University of Louisville
IN-26: Innovation C

As part of the University of the 21st Century Initiative, UofL allocated $250,000 per year for three years (2017-2019) to support this new Consortium to fund the creation or expansion of transdisciplinary social justice research teams, projects, creative activities, and community-engaged scholarship for faculty and students at UofL.

Each year, beginning in February 2017, the Consortium awards up to 27 Faculty Research Fellowships, and at least one PhD-level Graduate Student Research Assistantship for the calendar year. The Consortium also assigns 8 graduate and professional Graduate Fellowships to transdisciplinary research teams, and assigns a minimum of 7 Undergraduate Research Fellowships to advance social justice transdisciplinary research (TDR) activities.

Social justice TDR stretches past traditional academic multi-disciplinarity or inter-professionalism to foster collaborations across disciplines, colleges, and beyond academia to develop humanistically-infused processes for identifying new solutions to complex, intransigent social problems.

Social Justice Areas of Focus for Funding:
a. Community Justice: emphasizes issues of housing justice and restorative justice (including
school-to-prison pipeline, mass criminalization);
b. Environmental Justice;
c. Emerging Social Justice Issues - providing an opportunity to respond to current social
justice issues arising locally, nationally, or globally, such as and including health equity;
d. Social Justice in West Louisville.

Faculty Fellowship Grants Available:
1. Faculty Workload Fellowships: Provides a course or clinical replacement for one semester at a PTL/adjunct level to support new research and/or research project completion. Up to 13 available annually.
2. Mini-Grant Faculty Fellowships: Provides a research grant for transdisciplinary group project proposals in an amount up to $2,500 to support new research and/or research project completion. Up to 8 mini-grant faculty fellowships awarded annually.
3. Grant Fellowships: Provides a research grant for transdisciplinary group project proposals in an amount up to $7,500 to support new research and/or research project completion. Up to 9 large grant faculty fellowships awarded annually.
4. Grants and mini-grants are available according to the following schedule: Up to 7 one-year grants, non-renewable; up to 10 renewable grants (assuming iRFP funding is renewed), both 2-year and 3-year.

The principal function of the Consortium is to incubate, support, and promote faculty and student involvement in University-wide social justice transdisciplinary research including research teams, projects, creative activities, and community-engaged scholarship. The Consortium is dedicated to understanding and finding new, innovative solutions to complex, intransigent social justice problems with a special emphasis on structural inequality. We seek to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries that typically limit university research. The initial priority research areas build on existing strengths in faculty scholarship and creative activities across the University.