2015-16 Call for Working Group Proposals

The  Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility calls for working group proposals for the 2015-2016 academic year. Groups can request up to $6000 as seed funding for their project, or for a continuation of a working group funded last year. If applying to continue one’s project, please explain what work you did this year, and what an additional year of funding would enable.

DEADLINE: May 10, 2015. Please submit queries and your proposal to migration@newschool.edu. Feel free to visit the existing working groups page.

We envision these working groups as collaborations amongst faculty and students, which may include speakers, visitors and/or participants from outside the New School. The proposal should be no more than 800 words. Please include: rationale; goals; director or co-directors (this can any combination of students and/or faculty) possible participants; a budget, and most importantly, what you expect as final outcomes or products (research piece; report; literature review; working papers; graduate student papers; multimedia piece; pedagogical initiative; etc).

While we welcome proposals in any form, here are a few possible formats:

1) Research Clusters

2) Intellectual Development

3) Creative Collaborations

4) Film or other Multi-media Series

Research Clusters involve collaborative work with the goal of producing new research on a common theme bringing together faculty from different divisions. For instance, the Memory and Migration, Ethnography of Movement and Mobility, and the Multiple Mobilities groups are examples of such groups. Members of the group carry out fieldwork together on related themes, they organize public events or workshops to discuss their research and develop it into a publication (including individual publications or a collection as a special issue for a journal or an edited book).

Intellectual Development involve a set of participants (including faculty and students) engaged in reading texts and having a sustained, interdisciplinary conversation on a set of themes related to the Zolberg Center’s mission. This could also involve inviting the author of a text to come speak to the group, or to present a work-in-progress that the group then discusses. The group could itself be a works-in-progress group, and produce literature reviews, or working papers. Current examples are the Borders Research Network and the Sovereignty and its Subjects groups.

Creative Collaborations are the most open format, offering the opportunity to bring together faculty, students, artists, designers and/or activists to explore some common project, method, approach or theme: i.e. intersection of design and politics on the topic of mobility; the issue of incarceration/detention centers; interrelated movements of people and things; etc. The Humanities Action Lab Global Dialogues is one of the current examples.

Film/Multi-Media Series would involve curating a film or multi-media series about migration, mobility and immobility, borders, refugees, sovereignty, belonging, etc. This could involve experimental work, works-in-progress, or could be a combination of established and new work. A current example is the Feet in Two Worlds Dream City project.