European call for proposals: Crisis – Perspectives from the Humanities

The Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) and the Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE) are inviting transnational consortia to submit humanities-led proposals that address innovative outlooks on the phenomena of crises past and present. Proposed research may draw on insights and methodologies from a wide spectrum of humanities disciplines. Proposals may involve a variety of perspectives from one or several of the following sub-themes:

• Different understandings of crises: Proposals focusing on the conceptualisation of crisis may investigate how all crises have a discursive dimension. Proposals could address the significance of crisis within different cultural traditions, the transcultural exchanges, and their impacts on understandings; narratives of crisis; critical research theories or methodologies that have caused crises in the humanities resulting in major conceptual transformations and research on the impact of human activities on climate and the environment from a humanities perspective.
• Crises and the human response: In both media and politics, the term ‘crisis’ is and was frequently used to dramatise a situation to generate the perception of a looming threat or impending disaster, which creates a risk of escalation based on polarised emotional reactions. Proposals could investigate how media, politics and other entities contribute to the escalation or/and de-escalation and resolution of crises; how some assertions of belonging create, contribute to or respond to crises; and whether the concept of crisis is an effective tool for analysis and explanation in the political, cultural, intellectual and economic domains.
• Representations of crises: Proposals might investigate the evolving representations (or poetics) of crises, i.e. the changing representations of crisis resulting from transformations of heritage and cultural memory. Proposals could address the immediate responses to and different representations of crises in literature, philosophy and the arts; the extended forms of commemoration, post-memory reinterpretations; whose vision of crisis is represented in the media, literature and the creative and performative arts and why they are chosen.

Researchers from at least four countries

The projects selected within this call will be funded directly by national/regional funding agencies and their partners from the following countries: Austria, Belgium (F.R.S-FNRS), Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

Each proposal must involve a minimum of four and a maximum of six principal investigators from four countries on the above-mentioned list who are eligible for funding by their respective national/regional funding agency. Projects must have a duration of between 24 and 36 months, and the budget across all partners should not exceed 1,500,000 euros.

To facilitate the formation of research consortia, HERA and CHANSE offer applicants a partner search tool. This tool can be used by projects looking for partners and partners looking for projects.

Important submission deadlines and dates:

• Deadline for outline proposals: 21 September 2023, 14:00 CEST
• Deadline for invited full proposals: 26 March 2024, 14:00 CET
• Call results: October/November 2024
• Start of funded projects: end of 2024 / beginning of 2025

Supported by the SNSF

The call is not co-funded by the European Commission. Applicants from Switzerland must be eligible for the SNSF project funding scheme and are strongly encouraged to contact the SNSF if they are submitting their first application to the SNSF. Along with the application to the CHANSE online submission system, they need to submit an administrative application to the SNSF via mySNF.

For further details, please refer to the websites of HERA and CHANSE.

• HERA website
• CHANSE website
• HERA and CHANSE partner search tool