Cultural Anthropology Program - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants

The primary objective of the Cultural Anthropology Program is to support basic scientific research on the causes, consequences, and complexities of human social and cultural variability. Anthropological research spans a wide gamut, and contemporary cultural anthropology is an arena in which diverse research traditions and methodologies are valid. Recognizing the breadth of the field’s contributions to science, the Cultural Anthropology Program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, and methodologically sophisticated research in all sub-fields of cultural anthropology. Because the National Science Foundation’s mandate is to support basic research, the NSF Cultural Anthropology Program does not fund research that takes as its primary goal improved clinical practice or applied policy. Program research priorities include, but are not limited to, research that increases our understanding of: Socio-cultural drivers of critical anthropogenic processes such as deforestation, desertification, land cover change, urbanization, and poverty Resilience and robustness of socio-cultural systems Conflict, cooperation, and altruism Economy, culture, migration, and globalization Variability and change in kinship and family norms and practices Cultural and social contexts of health and disease Social regulation, governmentality, and violence Origins of complexity in socio-cultural systems Language and culture: orality and literacy, sociolinguistics, and cognition Human variation through empirically grounded ethnographic descriptions Mathematical and computational models of sociocultural systems such as social network analysis, agent-based models, and integration of agent-based models with geographic information systems (GIS) As part of its effort to encourage and support projects that explicitly integrate education and basic research, CA provides support to enhance and improve the conduct of doctoral dissertation projects carried out by doctoral students enrolled in U.S. universities who are conducting scientific research that enhances basic scientific knowledge.