ACLS Awards Microgrants to Support Academic Society-led Initiatives to Foster More Equitable and Inclusive Engagement with Early Career Scholars

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is excited to announce the inaugural awardees of its Intention Foundry Learned Society Extended Engagement Microgrants. This latest milestone for the Intention Foundry program will support efforts by ACLS member societies designed to counteract practices and systems that create precarity among early career scholars from groups who have been systematically excluded, marginalized, or otherwise neglected in their fields or disciplines.  

With funding from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS established Intention Foundry (IF) in 2021 as a multi-year series of in-person and virtual workshops in which ACLS member societies collaborate with scholars and higher education administrators to develop and pilot actionable solutions to advancing equity, inclusion, and justice in their fields.

In spring 2024, participating academic societies were invited to submit proposals for funding to advance projects and initiatives that emerged from the IF workshops. To receive funding, projects had to meet the following criteria: center equity, justice, and wellbeing for early career scholars that disproportionately experience precarity in their fields; directly engage those scholars as primary beneficiaries and collaborators; and provide opportunities for scholars to gain concrete professional development skills.

For 2024 ACLS is pleased to support 10 academic societies in advancing their efforts toward more diversity, equity, and inclusion within the academy through projects that range from data research studies of contingent faculty and working groups on equity, accessibility and disability, to launching workshops on publishing and leading professional development institutes, and more:

• African Studies Association and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (collaborative)
• American Folklore Society
• American Historical Association
• College Art Association
• Dance Studies Association
• National Council on Public History
• Philosophy of Science Association
• Rhetoric Society of America
• Society for Biblical Literature

Eight societies were granted awards of $3500 for their projects, and two societies received $7500 for a collaborative project.

“Awarding this first round of funding for these outstanding initiatives led by our academic societies represents an important next step in addressing the kinds of pervasive precarity— intellectual, social, and financial—experienced by early career scholars,” said Jovonne Bickerstaff, Director, Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA). “By investing in promising new pathways to support scholars who have less access to networks and opportunities, we hope to encourage more successful partnerships between societies and early career scholars in helping to establish more fair and equitable practices.”

The Intention Foundry (IF) is part of the recently established ACLS Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) unit. IDEA, which also runs the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program and the Leadership Institute for a New Academy (LINA), draws on human-centered design as a methodology for developing activities and convenings that re-envision academia’s culture, policies, and practices.