Recent decisions to close down avenues for Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities funding have fed into long term concerns for financial sustainability across all institutions. This session focused on how to best support and recognise the value of our disciplines as a central focus of the Associate Dean Research.
Strategies undertaken to support Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
- Working with university leadership to allocate strategic funds to enable the creation of cross-disciplinary teams. Developing cross-disciplinary partnerships/teams and reframing HASS projects to apply for diverse funding.
- Finding a way to support early-career researchers who had previously received funding from the Marsden Fund. Continuing to emphasise the value of HASS research in the wake of recent changes.
- Investigating possibility of philanthropic investment with a particular view to global partnership opportunities including, for example, the British Academies Humanities Fund.
- Acknowledging uncertainty in global environment and the difficulties that brings to research funding and local contexts.
- Investing faculty funds into research funding applications that demonstrate the value of HASS and leveraging success to encourage greater support for future funding applications.
- Working with professional teams to increase administrative support for HASS projects by leveraging the demonstrated success of projects supported by faculty funding.
- Opportunities for cross-disciplinary funding chances in the Horizon Europe Fund particularly in clusters one and six. Noting the importance of the HASS disciplines in other clusters is also a great way of encouraging and framing cross-disciplinary uptake.
- Developing partnerships or joining successful or already formed Horizons Europe teams. Engaging with their dedicated support systems for putting together budgets and applications. Many of these teams have developed modules on how to put together a Horizons bid. They are listed on each Horizons cluster website.
- Exploring with university exec/leaders other options about re-assessing or forgiving overheads in the wake of Horizons top up funding being removed.
Ongoing challenges
- How to best fund deep dives into disciplinary research.
- How to best engage and get institutional support from support staff who are also under workplace pressure.
- Concerns over system upgrades which may also impact support staff.
Dr Corinne Seals, Associate Dean Research, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington facilitated this session.
