As social media compresses information into ever smaller soundbites, books are arguably more important than ever. The latest round of Independent Social Research Foundation funding recognises their unique ability to convey radical ideas in a considered, evidence-based way.
Through a new round of First Book Fellowships, the ISRF is funding seven innovative projects that tackle some of today’s most pressing global problems.
Through interviews, archival research and fieldwork across the globe, the researchers will help bring new understanding to complex cultural and political issues.
Their resulting books will reveal the historical context behind seemingly entrenched social problems and offer compelling and innovative new solutions.
The international scope of the ISRF's work is reflected in projects which look at Palestinian refugee camps, post-Soviet geopolitics, the Bosnian war, the German immigration regime, policing in Brazil, EU trade policy, and French theory in Britain.
Professor Christopher Newfield, ISRF Director of Research, said he was “thrilled” with the new cohort of researchers, adding that the selection panel had been in “unanimous agreement about the strength of the projects”.
After receiving a selection of highly competitive proposals last month, the ISRF awarded the following researchers:
Beyond the Borders of Berlin: West African perspectives on German immigration enforcement
For Aino Korvensyrjä, understanding the brutality and racism of border regimes must be driven by the accounts of migrants who are directly affected – and who resist their violence.
Korvensyrjä’s research draws on long-term fieldwork with West African migrants in Germany, exploring their experiences of navigating migration, as well as the state’s response.
These voices reveal the colonial roots of asylum and deportation, as well as the distinct role these systems play in contemporary capitalism.
Lived Geopolitics: Rescaling market infrastructures in Odesa and Bishkek from Soviet collapse to backlash imperialism
This is the tale of two markets – 2,000 miles apart – that reveal important lessons about the collapse of Soviet power.
Social anthropologist Claudia Eggart looks at what these retail hubs, built from repurposed shipping containers, tell us about the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, as well as broader geopolitical rivalries.
For Eggart, the 7 km Market in Odesa and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek capture something essential about the interplay between "macro-scale power politics and the micro-scale of everyday life”.
“The Sufi is the Child of the Present Moment”: Islam, the self and the ethical imagination in postwar Sarajevo
How have Muslims practised their faith in the aftermath of the Bosnian war of the 1990s – a conflict marked by genocide and ethnic cleansing?
Zora Kostadinova explores how these devastating events have shaped personal religious choices and their impact on “ethical life in a postwar context”.
Through ethnographic fieldwork in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, she reveals the revitalisation of Sufi Islam and how it has emerged as a practice of "ethical self-cultivation” in response to the cultural and personal trauma of war.
Can Refugees Save the World? Lessons in community-based development from Palestinian refugee camps
Drawing on her own experience, Palestinian academic Yafa El Masri investigates whether refugee camps can offer an alternative to capitalism based on care, solidarity and collective action.
El Masri was born and raised in Bourj Albarajenah camp, Beirut, Lebanon, and is now a lecturer in geography and global development. She explores the grassroots cooperation that allows humans to survive, often in the absence of aid.
This project redefines refugee camps not as sites of suffering but as places of care, solidarity and community development. And in doing so, she asks whether refugees might have answers to the crises facing our planet.
The New Christian Militarism: Evangelical activism with the police in Brazil
In Brazil, the bible and the baton have an ever-closer relationship as faith plays a growing role in the country's policing.
Rodrigo Campos exposes the role of religious activism within the military police and its relationship to far-right politics, raising questions about the implications that this "process of radicalisation” might have for democracy.
For Campos, this blurring of the lines between public security and political ideology is part of a new Christian Militarism which is linked to dramatic political, economic and social shifts in the South American state.
From music magazines to art galleries, French theorists electrified cultural life in the United Kingdom during the closing decades of the 20th century. Colm McAuliffe traces the unexpected rise of continental philosophy during the post-war period.
He highlights the important role played by the New Left Review, the British Film Institute, Screen journal, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the popular music press in bringing radical ideas to a bigger audience.
By digging through the archives, McAuliffe traces the growing impact of French thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva on Britain between the 1960s and 1980s.
Brussels’s burden: (Un)making the global souths in the European Union’s preferential trade policy
While colonialism has supposedly come to an end, Europe continues to express economic dominance over many of the world’s poorest states through the power of trade.
Building on fieldwork in Brussels, Antonio Alcazar III challenges prevailing assumptions that frame EU trade policy as a “well-intentioned act of partnership” with nations in the global south.
Through archival research, document analysis and interviews with “policy elites”, he exposes the colonial underpinnings of a system that frames these states as needing perpetual guidance, intervention and approval.
First Book Grants
As part of its mission to advance the social sciences through the promotion of new modes of inquiry, the ISRF regularly awards funding through a series of Grant Competitions.
The ISRF’s First Book Fellowships scheme was successfully piloted in 2022 and returned for a second round, with researchers receiving grants of up to €41,500 or £35,000.
Applications for the First Book Grant competition are currently closed. Make sure to subscribe to the ISRF newsletter for details of all upcoming grants and competitions.
