Recognizing Promising New Ideas
Mapping Inequality
An ISS small grant enabled Kim Weeden, associate professor and chair of the Department of Sociology, to develop a multidimensional framework not only to map inequality trends in income, wealth, education, and other dimensions, but also to show how multiple factors contribute to the experience of inequality. "We want scholars and policy makers to be able to accurately characterize the structure of inequality, track it over time, and understand how and why it is changing—just as the GDP is used to monitor the economy," says Weeden. Her ongoing collaboration with David Grusky, a sociologist at Stanford, has led to two publications.
The Small Grant Program strengthens the Institute for the Social Sciences' commitment to collaboration. Funding assists Cornell's tenure-track faculty in the social sciences in exploring new ideas and innovative approaches to doing research.
The biannual grant competition provides funding of up to $15,000 for faculty to initiate research projects, collect data, run conferences, or travel to meet with collaborators.
Interdisciplinary research is encouraged.
The grants not only help bring research projects to fruition and publication, but also can serve as the basis for securing major grants from external funding sources such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Often activities lead to new ISS theme project proposals.
Each year, greater numbers of high-quality proposals from more departments are entered in the small grants competition. In the most recent cycle, 60 proposals were submitted for a combined $650,000 in research requests, but only $80,000 was available for awards. The ISS would like to expand its funding of small grants to $300,000 annually to provide seed funding for a greater number of innovative research ideas.