• Evictions, Displacement and Homelessness in the Global City
• Wealth, Inequality, and Philanthropy
• Welfare and Social Protection in the 21^st Century
• Financialization, Debt, and Financial Disobedience
• Policing and Incarceration

Eligibility: All UCLA faculty are eligible to apply either on an individual basis or as a research team. In the case of the latter, the application must indicate a lead researcher.

Criteria: We seek to support projects in the social sciences, humanities, arts, and design related to the listed research themes. Given the scope and purpose of the Institute, we are especially interested in projects that meet one or more of the following criteria:

1. Research developed in partnership with social movements and community-based organizing. We welcome all quantitative and qualitative research and evidence-based methodologies but ask that the research framework explicitly address how university-movement collaborations might be built and sustained. More ambitiously, we are interested in how such collaborations can generate new formats of research, be it the research questions that are posed, or the data that is collected, or how research is distributed and disseminated.
2. The Institute’s mandate is to organize knowledge to challenge inequality. We welcome research that advances critical thinking and that can make a decisive conceptual contribution to the topic at hand. We are especially interested in research that can demonstrate how “organizing knowledge” can challenge established academic wisdom, contribute to public debate, or have impact on a policy decision. We welcome projects that express a strong point of view and that dare to think beyond conventional norms.
3. The Institute’s work has a global scope. Whether the research is located in a single neighborhood or concerned with translocal networks, we hope to highlight the global forces that might be at work in the processes and struggles at hand. We thus encourage research that has such a critical imagination, be it located in global Los Angeles or elsewhere.
4. We ask that the research have a public orientation, i.e. an intent of speaking to public issues and/or addressing audiences that lie beyond the university. With this in mind, we welcome various genres of scholarship, including artistic performance, opinion pieces, creative writing, policy-oriented briefs, and social science peer-reviewed publication.

In this funding cycle, we encourage faculty with current grants from the Institute to apply for an additional year of funding. For such applications, we ask that proposals also address the following:

Clearly demonstrate the research findings and conceptual contributions generated by the first round of funding and indicate how the second year of funding will be used to disseminate these findings.  This should include a detailed discussion of which audiences will be the focus of dissemination and the expected impacts of such dissemination.

Format of Application: Each application must include the following:

1. 1. 1. Title of project.
      2. A short proposal (not exceeding 3,000 words) explaining the significance of the proposed research, its methodology, its contributions, and expected impacts The proposal must fall within one of the listed research themes and explicitly address the criteria outlined above. It must also briefly speak to how this seed grant will allow the broader research project to flourish.
      3. A short CV (no more than five pages) for the lead researcher and each member of the research team, if applicable.
      4. A letter of support from the relevant community/ social movement partner.
      5. A one-year plan of work and budget justification (not to exceed $10,000).
      6. For applicants asking for a second year of funding, please share a detailed dissemination plan.

 Application deadline: Tuesday, April 18, 2017, 5 p.m.; funding decisions will be announced by May 19, 2017; funds will be available for use starting July 1, 2017 and must be expended by June 30, 2018.

How to submit applications: Applications must be submitted as a single PDF portfolio to the following email address: challengeineq@luskin.ucla.edu

Awards: Successful proposals may be funded in full or in part at the discretion of the review committee. The review committee will be made up of UCLA faculty and members of the Institute’s community and social movement partners. Funding will be for one year with the possibility of renewal through a new proposal competition next year.

Faculty awards will be dispersed after notification of award. We also require a short project update/summary by April 1, 2018. Projects that are awarded grants must acknowledge the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in all programs, public information materials, and publications resulting from the grant.

You can learn about the Institute, its mission, scope and purpose here on our website.