The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has issued an invitation for applications for its care for the Research Grants future highlight notice ‘environmental change and sustainability − thinking forward through the past research grants.’

Theme overview

‘Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past’ affords an opportunity for researchers in the arts and humanities to generate new novel understandings of the relationship between the past and the future, and the challenges and opportunities of the present through a temporally inflected lens. Importantly, it offers academic researchers in these fields the opportunity to facilitate and activate collaborations with partners including those outside HEIs in the cultural and creative sectors both in theUKand internationally.

There are a number of core elements that are relevant to Care for the Future, such as an exploration of the values and beliefs of individuals, communities and institutions. These include questions around what is meaningful about continuity and change, and the role that narratives, experiences, visualisations, performances and stories have to play in these processes. Issues around understanding modes of cultural learning and intergenerational equity, as well as questions relating to authority, ownership and justice within and across time, may help inform understanding of current and future global challenges faced by society today. Technological development, alternative lifestyle movements, and the nature of ideological and philosophical, ethical and creative, historicised and imagined perspectives jostle for attention and require a diversity of approaches and disciplinary engagements for the theme to reach its full potential.

Applications for up to £1.5m (full economic cost) are invited under this highlight notice in AHRC’s standard and early career research grants routes. The highlight notice addresses the ‘Environmental Change and Sustainability’ area within the Care for the Future theme, full details can be found in the call document below. The highlight notice is open until 30 October 2012.

 Environmental Change and Sustainability Call Document (pdf 45kb)