ISID Leadership Council Graduate Field Research Awards

As a result of generous funding from the ISID’s new Leadership Council, ISID is able to award 2 Leadership Council Graduate Student Field Research Grants. Each award is valued at $4,000 and is to be used to help finance field research required for the successful completion of the applicant’s thesis or dissertation.

Eligibility

Research proposals must have received departmental approval; Research projects must be related to one of ISID’s three research clusters (see below); The graduate student’s supervisor must be a Member of ISID.

Applications should include the following:

Approved research proposal;

A brief (1 page max.) abstract of the research and its relation to an ISID research cluster;

Transcripts (email acceptable);

One letter of recommendation (Email preferred);

A recent CV.

Application Deadline: May 15, 2011. All application materials should be sent by email to: kirsty.mckinnon [at] mcgill.ca.

ISID’s  Research Clusters:

1) Economic Development and Living Standards: The welfare of people living in developing countries is conditioned fundamentally by factors related to economic growth and structural change.  At the same time, the globalized economy has created new opportunities and challenges for sustained growth. Research in this cluster revolves around the factors contributing to the improvement of standards of living and sustained economic growth, the trade-offs associated with different ways of achieving growth and poverty reduction, and the distributional issues that development inevitably raises. More generally, research in this cluster is concerned with understanding how the process of economic development unfolds under different conditions and circumstances and the implications for human well-being;

2) States and State Institutions: Many states enforce the rule of law, guide the economy, provide diverse public goods, and therefore promote broad-based development. Yet some states are unable to effectively promote development, others are used by political officials to terrorize and prey on society, and still others have failed and collapsed. Such variation across the developing world calls for deeper analysis of the ways in which states affect developmental processes, the origins of different state structures, and the possibility of building more developmental states;

And 3) Civil Society: Identity, Diversity, and the Mediation of Difference: Within nation-states and local communities, individuals and groups continuously struggle to negotiate their relationships with the state and with each other in ways that may challenge conventional or legal definitions of citizenship. In regions where certain social actors must deal with entrenched social inequities that are the legacy of colonialism, they seek rights and access to resources that continue to be denied to them. Across the globe, people draw on identities that currently may involve revised configurations of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and politics, to demand social justice from oppositional entities, which may include nation-states, legal and political institutions, or even other members of civil society.