UBC-Vancouver Public Humanities Hub Public Engagement Award

  • Deadline: TBA  
  • Value: $1,000/Award; up to 7 will be awarded  
  • Eligibility: Outstanding public humanities engagement in the past two years   
  • Faculty member (tenured/track) in the UBC-V Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Education, and Allard School of Law. 
  • Lecturer, sessional, or postdoctoral fellow in the UBC-V Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Education, and Allard School of Law. 
  • Graduate student in the UBC-V Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Education, and Allard School of Law. 
  • Partner organization working on a collaborative public humanities project with an eligible UBC-V scholar in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.  
  • For queries related to this grant, please contact the Public Humanities Hub manager, Heather Tam, phh.manager@ubc.ca.

 

NOMINATION PROCEDURES 

Introduction 

The UBC-Vancouver Public Humanities Hub (PHH) is delighted to announce this year’s competition for the Public Humanities Public Engagement Awards. A total of four to seven (4-7) $1,000 awards will be given to faculty/students and one partner organization who have exhibited outstanding public humanities engagement in the past two years. 

 

Eligibility 

  1. One+ award to recognize the Public Humanities contributions of a tenured or tenure-track UBC-Vancouver faculty member (in research or educational leadership streams) in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education. 
  2. One+ award to recognize the Public Humanities contributions of a UBC-Vancouver lecturer, sessional, or postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.  
  3. One+ award to recognize the Public Humanities contributions of a UBC-Vancouver graduate student in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education.  
  4. One award to recognize the contributions of a partner organization working on a Public Humanities collaborative project with an eligible UBC-Vancouver scholar in the Faculty of Arts, Allard School of Law, or the Faculty of Education. 

 Members of the Public Humanities Hub Advisory Board are not eligible to be nominees or nominators. 

 

Public Humanities Hub Public Engagement Award nominations   

 The Public Humanities Hub recognizes that there are many diverse publics and many diverse humanities methods for engaging these publics. For the first six awards, we encourage nominations of individuals a) who employ more traditional forms of engagement, i.e. through print and broadcast media, and/or b) who employ more creative approaches like community partnerships, podcasts, videos, films, exhibitions, festivals and more. We are particularly interested in recognizing scholars whose work has contributed to the expansion of the range of voices in public discourse and who attempt to facilitate two-way dialogue with broader publics. For examples from previous years, see https://publichumanities.ubc.ca/funding/public-engagement-award/public-engagement-award-winners-2023/  

For the award that recognizes the Public Humanities contributions of a partner organization, we encourage nominations of organizations that have partnered with a UBC-Vancouver Humanities scholar(s) to do public humanities work, broadly conceived. We are particularly interested in recognizing organizations whose work has modelled and encouraged reciprocal forms of knowledge exchange.  

 

Public Humanities Scholarship 

  1. Humanities? The Public Humanities Hub (PHH) supports scholarship across a range of fields of inquiry in Arts, Education and Law; academic work that is located within a diverse set of interpretative and analytical knowledges and critical methods that represent how we, as the PHH, understand public humanities scholarship. Humanities and posthumanist, or digital methodologies in academic humanities projects are primarily analytical, critical and speculative and are not typically deployed positivistically to produce empirical data. Humanities methodologies are not usually oriented towards those determinative accounts of cause-effect commonly located in the social sciences. Humanities research typically involves scholarly usage of particular qualitative, interpretive, digital, hermeneutic, exegetic methodologies, including narrative, memoir, genealogy, phenomenology, literary/visual/acoustic analysis, composition, theory, performance, ekphrasis, archivism, animated archives, enhanced critical curation, visualization, cultural analytics, fluid textuality, filmmaking, mapping, poesis and diverse other methods.  
  2. Public Humanities? For the Public Humanities Hub (PHH), public humanities scholarship can refer to humanities research that prioritizes public-facing engagement; research that aims to bring high-brow cultural artifacts within reach of a broader audience. Alternately, public humanities can refer to academic engagement that seeks to reimagine and collaboratively curate and in fact, redistribute, access to the capacity to create knowledge amongst a very broad set of publics, including most particularly, communities historically and persistently marginalized. 

 

Award 

Each winner will receive $1,000 and be recognized on the Public Humanities Hub webpage. Winners can use prize funds for any purpose. 

 

Adjudication Criteria

The Adjudication committee, a multi-disciplinary committee of UBC Humanities scholars chaired by the Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub (Dr. Mary Bryson), will consider the following criteria when evaluating nominations for the first six awards:   

  1. advancement of public humanities scholarship  
  2. clarity of EDID (equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization) and human rights methods and approaches  
  3. the creativity and innovation of the humanities methods of public engagement,  
  4. the impact of these forms of engagement (qualitative, i.e. uptake by students and colleagues, policy changes, translations, etc. OR quantitative, i.e.  readership, attendance figures, etc.), and 
  5. the degree of knowledge exchange fostered 

 The Adjudication committee will consider the following criteria when considering nominations for the award to a partner organization:  

  1. the timeliness of the partner organization’s contributions.   
  2. the creativity and innovation of the forms of public engagement,  
  3. clarity of EDID (equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization) and human rights methods and approaches 
  4. the impact of these forms of engagement (qualitative, i.e. uptake by the community, students, and/or colleagues, policy changes, translations, etc. OR quantitative, i.e.  readership, attendance figures, etc.), and 
  5. the degree of knowledge exchange fostered 

 Notification of awards will be made by July 2024. 

 

NOMINATION PROCEDURES 

For UBC members 

To nominate someone (or yourself) for the prize, please submit: 

  1. A letter of nomination (maximum 3 pages). Letter addressed to Dr. Mary Bryson, Academic Director of Public Humanities Hub, that includes a rationale for the nomination and describes two examples of the nominee’s public humanities engagement in the past two years. <<PDF Bookmark Label: Nomination Letter>>    
  2. Links to or attachments for these two examples. <<PDF Bookmark Label: Examples of Public Humanities Engagement>> 
  3. A short CV that highlights the nominee’s public engagement work.  <<PDF Bookmark Label: Short CV>> 

 Please upload these documents as a single, bookmarked PDF file and name the file by using the following format: 

Nomineesurname_PEA2024.pdf 

 

For partner organizations 

To nominate a partner organization, at least one UBC scholar collaborating with that organization should submit: 

  1. A letter of nomination (maximum 3 pages). Letter addressed to Dr. Mary Bryson, Academic Director of Public Humanities Hub, that includes a rationale for the nomination and describes a publicly engaged project that took place within the past two years. <<PDF Bookmark Label: Nomination Letter>>   
  2. Links to or attachments for that project. <<PDF Bookmark Label: Example of Public Humanities Engagement>> 

Please upload these documents as a single, bookmarked PDF file and name the file by using the following format: 

Organizationname_PEA2024.pdf 

 

We encourage those who wish to nominate themselves to consult their unit’s Head or awards committee to ask for their assistance in drafting the letter.  

 

Attachment Requirements  

The completed Application Form and all attachments must be submitted as a single bookmarked PDF which conforms to the following formatting conventions:  

  • Font: Size 12 pt Times New Roman  
  • Page size: 8 ½” x 11”  
  • Spacing: Single-spaced  
  • Margins: Minimum ¾ inch (1.87 mm)  
  • Whole PDF must be Bookmarked  

(How to bookmark a PDF)  

(How to merge PDFs) 

 

Proposals are due May 24, 2024.  

For queries related to this grant, please contact the Public Humanities Hub manager, Heather Tam, phh.manager@ubc.ca. 

 

NOMINATIONS HAVE CLOSED