CSI Seed Funding Call
The Crisis Studies Initiative (CSI) invites proposals for seed funding to support innovative research that advances the study of crisis across disciplinary boundaries. We welcome projects that investigate the causes, meanings, governance, consequences, or anticipation of crises, as well as projects that develop new concepts, methods, or comparative and historical perspectives for understanding crisis phenomena.
Representative questions include:
- What counts as a crisis, and what forms of crisis remain marginalized, contested, or invisible?
- How do anticipation, expertise, and knowledge about crisis shape social life before crises occur?
- How do urgency, uncertainty, and perceived threat influence decision-making and intervention during crises?
- What are the possibilities and limits of crisis management and policy response?
- How do crises and their management transform institutions, communities, and everyday life?
- How do crises end, and what social, political, or cultural legacies do they leave behind?
CSI is particularly interested in projects that attend to social inequalities rooted in race, gender, class, global position, and other forms of stratification; explore the cultural and political processes through which crises are interpreted and experienced; examine the forms of expertise and governance that shape preparedness and response; or analyze the historical dynamics through which crises emerge and transform societies.
We encourage proposals from scholars across the University of Virginia and welcome interdisciplinary collaborations. Through this program, CSI seeks not only to support individual research projects but also to strengthen a community of scholars working to advance Crisis Studies as an emerging field of inquiry.
Funding: CSI will provide seed grants of up to $3,000 for faculty and $1,000 for graduate students to support research related to Crisis Studies.
Deadline: Proposals are due October 30, 2026.
Proposal Format: Proposals should be no more than two pages and should include a brief description of the project and its research questions, research design and methods, anticipated timeline, and a representative bibliography.
Workshop Participation: Grant recipients will be invited to discuss their research ideas at a CSI workshop in early Spring, providing an opportunity to share work in progress, receive interdisciplinary feedback, and engage with the broader Crisis Studies community at UVA.