Cultural Anthropology Program - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants

The Cultural Anthropology Program - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants opportunity supports basic scientific research on the causes, consequences, and complexities of human social and cultural variability. The program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, fieldwork/lab-based, theoretically engaged, and methodologically sophisticated research in all sub-fields of cultural anthropology. The program priorities include research on sociocultural drivers of critical anthropogenic processes, resilience and robustness of sociocultural systems, scientific principles underlying conflict, cooperation, and altruism, and more. • Sociocultural drivers of critical anthropogenic processes such as deforestation, desertification, land cover change, urbanization, and poverty. • Resilience and robustness of sociocultural systems. • Scientific principles underlying conflict, cooperation, and altruism. • Economy, culture, migration, and globalization. • Variability and change in kinship and family norms and practices. • General cultural and social principles underlining the drivers of health outcomes and disease transmission. • Biocultural work that considers the nexus of human culture and its relationship with human biology. • Social regulation, governmentality, and violence. • Origins of complexity in sociocultural systems. • Language and culture: orality and literacy, sociolinguistics, and cognition. • Theoretically-informed approaches to co-production in relation to scientific understandings of human variability and environmental stewardship. • Mathematical and computational models of sociocultural systems such as social network analysis, agent-based models, multi-level models, and modes that integrate agent-based simulations and geographic information systems (GIS). • Socio-cultural drivers of technology and technological systems such as AI, machine learning, augmented data, and platforms.