Call for Applications: Residential Fellowships Program 2025-26

Theme

• Scholarly explorations of digital inequality, on the one hand, and of efforts to achieve equality through digital means, on the other, emerge from distinct disciplinary traditions and methods. Bringing these approaches into closer dialogue, this special theme year will take up the relationship between digital inequality and digital equality. Scholars collaborating in the theme seminar will explore the paradoxes of digital (in) equality in different historical and social contexts. The seminar will consider such questions as: In what ways are digital equality and digital inequality co-constituted? What forms does digital inequality take? How do digital technologies shape, enable, or constrain gender or racial equality and inequities? What is the relationship between algorithmic bias and digital inequality? How should scholars apprehend the exacerbated harms, concentrated wealth, and consolidated power that have characterized society after the digital turn? How do digital technologies expand and limit the exercise of rights claims and the possibilities for civic participation? Do digitally enabled equality efforts enhance democracy, civil liberties, and freedom? Do they expand equity or justice?
• The seminar will meet at a crucial juncture. Digital technologies organize, channel, constrain and amplify the distribution of goods, services, and opportunities across societies. Early digital scholarship accordingly attended to the lack of access to technology. It centered the so-called “digital divide – defined at various points as lack of access to the personal computer and then broadband and consequent disparities in educational achievement, employment opportunities, creative endeavor, knowledge production, civic participation, and more among communities, countries, and nations. It also heralded the possibility of new liberatory networked communities and modes of being based on this small set of networked digital tools.

Funding Information

• The School seeks to provide 50% of base salary, with the expectation that the Member’s home institution, sabbatical funding, and/or other grants will cover the remainder. Maximum stipend is $80,000. Factors affecting stipend calculation include base salary, availability of leave pay and other institutional support, and/or other grants/awards.
• All Members receive a modest research fund from which up to $800 of non-travel research expenses can be reimbursed.
• An allowance to help defray the cost of relocating to the Institute may be available. Supplemental assistance for child care for families with preschool-age children may also be available. If no health insurance is provided by your home institution, additional support may be available to help cover the cost of participating in the Institute’s policy.

Eligibility Criteria

• The Institute welcomes fellowship applications from scholars regardless of citizenship or national origin. As a US Department of State designated J1 Exchange Visitor Program Sponsor, the Institute issues paperwork for their foreign scholars to apply for J1 status; their legal spouses and dependent children can be sponsored on a J-2 Exchange Visitor Visa.
• Applicants must have their doctorate in hand no later than the application deadline.
• Most applicants hold a position at an academic or research institution, but it is not required.
• In any given year, about half of successful applicants propose projects directly pertaining to the School’s theme. Applications not relating to the theme are equally welcome.

For more information, visit IAS.