Faculty Research Grants

The Institute supports faculty research by providing faculty research grants in ethics. These grants support projects that explore ethical issues from a range of methodological perspectives.

About the Grant

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 Deadlines (2026-2027)

Summer term, June 25, 2026

Fall term, September 14, 2026

Winter term, January 5, 2027

Spring term, March 29, 2027

Application Instructions

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.

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.

Comparative Literature

A book project on the role of the intellectual in authoritarian contexts. For this project, I am interested in moving beyond the dominant binary of "complicit commissars" and "disciplined dissidents" as it fails to account for the complex role of public intellectuals in national contexts with political governance systems that control all aspects of cultural production. It also does not properly address the myriad ethical questions that stem from the overlapping roles of intellectuals as dependent employees and independent authors/artists. In such contexts, an intellectual could simultaneously hold a position in the ministry of culture while also openly criticizing the ministry of interior for its aggressive policing or the ministry of economics for failing to properly provide for the masses. I plan to examine the life and works of a number of writers and artists from various Latin American and Middle Eastern socialist or ex-socialist countries who, from the mid 20th century to the present, have simultaneously held high ranking positions in their respective nations' state-controlled cultural institutions while also developing a reputation as dissidents. Some of the questions I ask are: what does it mean to "critique from within" in national spaces where there is no "outside" alternative to state institutions? What kind of ethical dilemmas arise due to the conflicts of interest embedded in such structures of interdependence? What kind of writing strategies are prioritized when critiquing from within (satire, parody, historical distancing etc)?

Energy Justice Clinic (Geography research)

This research seeks to contribute to the field of energy ethics and justice. It directly advances the mission of the institute since the research project involves Dartmouth student researchers, four of whom have been involved in the project for a year or longer. I will also be integrating this research trip with my course, Energy Justice, offered this spring. In particular, this project will advance applied methods for energy ethics research, particularly involving Indigenous lands and peoples.

Engineering

This project aims to contribute to the knowledge base about how K-12 educators can be empowered to lead bottom-up change in public schools--change that is informed by scholarship both: about the role schools should play in democratic society ("What is ethical education?"); and scholarship relevant to the change initiative.

I propose to create an "Upper Valley Education Design Clinic." Five teams from local public schools will be accepted each year along with a "Problem of Practice" that they propose and I will help scope. Teams will learn design thinking methods, philosophy of education, and evidence-based instruction. The Clinic will guide teams through: Framing the project's core challenge, context, and motivations; Conducting primary and secondary research; Clarifying barriers to–and opportunities for–successful innovation; Exploring the team's core educational beliefs and moral values and how those might be embedded throughout the project's process and outputs; Designing and testing a pilot innovation; and Seeking the perspectives (and collaboration) from a large variety of school stakeholders.

French and Italian

The ABCs of Alberto Manzi, teacher of Italains

"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."

Geography

What are the ethical and material implications of a relational legal geography attuned to political ontology and more than human legal subjects, like the rights of nature?

Within this project, I am leading a co-written article and organizing a dialogue among the six co-authors at the American Association of Geographies Annual Meeting. Should we secure additional funding, we also hope to host a writing workshop and symposium on Legal Geographies from the South.

Government

Ethical meaning of prophecy, from Socrates to Martin Luther King

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.

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.

Measuring social media manipulation from AI on visual-based social media platforms—TikTok and Instagram

This is the first election in history where generative AI may play a significant role in manipulating public opinion. This project focuses on measuring social media manipulation from AI on visual-based social media platforms—TikTok and Instagram. With an anticipated dataset of more than 10 million videos and images and 1 billion engagements, I have three main research questions:

• What is the extent of synthetic visuals during the 2024 elections, their framing, and moral arguments?
• How does voter trust in political institutions shift in response to AI?
• How do these images diffuse across TikTok and Instagram networks? How do they diverge?

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.

The changing landscape of political identification among Salvadoran communities in the United States

Research in progress about the changing landscape of political identification among Salvadoran communities in the United States. Looking specifically at the Salvadoran diaspora in Los Angeles and Washington D.C., the two metropolitan sites with the largest number of Salvadorans, I aim to understand the shifting political loyalties and ideologies among these groups. Specifically, this research will attend to how El Salvador's current President, Nayib Bukele (2019-), has impacted this and prompted a reshaping of diaspora politics into a newly reconfigured relationship to Salvadorans abroad to those back in the home country.

Philosophy

Black feminist politics and ethics of care and caring

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.

Stare Decisis

Many discussions about "stare decisis" – especially by judges, even if less so by legal theorists – (either implicitly or explicitly) hold that there is something special about the law that makes practices of deference to precedent especially apt. I want to explore whether this is so, by engaging with theories in general jurisprudence, about the nature of law.

The basic line of argument that I'm developing is this: there are some potential sources of support here for stare decisis which draw on plausible facts about the nature of law. But most of the heavy lifting isn't going to come from such facts. Rather, it's going to need to come from substantive ethical and political facts, of the kind we'd appeal to in debating practices of deference to precedence in non-legal contexts. I aim to explain why that is so, and to explore the significance of this for how we think about the ethics and politics of legal practice.

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.

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.

Spanish and Portuguese

Posthumous: Slavery and the Afterdeath in Nineteenth-century Cuba and Brazil

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.

Spanish and Portuguese

The Impossibility of Articulating Identity: Antagonism Between Citizenship and Diversity and the Experience of Becoming Invisible

I was invited to give a talk in the "VI International Conference on Interculturalities and Education in Latin America: Dialogues, Tensions, and Alternatives" (8/14/24)
https://redfeial.org/convocatoria-al-vi-congreso-internacional-de-la-redfeial/
These international series of conferences aim to explore the complex intersections between intercultural dynamics and educational practices in Latin America. Providing a platform for scholars, educators, and activists to engage in dialogue, share insights, and explore alternative approaches to addressing intercultural sensitivity and its multiple challenges within diverse cultural contexts. This event presents a unique opportunity to take part in meaningful dialogues about interculturality and intercultural sensitivity from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Research in energy ethics and justice

Sarah Kelly presents at a conference in Oslo

As a geographer, my research seeks to advance the field of energy ethics and justice by conducting community-based participatory research with Mapuche-Williche Indigenous people involved in a long-term (15 year) conflict involving hydroelectric development. It also involves collaborators from a solidarity network of collaborators committed to improving the standards of renewable energy development in Chile, the U.S. and Norway. I ask two related research questions: How can Indigenous ways of knowing and decision-making be better integrated into renewable energy development? What are the limitations of the legal mechanism Free, Prior and Informed Consent in this pursuit?

Faculty Research Grants

About the Grant

Application Instructions

Recent Research Funding by Area of Study