The research priority area (RPA) Global Digital Cultures critically explores how digitisation is transforming cultural practices around the world, from friendship, intimacy and sexual relations, to the construction, targeting, and surveillance of publics. Digital platforms and mobile apps, such as Facebook, Tinder, YouTube, Instagram, the Russian platform VK, and the China-based WeChat, TikTok, and Tantan, have rapidly become central to the production, circulation, consumption, and monetisation of culture. The new RPA  aims to examine these developments from a broad interdisciplinary perspective.

To pursue this objective, the RPA provides an ‘event grant’ program. The program offers faculty, postdocs, and PhDs at the UvA the opportunity to request funding to organise a workshop, network event, exhibition, or small conference, leading to either publications (popular or academic), or grant applications. Grants are typically awarded to events focused on one of the three domains of the RPA: 1) Consumption & Participation concerns the global variety of daily cultural practices developed by users of digital platforms and mobile apps. 2) Production & Labor focuses on the (re-)organisation of production and labor relations around digital platforms and mobile apps across the world. 3) Security & Citizenship explores how digitisation enables new modes of public expression and collective action in different political-cultural regions, while simultaneously facilitating ubiquitous data-driven forms of surveillance. 

Application procedure

Applications should be submitted by e-mail to gdc@uva.nl Decisions are made on a running basis by the RPA Directorate using the criteria below. 

Terms & Conditions

• The event should be held within one 1 year after the grant has been awarded. 
• The grant can have a value of max EUR 5,000. 
• The grants are available to all assistant, associate and full professors as well as postdoc and (external) PhD researchers with their main affiliation at the UvA.

Evaluation criteria include

• Quality, originality, and feasibility of the proposal 
• Alignment with one of the three RPA domains
• Interdisciplinary character of the proposal 
• Preference is given to proposal that make an explicit link to teaching (students participating in the event / master class / guest lecture)
• Preference is given to co-funded activities, so to proposals that have already secured partial funding or will apply for additional funding elsewhere
• The committee may also apply additional macro criteria such as disciplinary, gender, thematic and programmatic diversity. 

Application

• Title event
• Applicant details: Title, initials, surname(s); Faculty; Affiliation; Discipline: Gender; Personal Homepage:
• Description of the proposed activity/event (max. 400 words)
• Explanation of how it connects to one of the three domains of the RPA and promotes its interdisciplinary objectives (max. 200 words)
• Planned date(s) for the activity/event
• Specified budget
• Expected output (e.g. expected audience, publication, funding application)

Please send your proposal to: gdc@uva.nl