The Luce Foundation is proud to support the sixty-two recipients of Rapid Response Grants from the Social Science Research Council. Scholars representing a variety of social-science perspectives will examine the wide-ranging impacts of COVID-19, including how the pandemic has intensified existing social issues, disproportionately affected some of society’s most vulnerable populations, and interacted with existing health disparities and other environmental and social crises.

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Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Social Science Research Council has supported social researchers in generating knowledge in moments of crisis, from the Great Depression and World War II in the first half of the twentieth century to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in the new millennium. Even as scholars grapple with how to safely conduct research during the current crisis, social transformations are occurring in real time that require the scholarly community’s urgent attention. In April, we launched our Virtual Research Center on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences, dedicated to understanding the coronavirus pandemic, its immediate effects, and its lasting consequences. As a central component of this effort, we issued a call for proposals for rapid-response research grants for innovative and ethically informed projects using remote methods on key issues impacted by Covid-19.

Today, in partnership with the Henry Luce Foundation, and with the generous support of the Wenner-Gren, Ford, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations, we are pleased to announce sixty-two recipients of the Rapid-Response Grants on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences. These grantees were chosen from a pool of over 1,300 applicants, the largest-ever in our history. Over half of their projects are international or transnational in focus, and over one-third center on countries in the global South. They will examine the wide-ranging impacts of Covid-19—including on education, the workplace, health care, and religious practices—from the perspectives of a range of disciplines, from anthropology to political science to psychology.

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