FHSS researchers receive Marsden grants
Three Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) projects, each from a different school, are being supported in the 2019 round of the Marsden grants, which are for innovative thinking by top researchers and are administered by the Royal Society Te Apārangi on behalf of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. The projects selected shows the wide scope and quality of research projects within our Faculty.
Professor Stuart Brock and Professor Richard Joyce (School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations) have received a standard grant of $660,000 for their research project Religious and Moral Fictionalism. This project will investigate how fictionalism can be used to help people with differing religious and moral beliefs engage respectfully and will examine the relationship between morality and religion through a fictionalist lens.
Professor Kevin Dew and Professor Kerry Chamberlain from the School of Social and Cultural Studies are co-leads on their project, which also involves researchers from the University of Otago, Massey University, and the University of Sydney in Australia. Their project, Exceptional trajectories: Transforming understandings of cancer survivorship, has received a standard grant of $842,000 to investigate how cancer survivors, their companions and supporters, and their health and medical carers represent, understand and negotiate survivorship, to gain insights into extraordinary survivorship.
Dr Corinne Seals (School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) received a Fast-start grant worth $300,000 for her project Creating a Model for Learning Multiple Languages. She will work with Samoan and Māori communities to develop a model with the aim of providing better support to minority students in their language learning as most current methods of language teaching privilege Western (often Anglo) models.
“This is a wonderful outcome for FHSS that confirms the excellence of our scholarship and the breadth of research strength across the Faculty. My congratulations to Corinne, Kevin, Richard and Stuart on their success in this very competitive process,” says Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Dean Professor Sarah Leggott.
The University received funding for 19 projects overall and performed above average with 57.14 percent of the University’s proposals which made it to the second round receiving funding, compared with a national average of 48.07 percent.