follow-on phase.
Further information is available on the UK NEA website.
Future Plans
We are currently considering a possible call for small research development projects addressing some of the above areas later in 2012.
Researchers interested in the community dimension of the Theme may also be interested in planned activities under the Connected Communities Programme.