The Language Sciences Workshop Fund offers support for interdisciplinary workshops on ambitious questions with the potential to lead to large-scale research projects.
Workshop Fund Awards 2022
Please note applications for this round have now closed. Future calls will be announced on the website and via the Language Sciences email list.
In 2022 the Language Sciences offered funding for two interdisciplinary workshops linked to one or more of the following “moonshot” questions:
Language, Trust & Society: How can people with diverging views be supported to successfully communicate and negotiate?
- Timeliness: development of new technology has outpaced the evolution of mediation and politeness conventions.
- Answering this question requires understanding how people communicate and miscommunicate, how disputes can be resolved, and what tools could make these processes smoother.
Language, Health & Well-being: How can language use allow us to understand and predict mental health conditions?
- Timeliness: advances in AI are creating new opportunities for personalised healthcare.
- Answering this question requires understanding the variation in language use between individuals, how this depends on underlying cognitive processes, and how this can be applied in a clinical context to improve patient outcomes.
Language, Learning & Diversity: What does language diversity tell us about the past, present, and future of humankind?
- Timeliness: an estimated 40% of the world's languages are currently endangered, many in areas with high socioeconomic deprivation and at high risk of environmental degradation.
- Answering this question would mean understanding the history of human populations, how languages are learnt by individuals, and how they change over generations.
Language & Education: How can learning a second language be made effortless?
- Timeliness: the majority of the world's population learns at least one second language, but even motivated learners typically take thousands of hours of study and practice to reach proficiency.
- Answering this question requires understanding the process of language learning, which aspects are difficult or effortful, and how this process changes with different contexts or approaches to learning and teaching.
There is funding of up to £2,000 available per workshop. Proposals should have at least two co-applicants from different disciplines. Workshops may be online, hybrid and in-person.
If you have any questions about this funding please email contact@languagesciences.cam.ac.uk.
Eligibility & funding criteria
Proposals will be evaluated by peer review and by the Language Sciences Management Committee. Where proposals are found to overlap, cooperation between the different groups will be encouraged in the interests of involving a wide range of researchers.
Eligibility
- All applicants must be full members of the University of Cambridge or affiliated institutions.
- Each proposal should be submitted by co-applicants from at least two different research groups.
- The workshop programme must be interdisciplinary
- The topic should be relevant for one or more of the moonshot questions
- External speakers and participants may be invited.
Conditions of funding
- Workshops should be delivered within 6 months of notification of the award.
- A written report on the workshop should be provided for publication on the Cambridge Language Sciences website within 2 weeks after the event.
- Outcomes of the workshop should be reported back to Cambridge Language Sciences.