The Bobst-AUB Collaborative Initiative invites faculty members to submit proposals for seed funding to support their research projects and creative endeavors. This includes topics such as Anthropology, Economics, Education, Gender, Media Studies, Political Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, or other related fields. Research grants are up to $10,000, and the funds may be used for research assistants, equipment, conference participation, and summer salaries. Bobst-AUB has limited funding for this opportunity, and applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Eligibility: Lead PIs should be FAS professorial-rank faculty members. Priority will be given to junior faculty and first-time applicants.
Budget: Up to $10,000
Application materials: Apply online. Please upload in PDF a proposal (1-2 pages) using the following format: I. Introduction and motivation, II. Statement of the research question, III. Brief literature review, IV. Methods, and V. Anticipated budget plan.
Note: Bobst-AUB abides by the AUB Institutional Review Board (IRB) regulations concerning research projects involving human subjects.
Application deadline: TBA
Contact: [email protected]
2024-25
- A Phenomenological Investigation of Epistemic Cognition and Reading Comprehension
Ghazi Ghaith, Department of Education
This proposed research is grounded in the findings of our recent series of studies into the interplay of the determinants of reading comprehension and the academic achievement of college learners from diverse academic disciplines. Specifically, our findings have established that reading metacognitive strategies, particularly problem-solving strategies, predict reading comprehension (Ghaith & El-Sanyoura, 2019) and that reading anxiety negatively impacts comprehension and mediates the use of support strategies (Ghaith, 2020). Additionally, Ghaith (2021) reported that college readers hold dichotomous as well as less contrasting implicit theories (ITs) of reading, which affects their way of approaching text and making meaning. Furthermore, Ghaith and Harkous (2024) proved that readers’ sense of self-efficacy and overall reading proficiency predict academic achievement. Finally, Ghaith (under review1) found significant gender differences in using metacognitive reading strategies in favor of female college readers and concluded that college readers do not hold strong ITs and tend to emphasize locating meaning in text rather than critiquing and constructing meaning (Ghaith under review 2). Our findings have led to a number of pedagogical implications to enhance reading proficiency and subsequently the academic achievement of college learners. Chief among these implications is differentiating instruction, scaffolding readers’ efforts, private feedback, and fostering collaborative intelligence to ensure success for all. Yet, this line of research has generated a number of unanswered questions that we propose to investigate. Because our research participants came from hard as well as soft academic disciplines, it is unclear if their epistemic disciplinary cognition affects their reading ITs and comprehension. Furthermore, our studies, like most of the other studies elsewhere, utilized self-report measures that need validation across various sociolinguistic and cultural contexts (Lordan Sole, & Beltran, 2017). Consequently, we propose to develop valid measures of reading strategies, reading anxiety, motivation to read, and reading ITs that are appropriate to the Lebanese context of higher education. Additionally, we aim to test a number of hypotheses regarding the interplay of disciplinary cognition and the determinants and outcomes of reading comprehension as a complex act of communication that entails literal, interpretive, critical, and creative understanding of what is read. 1. What are the ITs of reading held by college learners from varied academic fields of specialization? 2. What is the role of reading ITs in the literal and higher order reading comprehension of college EFL learners? 3. Is there an interaction between determinants of reading comprehension (reading strategies, reading anxiety, motivation to read) and the reading ITs of college readers? 4. Does gender affect the determinants of reading comprehension (reading strategies, reading anxiety, motivation to read) and the ITs of college learners? 5. What is the relative role of the determinants of reading comprehension (reading strategies, reading anxiety, motivation to read) and reading ITs in the academic achievement of college learners?
- Assembling the Middle East: Markets as Social Experiments
Elizabeth Matta Saleh, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies
For the duration of this seed-grant, my aim is to (a) refine the focus of a research-based project tentatively entitled “Assembling the Middle East: Markets as Social Experiments” and (b) lay the groundwork required to apply for further grants to fund the project’s activities. The focus on the concept of experiment is an invitation for cross-disciplinary engagement to critically think and analyze the often-unintended consequences of visions of markets as implemented through models and practiced across different scales of exchange in the Middle East. My interests to pursue such a project stem from two independent long-term ethnographic case studies I have conducted in two very different settings in Lebanon. My first study focuses on Lebanon’s wine industry and included more than twelve months of fieldwork in the Bekaa Valley that began in 2006. My second study focuses on Lebanon’s scrap metal industry where I have spent nearly a decade working with insiders of the trade that commenced in 2015. Building from my research focus, I intend to develop a project to build a network of scholars who focus on the region, come from a range of disciplines that include history, archaeology, and anthropology to political science, public policy, and economics, and who are making important interventions by using experiment as a lens through which to demonstrate how markets, and by extension market-based economies, do not lie exclusively within the realm of the theoretical. In developing such a research network (which could also be a platform, lab or unit), my objective is to foster further research through (a) activities ranging from workshops to student seminars, (b) establish scholarships or fellowship for junior scholars, and (c) design collaborative projects. Interdisciplinary engagement will be tentatively aimed at interrogating the following II. research questions (a) how have different and even contesting models and policies for market exchange sought to assemble the Middle East? and (b) how have different and even contesting so-called “bottom-up” approaches sought to reassemble the region? Such broad questions lead to the other component of this invitation, which is to explore possibilities for experimental interdisciplinary engagement and collaborative experimentation so to explore possible alternative epistemologies to understanding the spaces and realms that markets hold in the Middle East. Experimental in this regard leans toward methodological inquiries and to innovative and creative ways of engaging academic disciplines.
- Between October and November
Ghalya Saadawi, Department of Fine Arts and Art History
The grant application is for research intended for a book manuscript titled Between October and November, for which I won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize (2023). The reputable literary press is known to publish book-length essays and fiction by theorists and academics, as well as by poets and novelists. The book is written in entries that weave cultural criticism, family history, social history, theories of time, history and revolution, and life writing in the form of a chronicle. It uses the Benjaminian form of the fragment as entries of various lengths from a phrase to several pages, to explore time, loss, as well as the destruction and recurrence of forms under an extended, capitalist modernity. Between October and November continues to think through the cultural preoccupation with the past, as well as with the materials of what has not become history, and where “history is what hurts” (Fredric Jameson, 2012). For that reason, it asks after the redemption of past revolutionary legacies (such as those stemming from anticolonial family histories, in the socialist tradition, Palestine, and beyond), and pursues questions around the contradictions of tradition, destruction, and novelty, while being haunted by mourning and how memory mediates. The prose does so through threads that weave political family histories between Libya, Syria and the north of England, and critically engages with culture through the eruption of the past in the present as evoked in fashion, music, urban life, politics, psychoanalysis. And thus, the book was born of these observations, concepts, motifs, histories that shape its temporal cadence from so many times in this one. The title alludes to this: October the month of revolutions and defeats and harvests. November, the following day. And the Arabic idiom between October and November is another summer.
- Evaluating the Impact of Interschool Collaboration among TAMAM Jordan Hub Schools around Improving Arabic Teaching
Rima Karami Akkary, Department of Education
TAMAM, a research and development initiative since 2007 at the Department of Education at the American University of Beirut (AUB) is requesting funding for a research project that entails evaluating the impact of a four-year interschool collaboration initiative among five Jordanian private schools aimed at improving the teaching of Arabic, the Arabic Teaching Improvement Project [ATIP]. This study aims to address the following research questions: 1- How has the TCBP enhanced the leadership capabilities in schools, particularly in terms of improving the ability to manage and sustain change? 2- How has the instructional development activities contributed to the improvement of teachers' pedagogical knowledge and instructional strategies in Arabic language teaching? 3- What impact has the improvement project had on student achievement in Arabic, particularly in terms of reading, writing, and speaking skills as well as their motivation and engagement? 4- How sustainable are the changes implemented as a result of this initiative in terms of long-term impact on school practices and student outcomes? 5- What additional outcomes or benefits have emerged from the initiative that were not initially anticipated?
- Public Feeling and Perpetual Crisis: Mediating Lebanon's Affective Histories
Zeina Tarraf, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies
Lebanon is a country that is plagued by perpetual crisis. Its contemporary history has been fraught by a seemingly endless amassment of political turmoil and instability. From the abrupt end of its 15-year civil war in 1990 to the latest Israeli aggression in 2024, ordinary and public life in Lebanon has been reshaped, distorted, and reconfigured by a multitude of crises that disorient the country. Some of this turmoil becomes part of the ongoing noise associated with the failed workings of the Lebanese state —it is seemingly peripheral to the constant motion of ordinary life or otherwise so deeply embedded in it that it does not register as a disturbance. Other events, however, create ruptures in how we experience time and everyday life. These ruptures load our everyday lives with new inflections and thrust us into what Lauren Berlant has called new historical presents. In my book project, Public Feeling and Perpetual Crisis: Mediating Lebanon’s Affective Histories, I study different moments of crisis in Lebanon through the lens of public feeling, or in terms of the collective emotional and affective registers that comprise them. I show how media and processes of mediation are implicated in the production and circulation of public feeling. My book is motivated by the following research question: How and why are some feelings made public, and once they are public what kinds of politics/imaginaries do they (dis)enable? In my book, I map the emergence and reconfiguration of media forms, environments, and popular culture across Lebanon’s various historical presents to offer a provocative theory of media and public feeling—one in which a collective mood is not just produced through media but also itself mediates social and political relations. I have already met with editors at Syracuse UP and Stanford UP, and they have expressed interest in the project. I am applying for funding through the Bobst-AUB Collaborative Initiative so that I can complete this book manuscript.
- Solidarity Economy Initiatives and Social Imaginaries at Times of Severe Crisis
Rana Sukarieh, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies
Solidarity Economy (SE) describes a wide range of non-capitalist economic initiatives, such as cooperatives, community gardening, fair-trade initiatives, alternative currencies, community-run social centers, among others. They vary in their nature (reformist vs. autonomous), orientation (policy vs. social movement orientation), models (top down vs. grassroot approach), and imaginaries (reformist vs. radical). In theory, the principles of SE of democracy, sustainability, equity, solidarity, reciprocity, and horizontalism translate into economic practices that prioritize collective wellbeing and counter capitalist practices. These principles shift away from the emphasis on profit-making, on capital, on resource depletion, on concentration of wealth and power toward a prioritization of communities, workers, sustainability, democratization of wealth, and distribution of power (Nikolopoulos & Kapogiannis 2013). The significant resurgence of SE initiatives during times of economic and financial crisis suggests that crisis-laden societies seek a transformation of socio-economic relations through opposing dominant neoliberal economics. It also suggests a shift in social imaginaries towards the creation of self-sustaining, autonomous, and equitable economic models that either work alongside or attempt to reform dominant neoliberal systems. This proposal aims to address critical gaps in our understanding of SE as a social movement that promotes alternative social and economic relations, and specifically focus on the Tunisian society. Although SE flourished in Tunisia since the 2011 uprisings and the relative success of reclaiming and cooperatizing Djemma date oasis (in South Tunisia) (Traboulsi 2022; Kerrou 2021), the country has a history of state-sponsored cooperative movement since its independence. In recent years, and through grassroot and union organization, the Tunisian government passed a law in 2020 that facilitates the constitution of SE. But critics suggest that the authoritarian government in Tunisia crafted a populist policy to coopt the SE movement. Which sociopolitical imaginaries coalesce in Solidarity Economy initiatives as a response to the multifaceted crisis of neoliberalism confronting Tunisia? How are these imaginaries articulating an emancipatory project for the future?
- Stated and Revealed Choices: Evidence from Boycott during War on Gaza
Ali Abboud, Department of Economics
Rising global political tensions are transforming the globalized economy. The opening of McDonald’s in Moscow in 1990 represented the symbolic victory of the West in the Cold War, ushering a new era of globalization with open markets, free movement of capital, and universality of culture. In the past decade, we have seen an accelerating reversal of these trends, with increased use of tariffs, sanctions and asset freezing, and technology exclusion by governments. Boycott has emerged as one of the primary political tools of individuals to take a stance on global politics. Like governments, individuals face trade-offs and constraints that might lead to misalignment between their stated or intend political stance and their actions. In the case of boycott this could be due to several issues, including lack of alternatives, missing or incomplete information, limited belief in the effectiveness of the boycott strategy, etc. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of boycott and the willingness of individuals to engage in them. It also aims to explore evidence on the relationship between stated political stance and actual engagement in boycott. The overarching research objective of this paper is to study the association between stated and revealed choices of economic agents in regards to issues of political nature. The study will be conducted in the context of the war on Gaza and the population response in Arab countries. In particular, we will investigate the stated and actual willingness of people in the region to engage in boycott actions. This will be achieved by investigating the following: 1. Estimate the causal impact of boycott calls on the operational and financial performance of targeted firms, franchises and brands. 2. Investigate how the stated sentiment towards political issues matches collective actions.
- The Skull in the Attic: An Intimate History of Debt and Inheritance in Postwar Lebanon
Sara Mourad, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies
Titled The Skull in the Attic (2026), my book in process is an intimate history of debt and inheritance in postwar Lebanon. It is a personal and theoretical exploration of the violent histories that bind us to place and people, and the ambivalent attachments through which we negotiate staying in, leaving, and returning to the unlivable spaces we call home. Threading memoir, oral history, archival research, cultural criticism, and theory, the book considers what is lost and what is transmitted in a time and space of perpetual crisis, of intimate and social collapse. The stories that populate it, gathered from people, films, and texts, revolve around homes destroyed, abandoned, and recovered. By thinking through the home as a place and an image, I trace a poetics of belonging that does not romanticize the nuclear family or the nation but that rather emerges through their rupture. The story of the skull, which forms the narrative core of my inquiry into war as a domestic experience, is the story of my mother’s return to Lebanon in the summer of 1982 as she had narrated it to me one day after lunch. But it is also the story of a writer asking: “From whence do I, as a writer, come? What is my tradition?” These are the questions that feminist literary scholar Barbara Christian believes every writer must ask. And she distills them through her reading of Alice Walker’s pathbreaking essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” “So many of the stories that I write, that we all write,” Walker writes, “are my mother’s stories.” Through years of listening to them, Walker not only absorbed the stories themselves, but “something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories - like her life - must be recorded” (p.47). The Skull in the Attic is not the story of a perpetual return to a damaged and damaging place, but of what it takes to write it. By following the threads of my mother’s story, I find my way to the attic, and I begin to follow an invisible thread that connects different objects around the house – suitcases, boxes, photo albums, letters, crafts, and video and cassette tapes – and that leads me to other houses, both real and fictional. How does one write an intimate history of war in Lebanon? How may we re-imagine collective memory by examining its transmission through the home and its image?
- Transnational Feminist Strategies to Combat Gender Inequality: Wages for Housework and Universal Basic Income Demands in the Post-Pandemic Era
Maya Gonzalez, Critical Humanities for the Liberal Arts (CHLA) Program
Today, a significant proportion of the global care work rests upon the backs of the world’s poorest women. Despite being essential work, domestic labor is feminized, socially devalued, and rarely studied by economists as contributing to national GDP. Furthermore, what the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated is that without increasing economic provision for households in times of economic uncertainty gendered inequality will rise and exacerbate the global care-gap. Renewed interest in UBI studies since the pandemic show the ways in which gendered inequality is reproduced within households and across transnational care-chains, falls ultimately on the poorest nations. Moreover, given the likelihood of future health crises, something proactive must be done to rectify the unequal global distribution of economic fragility apparent when global reproduction breaks down. Studying the effects of the social reproduction crises will demonstrate the urgent need for political and economic intervention. Comprehending gender inequality requires transnational feminist approaches to analyzing domestic servitude as a mutually constitutive relationship between global North and South. Under neoliberalism, the welfare systems of the world have increasingly subordinated public policy to economic rationalization. Consequently, gendered inequality remains persistent despite liberal privatization and market dependency which restricts the distribution of social benefits to women and households, within and across borders though debt structures and austerity measures. What I propose is a research project which contextualizes the demand for gender equality through universal basic income proposals as a feminist strategy, reviewing the state of the field in social reproduction theory, and finally broadening that field by making an original contribution. By analyzing state of the art studies and data from BLS reports I will propose an international demand for UBI for grassroots organizing around public policy transformations.
- Zero68 – The Black Box Session
Doyle Avant, Department of English
Zero68 is a multi-media performance memoir that seeks to break the metaphorical Time Barrier. The 68 refers to 1968, a year so saturated in history that it resets time to zero. It is a meditation on memory both as a biological function and as an act of subconscious creative mythologizing – an act of survival. Above all, Zero68 is the unreliable story of everything and everyone I’ve ever known. Everyone – that is – except my mother. Jane Maverick Welsh Weicker Avant Reyes. All six names of her. A fairly typical south Texas girl whose life somehow managed to bring her one degree of separation from John Kennedy, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Djamila Bouhired, Timothy Leary and others. Jane was also the 5-x-great-granddaughter of Samuel August Maverick, an escapee from the Battle of the Alamo, and a rancher whose neglect of his cattle led to the coining of the term maverick. A story we love to tell each other at our Maverick family reunions. A story we forget to tell is that Samuel Maverick was also a slave-owner. And that the perks of that trickled down to all of us.