Bridging Narratives Grant: A Convergence of Journalism and Research Perspectives is an intersectional research and journalism project funded by the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam and invites pitches from independent journalists and social scientists (researchers, scholars, and early-career academics) from around the world on the topics of on political economy, ecology, migration, and culture. The project aims to combine the strengths of academic research and journalism by strengthening collaborative engagement.
The output of the Bridging Narratives Grant will be a series of critical, people-centred, in-depth publications resulting from the collaboration between researchers and journalists. The stories would first be disseminated – entailing a textual, audio-visual, or illustrative form and will be mainly disseminated through The Contrapuntal digital magazine.
Selected authors will be invited to participate in a workshop on journalism-research collaborations and to reflect on their collaboration in short essays. Further information on the workshop’s aim, timeline, and location will be announced following the selection of pitches. The selected essays will then be gathered in an edited volume focusing on the challenges and opportunities of linking scientific research and journalism. This research aims to strengthen practice-based, ground-up participatory research.
The project accepts individual applications from journalists and researchers (including Academic staff, Independent Researchers, PhDs, and MAs). After receiving the pitches, the organisers will pair each journalist with a researcher who specialises either in the relevant subject matter or geographic region. This team will then collaboratively develop the selected pitch into a final project. They also encourage joint applications from journalist-researcher teams who wish to collaborate on a pre-selected theme.
The project will offer financial support of 400 EUR per story, which will be shared between the journalist and researcher, principally for fieldwork related expenses such as logistics, travel, insurance, and more. A total of eight stories will be funded under this initiative.
