Faculty Research Grants

These grants are open to all faculty doing research and teaching that seeks to advance the mission of the Institute.  These grants can be used in a variety of ways: to conduct qualitative or quantitative research, enhance an already existing course or create a new course; undertake professional development in an ethics-related area; present a paper at a conference or symposium; collaborate with co-authors; or work with students.

Projects may take place either off-campus or in Hanover. Faculty applying for these grants must include a chart string where the funds will be deposited.  Faculty may submit grant applications for up to $5,000 to support their research.  The Institute reviews these grant requests on a rolling basis and the award (which may be less than the amount requested) depends on how the project advances the mission of the Institute as well as the availability of funds.  

Application consists of the following:

• A detailed description of the proposed research project and how this project will advance the mission of the Institute (Ethics Institute Mission). 
• In order to ensure a timely review of your application, faculty should apply for these grants at least two months prior to when the funds will be used. 
• A budget that explains how the funds will be used. Items covered could include travel, books, surveys, student assistance, fees for translators.  Items generally not covered include the purchase of equipment (e.g., computers, cameras, iPods).

Submit an application.

French and Italian

"The ABCs of Alberto Manzi, teacher of Italains" delves into his educational and humanistic principles using the framework of an alphabet. The book presents an ABC of ideas, values, and inspirations, enabling us to uncover the man and the teacher who taught over a million Italians how to read and write, in Manzi's words, "better know ourselves and the world around us."

Government

Book project, ethical meaning of prophecy, from Socrates to Martin Luther King; the second book deals with the supreme goal of ancient ethics, to become as much like god as is humanly possible; the third book deals with the ethics of political rhetoric.

Anthropology

"Healing Justice, Rematriation, and Landback: Reconfiguring Relations with Plants, Place and Politics in U.S. Empire." Preliminary research for this project has been ongoing, building on my extant work with herbalists and activists in the United States, as well as with engaged scholars and community organizers in the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico and Hoopa, Shoshone, and Paiute Reservations on the continent.

Government and QSS

What, if anything, do we owe civilian victims of American drone strikes? How does the public's support for drone strikes shift once innocent civilians are harmed? And can providing post-harm aid to victims inadvertently create a moral hazard dilemma, where individuals support the relaxing of ethical restraints on drone strikes because they know mistakes will be compensated? To date, the small-but-growing literature on drone strikes has neglected post-harm mitigation efforts. We have no sense, for example, about how Americans view their ethical obligations to aid victims, the types of aid they might favor and deem appropriate for the harm inflicted, and whether providing aid affects support for drone strikes. Similarly, we have almost no data on whether exposure to drone strike footage affects emotional responses to civilian casualties and whether such actions influence willingness to engage in collective action (i.e., protests, voting) against drone strikes. Finally, nearly every study has been conducted among Western, principally American, audiences. Few studies consider how victims feel about the perpetrator's ethical obligations to them, including how to make restitution after harm has been inflicted.

Philosophy

The research project I am seeking funding for is to complete two chapers for one of my current manuscripts, which is on Black feminist politics and ethics of care and caring. It is currently at the penultimate stage of research and proposal outlining and has already gained interest from Duke University Press, University of Minnesota Press, Palgrave, and Lexington Books. The text begins with a discussion about the centrality of care within Black feminist theory from as early as Maria Stewart to our contemporary period. Despite the throughline of care within Black feminist thought, there have been few studies on this topic, especially from the perspective of Black women. The argument I plan to explore in this second manuscript is that in 20th and 21st century Black feminism there are five theorists whose work is essential to discussing conceptualizations of care in the Black community—Audre Lorde (mothering and self-revelation), bell hooks (self-recovery), Toni Morrison (witnessing), Joy James (captive maternal), and Christina Sharpe (wake work). I explore the concepts developed by these scholars and assert that they are not only practices of care in the Black community, but they also suggest a need to consider the boundaries and limits to what moral obligations, if any, we hold to others in the Black community.

Religion

"Epistemologies of Evidence in Myanmar: Fields and Figures." This project brings together ten interdisciplinary scholars of Myanmar (listed below) investigating the ethics of turning data into discourse in historical and contemporary Myanmar. Working at the intersection of religious studies, anthropology, and legal and literary histories, the group investigates the dissemination and circulation of contested ethical models and claims to authority via platforms such as state propaganda, the popular press under varying conditions of censorship, and social media like Facebook. How, by whom, and to what ends are claims about practices, discourses, or objects–irrespective of their contents or makeup, and regardless of their actual status as true or false–treated as valid? We aim to answer these questions through collaborative scholarship, including a journal special issue that builds on conference panels in Europe and the US and developing plans to pursue further external funding.

Spanish and Portuguese

Archival research in Pinar del Río and Havana, Cuba, for one-and-a-half months for my book project, "Posthumous: Slavery and the Afterdeath in Nineteenth-century Cuba and Brazil." This archival research is crucial for the preparation of my book proposal and my book third and fourth chapters. Posthumous, this literary and cultural study asks questions on the relationship between slavery and social death and the commodification of life, focusing on posthumous representations of the remains of enslaved people—the body's afterdeath—as a precarious and fragile form of existence at the limits of life and of capital. References to the horrors of slavery are explicit and detailed in nineteenth-century abolitionist Caribbean novels, with the corpses of the enslaved exposed for all to see. Most of the time these bodies do not intervene in or alter the plot's development; instead, they remain exposed, arrest the moment, and demand attention. Posthumous asks: What happens when we attend to this demand for attention? What can we unearth in these scenes that lay bare observations of deceased bodies in transatlantic slavery? Posthumous analyzes scenes from literature, anthropological descriptions and photographs where black bodies remain to examine acts of viewing, talking and describing corpses in a book which shows how the response to the presence of these bodies is noticeable. The goal of the book is to build a genesis of black remains.

Latin American Studies

Aging Along The Hudson, delves into the challenges faced by a community of older Latinxs (65+) as they navigate the complexities of aging within the context of precarity, emphasizing the ethical dimensions inherent in their struggles. Specifically, the focus is on Latin American and Hispanic-Caribbean immigrants who migrated to the United States and New York City during the 1960s–1980s, primarily for factory employment and domestic care.

Sociology

New book manuscript about the offshore financial system: a global network of financial-legal innovations that enable the world's wealthiest and most powerful entities (including both corporations and individuals) to elude the rule of law and most social norms. This system is not widely or well understood, outside the ranks of a few academic specialists like me, and the few thousand professionals who created and manage the system for the benefit of their corporate and individual clients.

Does Conjoint Analysis Mitigate Social Desirability Bias?

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Yusaku Horiuchi, Professor of Government and Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies, Dartmouth College

Yusaku Horiuchi, Zach Markovich, and Teppei Yamamoto. 2021. "Does Conjoint Analysis Mitigate Social Desirability Bias?" Political Analysis, First View. https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2021.30. Published Online: September 15, 2021

How can we elicit honest responses in surveys? Conjoint analysis has become a popular tool to address social desirability bias (SDB), or systematic survey misreporting on sensitive topics. However, there has been no direct evidence showing its suitability for this purpose. We propose a novel experimental design to identify conjoint analysis's ability to mitigate SDB. Specifically, we compare a standard, fully randomized conjoint design against a partially randomized design where only the sensitive attribute is varied between the two profiles in each task. We also include a control condition to remove confounding due to the increased attention to the varying attribute under the partially randomized design. We implement this empirical strategy in two studies on attitudes about environmental conservation and preferences about congressional candidates. In both studies, our estimates indicate that the fully randomized conjoint design could reduce SDB for the average marginal component effect (AMCE) of the sensitive attribute by about two-thirds of the AMCE itself. Although encouraging, we caution that our results are exploratory and exhibit some sensitivity to alternative model specifications, suggesting the need for additional confirmatory evidence based on the proposed design.

*Zach Markovich is a Class of 2015 (QSS and GOVT double major).

How to disseminate findings on the long-term effects of past trauma: A collaborative ethics project 

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Glorieuse Uwizeye, Ph.D. (PI) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dartmouth Society of Fellows and based in the Department of Anthropology.

Interdisciplinary workshop with a group of scholars working at the intersection of ethics, anthropology, and public health. Using our own research on adult children of genocide survivors in Rwanda as a case study, we will develop an ethical protocol to disseminate research findings to study participants.  Travel to Rwanda for three purposes: (i) to share findings with study participants using our newly developed protocol; (ii) to invite study participants to provide feedback to improve the protocol; and, (iii) to initiate community participatory research co-designed and implemented with our target population. Our intent is to publish a manuscript that draws attention to the ethical challenges of communicating epigenetic health results and to develop guidelines for best professional practices.

Following the dissemination of the findings to the study population, we plan to take these ethical efforts further by initiating a community-based participatory research project to understand the longer term impacts of prenatal genocide exposure on individual health and development. This approach is empowering to the study population in the sense that it gives them a genuine voice in research being done with them and for them (7). The approach also has the potential to address research questions that matter most to study participants and lead to interventions with higher potential for success given this equitable form of involvement of all parties. During the dissemination meeting we will identify members of our study population that we can collaborate with on this project and collect initial research project ideas. Though this is not a novel approach, this will be the first time that this approach will have been used among this underserved population, in particular individuals born of genocidal rape. The results of this community-based participatory research meeting will form the basis of our future collaborative research with this population.