ISLA is awarding grants of up to $5000 for research projects by faculty and graduate students related to this year's annual research theme: Technology and the Common Good. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis while funds remain available.
Click here for more details and to apply.
Feel free to contact me, Josh Tychonievich (tychonievich1@nd.edu), if you have any questions.
Annual Research Theme: Technology and the Common Good
In light of Notre Dame’s mission to be a powerful force for good in the world, ISLA aims to foster scholarly engagement with the promise and peril of technology. The technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution greatly expanded what humanity could produce and accumulate, even as many of these same technologies fostered exploitation and destruction and now threaten the earth and humanity. Information technologies, from the printing press to the internet, have greatly increased the speed of communication. Today, not only information but also misinformation can traverse the globe in seconds, inspiring violence and dissolving trust. The same technological breakthroughs that have increased quality and length of life for some have widened the gap between those who benefit and those who lack access. Clearly technological advances have had varied effects. How can we make technology serve the common good? How can we, in the words of Pope Francis, “ensure that scientific and technological growth is increasingly reconciled with a parallel ‘development of the human being as regards responsibility, values and conscience?’”
Taking to heart the notion that technology is a subject of inquiry not only for science and engineering but also the liberal arts, we seek proposals that evaluate the impact and ethics of technology in the past, present and future. How can the arts make use of technological advances to create meaning, or how might artistic endeavors shed light on the ethics of using particular technologies? What do we learn by studying technology through a humanistic lens that fully accounts for the social and cultural contexts that foster and respond to innovation? How might the social sciences point toward the best ways to harness the benefits of technology while restraining its worst effects? How might interdisciplinary inquiry help us meet our current moment to ensure the dignity of all amid profound and rapid change? Such questions lie at the center of this year’s research theme.
Originally published by at alresources.nd.edu on October 23, 2023.