In October 2024, the ISRF launched its eleventh Flexible Grants for Small Groups competition. Having received a number of strong proposals, a selection panel nominated the following 17 projects for award.

Bridging the Green Budgeting Gap: Comparing Green Budgeting Practices in Late Beginners (Spain, Portugal, Italy) and Early Adopters (Sweden)

This project explores the adoption of green budgeting practices across the European Union (EU), focusing on late beginner countries—Spain, Portugal, and Italy—and their comparison to Sweden as an early adopter.

Girlhood in Migration: New Directions in Inter-Disciplinary Research

This project brings together inter-disciplinary scholars from a newly formed Girlhood in Migration Network to develop a comprehensive and coordinated interdisciplinary, international research agenda on girlhood in migration.

Defining Neurodiversity-Affirming Space

Neurodiversity-affirming space (NDAS) is a new concept which has not been researched and has no definition. The proposed research would work with neurodivergent people to co-create a functional working definition of NDAS.

A Digital Ethnography of Everyday Disinformation in Armenia

Disinformation has become a pressing global issue, yet much of the existing research remains tethered to techno-centric perspectives, limited methodologies, and is thinly theorised. This project seeks to address these gaps by employing a digital ethnographic approach to study disinformation as a lived, everyday experience in Armenia.

Chasing the Smugglers: The Rise of Private Financial Institutions as Enforcers of Global Trade Security

This project seeks to host a one-day interdisciplinary workshop on the emerging role of private firms as enforcers of export control regimes.

Digitalisation and the changing power and purpose of banks: Banks’ control of digital infrastructure in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria

This project, which sits at the intersection of politics and economics, examines cross-national differences in the impact of the rise of FinTechs on the political power of banks.

Turning Failure into Success? Revisiting the Political Narrative of the Finnish Basic Income Experiment

This project proposes an in-depth examination of the politics of the Finnish basic income experiment (FBIE), which ran in 2017-2018 and was the starting point of (and a major inspiration for) the new wave of basic income trials around the world.

Rethinking Europe’s electric vehicle (EV) transition from a pericentric perspective

This project advances a pericentric perspective, critically examining Europe’s EV transition from the perspective of CESEE state institutions, policy elites, local firms, workers and their organizations, and environmental social movements.

Brick-by-Brick, Wall-by-Wall: Co-Producing Transnational Feminist Abolitionist Knowledges

Using a participatory methodology driven by anticolonial and abolitionist feminist ethics, this project will launch a Transnational Feminist Abolitionist network.

Aid or Extraction? Examining the Financialisation of UK Development Assistance in Kenya

This project will enhance understanding of the scope, drivers, and consequences of the financialisation of UK official development assistance (ODA), with a particular focus on private equity investments channelled through British International Investment in Kenya.

Fiction as Memory Work: Youth Engagement with Yugoslav Wars Through Literary Fiction

This project investigates the role of literary fiction in shaping collective memories of the 1990s among young readers in Serbia, focusing on youth born after 2000 who lack personal memories of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.

The Battle for Plastics: Corporate Power and the UN Global Plastics Treaty

This project examines how powerful corporate entities respond to a significant threat to business-as-usual: ongoing negotiations for a legally binding global treaty on plastic pollution.

Entangled Easts: articulating migrant grammars and border temporalities across Eastern Europe and East Asia

Entangled Easts proposes to bring together scholars and artist-researchers across the social sciences, arts, and humanities in a research network to map, examine, and interrogate migrant and bordering practices as they are experienced at the intersections of multiple ‘Easts’, focusing on interwoven temporalities, migration routes, and embodied connections and epistemologies.

Unlearning Oil: A Comparative Study of Energy Knowledge Production in Aberdeen and St. John's

This comparative study examines how oil-dependent communities learn to understand and value oil through institutional and cultural processes, focusing on Aberdeen, Scotland and St. John’s, Canada.

Building histories from below: Learning about housing struggles from tenants’ storytelling and archiving

This project builds a new transnational collaborative network between tenant activists and interdisciplinary housing researchers who are building tenant archives in the UK and US.

Managing regulatory tensions in international halal food trade

Bridging contemporary theories of regulatory governance and Islamic studies, this project develops a novel approach to observing the regulatory tensions between the values of 1990s neoliberalism frozen in WTO food trade rules, Islamic requirements for the food system and food sovereignty goals.

Water Justice in Muslim Societies: A Scoping Study of Three River Basins

This project investigates the intersection of water justice, climate change, and socio-cultural dynamics in major river basins spanning predominantly Muslim regions, including the Nile, Indus, and Mesopotamia.

Thank you to everyone who participated in our selection processes, across long-listing, external assessment, and the final selection. We are indebted to the academic community who continue to lend their time and expertise in these challenging times.