January 15, 2013
The Mind & Life Institute, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation, invites Contemplative Studies Fellowship grant applications that emphasize the role of the humanities or social sciences in deepening our understanding of contemplative practices in all their aspects. One-year grants are offered to humanities and social science scholars to support research that brings fresh perspectives from the humanities into contemplative neuroscience and contemplative clinical science.
The term "contemplative practice" is meant in a broad sense, including a wide range of diverse phenomena such as prayer, meditation, fasting, prostration, yoga, and tai chi. All successful proposals will engage contemplative neuroscience and contemplative clinical science in some meaningful way. Such engagement can be through direct collaboration with scientists, but need not be.
The MLCSF grant program has two complementary strands. Strand One is for projects that involve new kinds of scholarly reviews and critical analyses of scientific research on contemplative practices. The many possible projects under this rubric would include, for example, an in-depth study of the methodological and cultural assumptions that underlie clinical research on mindfulness. Strand Two projects foster partnerships between scientists and scholars in the humanities or social sciences with the goal of developing new interdisciplinary methods and richer approaches. A project in this strand might combine, for example, an anthropological study of a particular contemplative practice with scientific research on that practice's effects.