Deadline: 4 December 2019

The British Academy is seeking applications for its “Youth Futures Programme” with an aim to examine the contributions of young people to the UN’s 2030 Agenda, bringing a youth lens to the global sustainable development challenges.

Themes

This programme supports research which demonstrates an interdisciplinary approach yielding new conceptual understanding, developing ground-breaking research and energising innovative collaborations in the humanities and social sciences related to one or more of the three sub-themes below:

• Creativity: Understanding youth creativity and flexibility to identify imaginative solutions in developing countries that are effective and foster a sense of ownership by young people. The scope can be wide, but could include attention to how to amplify the voice of young people locally, nationally and globally; how to foster inter generational and institutional trust; how to develop new approaches to the green and low waste economy at a local level; the pathways that young people take and how policies affect them including the gap between policy, communities of interest, collective action and practice; how young people experience, and have experienced, change; or how to identify imaginative solutions to mitigate climate change.
• Categories: The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development states that people who are vulnerable, such as young people, must be empowered. Youth populations experience a combination of lack of economic opportunities (especially when combined with educational attainment, and concomitant expectations), lack of political voice and a sense of relative deprivation. The Academy would like to support projects that bring young people into the process of determining and setting the categorisations and concepts by which they view themselves and others, and how these foster their motivations, actions and aspirations. For example, this could include reconceptualising terms such as informality, inequality, mobility, resilience, identity, class, vulnerability and precarity from a youth perspective.
• Livelihood & Work: The meanings and manifestations of livelihood and work for and by young people in different settings on the ground are critical for their understanding of young people’s ambitions and expectations. The Academy is keen to encourage applications that focus on the practices and narratives of youth livelihoods and work (including unpaid domestic work) and provide a voice for young people to express their own perspectives. The changing attitudes of young people towards livelihood and work, particularly in their changing environment, are vital for illustrating how young people are and will live their lives and how society as a whole can be developed to support and integrate effectively the next generation.

Funding and Duration

• Projects must be 21 months in duration, with a maximum value of £300,000 (offered at 100% FEC).
• All projects must start on 20 March 2020.

Eligibility Criteria

• Principal Investigators must be based in the UK, however, equitable international collaboration is strongly expected to be detailed in any application. They particularly encourage collaboration with institutions and partners in the Global South, and expect to see applications demonstrate fully how researchers from the Global South will be involved as equal partners in the research proposed.
• The Principal Investigator and any Co-Applicants must be of postdoctoral or above status (or have equivalent research experience) and hold an established role that will last at least the duration of the grant funded by the British Academy.

How to Apply

Applications must be submitted online using the British Academy’s Grant Management System (GMS), Flexi-Grant®.

For more information, please visit https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/programmes/youth-futures