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Applications are now open for the 2025 African Critical Inquiry Programme Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Click here to learn more about this opportunity and apply for it.
Opportunity Details
The African Critical Inquiry Programme is pleased to announce the 2025 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards to support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled at South African universities and conducting dissertation research on relevant topics. Grant amounts vary depending on research plans, with a maximum award of ZAR 50,000.
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa. The ACIP is committed to collaboration between scholars and the makers of culture/history, and to fostering inquiry into the politics of knowledge production, the relationships between the colonial/apartheid and the postcolonial/postapartheid, and the importance of critical pluralism as against nationalist discourse. ACIP is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia (USA).
Awards are open to proposals working with a range of methodologies in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including research in archives and collections, fieldwork, interviews, surveys, and quantitative data collection. Applicants are expected to write in clear, intelligible prose for a selection committee that is multi-disciplinary and cross-regional. Proposals should show thorough knowledge of the major concepts, theories, and methods in the applicant's discipline and in other related fields and include a bibliography relevant to the research. Applicants should specify why an extended period of on-site research is essential to successfully complete the proposed doctoral dissertation. Applicants are urged to consult the guidance and advice on how to write a good proposal and prepare a well-crafted budget found in the Resources section below
To apply, eligible applicants should submit the following as a single file attachment with documents in the order listed:
Funding is to be used for on-site dissertation research; research cannot be at the applicant’s home institution unless that institution has necessary site-specific research holdings not otherwise available to the applicant. If your budget includes equipment purchase(s) (e.g., laptop; photo, video, or audio equipment), you must clearly and specifically justify the request in relation to planned work and successful project completion, show that the request is for cost-effective equipment appropriate to your research that you do not otherwise have access to, and explain what you plan to do with the equipment at the end of your project (e.g. donate to an educational organization related to your research). ACIP will not support equipment requests totaling more than 20% of the budget.
Applicants who have completed significant funded dissertation research by the start of their proposed ACIP research may be ineligible to apply to extend research time. Eligibility will be at the discretion of the ACIP Selection Committee, depending on completed research time and funding. Please note that Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards support dissertation research only and may not be used for dissertation write-up, editing or printing; tuition; study at other universities; conference participation; or to reimburse debts or expenses for research already completed. The programme does not accept applications from Ph.D. programmes in Law, Business, Medicine, Nursing, or Journalism, nor does it accept applications from doctoral programmes that do not lead to a Ph.D.
Please submit materials as a single file attachment with documents in the order listed above. Applications should be sent by email with the heading “ACIP 2025 Research Award Application” to [email protected].
ACIP RESOURCES
Apply for Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards