Academics and Artists addressing Social Challenges
Are you passionate about bringing research to new audiences or using art for social change?
It’s trapped! Freedom of the press is under threat.
Supported by the Open Societal Challenges Fund and the British Association for the Study of Religions, the Open University, King’s College London and Pitik Bulag cartoon collective are launching a competition to bring together outreach-focused academics and cartoonists to collaborate on a series of images that make the latest research about pressing social challenges accessible to general audiences.
Five successful academic applicants will each be matched together with five successful cartoonist with similar topical interests. Each academic-artist partnership will then have six weeks to collaborate to produce a cartoon and one paragraph accompanying text in English. The five resulting works will be exhibited at a series of international academic conventions and gallery installations, and put forward to a final competition with prizes for judges’, people’s and academics’ choice. Copyright will remain with the creators.
Applications procedure:
Academic applicants should submit a one-page Expression of Interest to precious.chatterje-doody@open.ac.uk by 12 noon (GMT) on Wednesday 3rd April. Half of this should be dedicated to the applicant’s motivations for, and any relevant experience of, academic-artistic collaborations. Half should provide an outline of the academic’s research topic and the particular finding/s that they envisage rendering as a cartoon. Joint applications from academic co-authors will be considered, but should state a lead applicant to be matched with the cartoonist, if successful.
Cartoonist applicants should submit between 1 and 3 examples of their previous work and a one-page Expression of Interest (EoI) to precious.chatterje-doody@open.ac.uk by 12 noon (GMT) on Wednesday 3rd April. The EoI should should say: 1) Why you want to collaborate with an academic; 2) What experience you have of working with others, and if you have worked with academics before; 3) What kind of social challenges you are most interested in, and how your art could help address them.
Work on any pressing social challenges is eligible for the competition, but we particularly welcome EoIs related to: international relations, history politics, disinformation/counter-disinformation, and the political roles of religious organisations.
Selection procedure:
Successful academic applicants will be selected based both on the strength of their EoI and the closeness of their fit with the selected artists participating in the project.
Project Timeline:
Wednesday 3rd April, 12 noon (GMT) - Deadline for submission of EoI
Friday 5th April - Notification to applicants
w/c Monday 8th April - Artistic-academic collaborations begin
Monday 20th May, 12 noon - Deadline for production of final cartoon and accompanying text
June – October 2024 - Exhibitions and promotion of final outputs