BISA members awarded early-career and learning and teaching grants

Each year BISA awards Early-Career Small Research Grants (ECSRGs) and Learning and Teaching Small Grants to members. We’re pleased to announce this year’s awardees and the projects they’ll be undertaking.

The ECSRGs provide up to £3,000 per grant for research in International Studies or a related sub-field. This year’s recipients are:

• Xu Peng (SOAS, University of London) for a project on ‘Checkpoint Politics and Digital Illicit Economies: Scam Logistics in Southeast Asia and West Africa’. This project analyses the rise of the digital illicit economy through a comparative study of scam industries in Southeast Asia and West Africa. Rather than approaching online scams solely as a problem of individual criminality or cybersecurity, the project situates them within international political economy and political geography. It examines how cross-border scam operations are organised, protected and contested along corridors linking China–Myanmar–Thailand and Nigeria to the wider world.
• Bohdana Kurylo (LSE) for a project on ‘Critical Infrastructure, Ontological Security and Wartime Resilience in Eastern Europe’. This project examines how the resilience of critical infrastructure underpins ontological security and wartime resilience in frontline European states affected by Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. The project contributes to IR scholarship on ontological security, critical infrastructure, resilience and regional security by conceptualising infrastructural resilience as a material foundation of national Selfhood, offering actionable insights for European policymakers concerned with hybrid threats, logistics and energy governance.
• Rodrigo Campos (KCL) for a project on ‘The New Christian Militarism: Evangelical Activism, the Far-Right and Policing in Brazil’. This project investigates the impact of Evangelical activism with military police forces and its relationship to far-right politics in Brazil. The project provides an innovative framework to understand the far-right in the Global South, addressing a major gap in the  literature, which remains largely Western-Centric.
• Marcelle Trote Martins (University of Manchester) for a project on ‘Fragments of Witnessing: War, Images and immigration in the UK’. This project investigates how war-related suffering is seen, felt, and politically understood in the UK by foregrounding the perspectives of refugees and immigrants. At a time when images from conflicts such as Ukraine and Palestine circulate rapidly across news and social media, Fragments of Witnessing asks: how do displaced people in the UK encounter and interpret these representations, and what impact do they have on perceptions of belonging, deservingness, and justice.

The Learning and Teaching Small Grants  are provided to support a discrete piece of international studies related teaching activity and/or pedagogic research. This year’s recipients are:

• Massimo D’Angelo (University of Greenwich) for a project on ‘Teaching International Politics at Foundation Level: A Student Perspective’. This project will investigate how Foundation Year (Level 3) students experience the study of international politics, and foregrounds their voices in shaping more inclusive pedagogy. While there is a growing literature on teaching introductory International Relations, there is currently no dedicated pedagogic work on the specific challenges of studying international politics at foundation level from student perspectives.

In addition to the ECSRG and L&T grants, we also allocate funds to our working groups, for Postgraduate and Undergraduate Network activities, bursaries for our annual conference and via our AspIRing Scholars Fund. Our individual funds are tailored to provide support at each stage of your academic career.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash