Competition opens for academics and artists to address Social Challenges

A new competition designed to bring together academics and cartoonists to make research about social challenges accessible to a wider audience has been launched.

The competition, supported by the Open Societal Challenges Fund and the British Association for the Study of Religions, The Open University, King’s College London and Pitik Bulag cartoon collective, aims to bring together outreach-focused academics and cartoonists to collaborate on a series of images that make the latest research about pressing social challenges accessible to general audiences.     

Five successful academic applicants will each be matched together with five successful cartoonists with similar topical interests. Each academic-artist partnership has six weeks to collaborate to produce a cartoon and one accompanying text paragraph in English. The five resulting works will be exhibited at a series of international academic conventions and gallery installations, and put forward to a final competition with prizes for judges’, people’s and academics’ choice. Copyright will remain with the creators.

Academic applicants should submit a one-page Expression of Interest to Precious Chatterje-Doody by 12 noon (GMT) on Wednesday 3rd April. Half of this should be dedicated to the applicant’s motivations for, and any relevant experience of, academic-artistic collaborations. Half should provide an outline of the academic’s research topic and the particular finding/s that they envisage rendering as a cartoon. Joint applications from academic co-authors will be considered, but should state a lead applicant to be matched with the cartoonist, if successful.

Cartoonist applicants should submit between 1 and 3 examples of their previous work and a one-page Expression of Interest (EoI) to Precious Chatterje-Doody by 12 noon (GMT) on Wednesday 3rd April. The EoI should outline:​

1. Why you want to collaborate with an academic;
2. What experience you have of working with others, and if you have worked with academics before;
3. What kind of social challenges you are most interested in, and how your art could help address them.

Work on any pressing social challenges is eligible for the competition, but particularly welcome are EoIs related to: international relations, history politics, disinformation/counter-disinformation, and the political roles of religious organisations.

The competition is part of the Open Societal Challenge project ‘Democracy, Information, and the cultural capital of Religion: Sharing Global Best Practice on Press and Election Manipulation’, by Dr Paul-Francois Tremlett (Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies) and Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody (Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies). The project’s long-term vision is to address inequalities in access to and critical interpretation of information that undermine civil society and democratic processes under media and electoral manipulation.

Image credit: Copyright (c) Cartoonist Zach