Provincialising the Anthropocene Research Labs Grants
13 January 2025
The IAS and UCL Anthropocene are offering up to five grants of £2,000-£3,000 to support teams of researchers to come together in a virtual Research Lab to work on cross-disciplinary themes or topics related to the Provincialising the Anthropocene conference.

These Research Lab grants are linked to a two-day international conference, Provincialising the Anthropocene: Area Studies and Planetary Futures, to be held at the IAS in September 2025. Jointly convened by the IAS and UCL Anthropocene, the event is designed to bring Area Studies research into dialogue with explorations of human/non-human relations stimulated by the idea of the Anthropocene. We anticipate many of the participants being from the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS), including from interdisciplinary fields such as Urban Studies or Environmental Humanities, but we also hope to stimulate dialogue with colleagues in the geo- and bio-sciences. We will encourage contributions from researchers working outside academia, in creative practice, policy-making or activism. Inspired by Bruno Latour’s provocation that the arts are the only way to think through the climate emergency, since their methods transcend divides between rationality and imagination, we hope contributions by artists of all kinds will join with other approaches to explore new modes of knowledge-making.
We are looking for projects to generate agenda-setting interventions to inform the conference discussions: e.g. new research questions, theoretical advances, methodological breakthroughs and/or better practices of interdisciplinary working, especially bridging AHSS and STEM. We hope to promote the kind of integrated interdisciplinary work that goes beyond exchange of perspectives to forge transformative insights. The project contributions to the conference programme could take the form of plenary sessions, panel agendas, topics for break-out groups, guiding questions for discussion throughout the two days, related performances or exhibits, spin-off workshops (immediately before or after the conference), or other, more imaginative, formats.
Administrative support for financial processing must be available from your home department(s). Provincialising the Anthropocene Research Lab grants are paid to the individual’s host department upon project completion, upon submission of a final expenditure report to the IAS.
Closing date: midnight on Sunday 23 February 2025.
Read more and download the application form here
Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash.