Funding Opportunities
CIIS Travel and Research Grants
CIIS Travel and Research Grants
The Center for International and Intercultural Studies offers several types of funding for student travel and research.
CIIS Travel Research Grants supports students who want to supplement their off-campus study experience with independent study and research.
The CIIS Fellows Program provides funding for a faculty member and from one to three students to pursue research outside the regular semesters and to share an experience of working off-campus in a significantly different cultural setting.
CIIS Travel Enrichment Grants support students seeking to supplement their off-campus study experience in some way. The purpose of these grants is to enhance immersion in a different culture and extend international or intercultural awareness.
St. Lawrence University Funding Opportunities
The SLU Fellows Program provides funding for students to engage in intensive, on-campus summer research under the guidance of a faculty member.
The Tanner Fellowship was created by the friends and family of Tanner Cornwell to honor the memory of Tanner whose short but extraordinary life touched many people. This award is intended to encourage students to enlarge their capacities to make a positive and creative mark on the world by enabling them to design and pursue educational experiences not otherwise available to them.
Each year the Fred Kahrs award is given annually to selected Global Studies majors to fund research for the senior project, normally field research abroad or in the United States. The application consists of a 2-3 page proposal detailing the proposed research, its relation to the senior project, its feasibility, a tentative timetable and budget, and information on any other sources of funding (e.g. CIIS fellowships) the student is pursuing. Applications should be submitted in the fall for research to be undertaken through the following June. The 2008 deadline for proposals is November 3. Proposals should be submitted electronically to John Collins, chair of the Global Studies Department. Should funds still be available after the November round of proposals there will be an additional call for proposals in the spring with a deadline of April 1.
Recent Recipients of the Fred Kahrs Award
Sean Watkins ‘07 used funds from the Fred Kahrs Award to pursue research while studying on the SLU abroad program in London in Spring 2006. His research project brings together his dual majors in Government and Global Studies and is entitled “Youth Perception of Political Systems: A Comparative Study of Youth Voters in England and the United States.” He is particularly interested in the effect of evolving technologies on young voters’ perceptions of politics.
Ruth Carlson ‘07, a Gobal Studies major and Religious Studies minor, is currently studying on the SLU abroad program in India for Fall 2006 and received a Kahrs Award to do research in Thailand, after the India program ends, on religious tourism, ie on visitors from Western countries who are interested in Buddhism and whose primary purpose in coming to Thailand is to visit temples and monasteries. She is interested in how such tourism affects the Thai people. Ruth previously studied abroad in Australia for a semester so she will be focusing partiuclarly on Australian tourists in Thailand.
Cameron Heiser ‘06 used the Kahrs Award to help fund her travel to Senegal with Professor Erin McCarthy of the SLU Philosophy Department in January 2006. Her interest was cultural tourism, developed through her study abroad experience in New Zealand where she observed the paradoxical relationship between Maori traditional culture and the commodification of that culture for the tourist industry. In Senegal for three weeks, she did an internship with an eco-tourism organization and undertook comparative research on how cultural tourism affects the local communities who help develop it and work in it.
Audrey Paule ‘05, a double major in Global Studies and Biology, received the Kahrs award to do field study with the Mam Mayan people of Todos Santos,Guatemala. This was to provide a Latin American case study for Paule’s senior honors project investigating the ways indigenous communities are affected by changes in agriculture, sense of place, and global economic networks. Paule had spent a considerable amount of time living in northern Thailand and studying the agricultural practices and ecosystems of indigenous groups living in the mountains bordering Burma and Thailand.
Brian Lind ‘04 and Kelly O’Ryan ‘04 were the first to receive the Fred Kahrs Award. They were in the Middle East doing independent research and study abroad from early summer 2003 through January 2004. Their study abroad program was an SIT program in Jordan but they spent the preceding summer in Ramallah, Palestine. In addition to studying Arabic at Birzeit University, they were doing ethnographic research on various activist groups, especially those involved in solidarity and peace work.