Limited Submission: Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Call for Concepts

ORSP invites proposals to a limited submission opportunity. Three proposals will be selected to move forward to submission to the sponsor. Please send required materials to Susan Pelton, spelton@sfsu.edu, and Thien Lam, ttlam@sfsu.edu by the deadline specified.

Sponsor: Mellon Foundation

Title of Funding Opportunity: Higher Learning Call for Concepts

Required Materials for ORSP Submission

Any pages over the limit will not be reviewed

1. One-page (inclusive of any references) project summary stating project’s goals and activities, its potential impact, and fitness of the institution and/or network for proposed work
2. One-page CV for each applicant

Deadlines

Part 1

1. Email Thien Lam at ttlam@sfsu.edu to confirm interest and to receive registration information: November 25
2. Register at Mellon site: December 1, 12pm PT

Part 2: Only for those who registered

1. Submit materials to ORSP and committee for review: December 12, 5pm PT
2. ORSP and committee to choose three applications to move forward: December 22
3. Application deadline: February 17

Funding and Duration

$250,000–$500,000 for up to four years

Eligibility

The applicant must be a faculty member and/or dean in a program or department in the humanities or humanistic social sciences.

Overview

Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. Through its Higher Learning grantmaking area, Mellon invites applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following two areas:

Unruly Intelligences

The emergence of generative AI has triggered a firestorm of techno-utopian promises and apocalyptic predictions alike. These reckonings often imply that AI is “intelligent” in the human sense, even though from the iconic use of this term in his 1950 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” Alan Turing called this attitude “dangerous” and famously defined artificial intelligence only in terms of how well computers could imitate human thought. Are we now facing an existential abdication of human capacities to machines? Or the usual evolution of how we define intelligence in keeping with our shifting technologies? Meanwhile, the terms of human and more-than-human intelligences are also unstable, with greater or lesser value assigned to particular populations, species, and objects according to our historical, social, and ecological contexts. How might different forms of AI — generative, predictive, agentic, and others, including models that are currently still theoretical — complicate or exacerbate the inequalities that arise from these norms? With so much at stake, the humanities have an urgent role to play in shaping contemporary understanding of artificial and other intelligences — and in making practical, informed recommendations about how to regulate and/or adopt AI in our learning, work, and most intimate lives. Projects might investigate the following:

• the meanings of intelligence;
• the effects of different conceptions of intelligence on (or their emergence from) democratic processes, human subjectivities, probability and prediction, and aesthetic and cultural taste;
• the social and cultural impacts of specific forms of AI, as seen through discrete analytical or disciplinary lenses (such as disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental justice studies, and ethnic studies); or
• any of the above, using comparative analyses that address how computational and non-computational understandings of intelligence take into account, for example, attention, dignity, embodiment, expertise, faith, justice, pleasure, serendipity, and surprise.

Normalization and Its Discontents

The concept of normalcy is paradoxical. It entails the statistically average that is at the same time a moral imperative, a completely ordinary state that is nonetheless much to be desired, a cultural ideal. Moreover, the normal often functions as the ideal even when it is not numerically average. Despite the seemingly universal character of these formulations, the normal entered Western consciousnesses only in the modern era with the nineteenth-century efflorescence of statistics, bringing with it its opposite: the deviant, exceptional, aberrant, not normal. How does the concept of normalcy govern notions of human life, and when doesn’t it? What are the structures and systems that keep it in place, in realms as disparate as the aesthetic, socioeconomic, psychological, physiological, political, spiritual, and ethical? What, if anything, does the historical knowledge of its recent invention — and vigorous social rejections — enable? Projects might investigate the following:

• comparative historical, geographic, and/or cultural treatments of the normal;
• normalcy and political contestation;
• the import of the normal within specific disciplinary approaches;
• the unspeakable, the taboo, and other deviances surreptitiously produced by a norm; or
• potential relationships between the normal and the utopian.

For more information and guidelines, see the program page.