COVID-19 Recovery Call to Build Future Pandemic Preparedness and Understanding Citizen Engagement in the USA and UK

The British Academy (BA), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Science & Innovation Network in the USA (SIN USA) are inviting proposals from UK and US-based researchers in the humanities and social sciences aiming to support around 10 in-depth transatlantic studies focused on UK-US vaccine engagements, including examples of community confidence and hesitancy.

This call is funded by the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

This call follows a forthcoming initial pilot study and aims to scale that work further, building an evidence base allowing us to answer:

• How does context specific to place, culture, social, political and economic factors shape people’s responses to vaccines?
• How can we harness existing knowledge to develop, disseminate and employ community-engaged research which works for and with national and regional public health authorities and community actors and researchers, before, during, and after vaccine deployment programmes?

Projects on these issues must demonstrate a dedicated focus on place and context at local and community levels and indicate how they would incorporate a transatlantic view on the issues and questions.

The lead applicant must be a researcher from the humanities or social sciences and be based at an eligible UK university or research institute. The lead applicant must be of postdoctoral status or above (or have equivalent research experience) and the PI’s position must last at least the duration of the grant funded by the Academy.

Awards of five months in duration and up to £100,000 (with Full Economic Costing at 80%) are available.

Awards will run until March 2022.

Funding can be used to:

• Support the time of the Principal Investigator and Co-Applicants
• Research assistance
• Travel
• Fieldwork and related expenses
• Networking costs.

Applications must be submitted online by the deadline 06 October 2021 (17:00 UK time).

Further information can be found here.