Social sciences research at risk

Can you describe your research project that was impacted by the grant termination, and why this work is important for society at large?

We had an NEH “Implementation” grant to support UC Irvine’s PrisonPandemic project in “Digitizing and Amplifying Stories of Incarceration During COVID-19.” The grant would have supported processing and digitization of 1,400 letters and 440 phone calls, as well as artwork, poetry, and physical objects, documenting the COVID-19 experience among Californians incarcerated in jails, immigration detention facilities, state and federal prisons. The PrisonPandemic team collected these stories between 2020 and 2023, in response to the crisis COVID-19 generated in jails and prisons. Although initial quantitative analyses tracked more than 90,000 COVID-19 cases and 310 deaths in California state prisons alone during the first three years of the pandemic, no projects tracked the lived experiences of people enduring these infections and witnessing these deaths. In the first year of the pandemic, incarcerated people were five times as likely to be infected and three-time as likely to die from COVID-19 as non-incarcerated people. Despite this data, few (if any) sources have given voice to the numbers. PrisonPandemic addresses this gap by creating a comprehensive archive of firsthand accounts from incarcerated individuals living through the COVID-19 pandemic in California carceral facilities. While the stories have been collected, the NEH grant would have supported anonymizing, describing, digitizing, and sharing materials to ensure their preservation and accessibility. Specifically, NEH funding would have ensured completion of the inventory and digitization of the collection, implementing permanent redaction of physical letters, and refining and sharing resources to encourage similar projects that document notable periods in our nation’s history. The project, first, provides a unique qualitative dataset, complementing existing quantitative data on COVID-19’s impact in prisons. Second, it facilitates researcher exploration of the social and psychological effects of the pandemic on incarcerated populations, contributing to a more holistic understanding of public health crises in confined environments, which in turn might inform future policies and interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable populations in similar scenarios. Third, the project benefits the American public by enhancing transparency within the prison system, which is often opaque. By bringing to light the personal stories of those affected by COVID-19, PrisonPandemic fosters a greater understanding of the challenges faced by incarcerated individuals, particularly during emergencies like a pandemic. This increased awareness can drive public discourse and policy reform aimed at addressing systemic inequalities within the criminal justice system.

What stage was your project at when the funding was terminated, and what are the immediate and long-term consequences of this disruption—for your work, your students, and the communities involved?

When our NEH funding was terminated for PrisonPandemic, we were just a few months into the “Implementation” phase of the project: building the infrastructure to redact, process, digitize, and permanently archive our collection of hundreds of letters and phone calls documenting incarcerated Californians’ experiences of living through a global pandemic. Our team had been working since the summer of 2020 to accept and process stories from people in jails, prisons, and detention facilities across the state, often fundraising a few hundred dollars at a time, through social media campaigns, zoom lectures, and small foundation grants, scraping together just enough money to pay for stamps to mail letters about the project into prisons, and to build and host a website, so that we could bring incarcerated voices to the public as quickly as possible. Our $350,000 NEH grant, awarded in 2024 was the largest grant the project had received and finally provided real and substantial financial support, especially for the librarians and graduate students, who had initially volunteered on the project. Indeed, faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and librarians all volunteered their time on the project for its first two-plus years, in the order of thousands of hours, to ensure a hotline was staffed for incarcerated people, letters were redacted and transcribed, and the website sharing these stories was operational. For more than a year, I always had my cell phone at the family dinner table, on call from 5 to 9 p.m. every weeknight in case an undergraduate or graduate student staffing our hotline had technical issues – or just needed emotional support after hearing a particularly traumatic story of isolation, abuse, or, even death, from an incarcerated caller. Our NEH grant would have ensured support for graduate students, like the ones who staffed that hotline, in the next phase of processing stories. Even more important, NEH funds would have ensured that each of those people who took precious time to write or call us would have their stories not just available short-term on a website, but permanently preserved and available to researchers and community members alike in a curated digital archive in the University of California’s Calisphere database. While our team is all-too familiar with doing this work of processing these stories on a volunteer basis, and we are all committed to continuing to do so, the next phase of the project will proceed much more slowly, relying again on volunteer labor of senior team members (who are foregoing other cutting-edge research tasks in order to do this work), and the archive may never be as fully digitized and widely accessible to the public as we had hoped to make it with the support of the NEH grant. Importantly, the grant would have supported outreach and community engagement—ongoing exhibits highlighting materials in the archive, support for community advisory board members engaging the project, and development of best practices materials about our collecting and archiving process. This outreach and best practices work is particularly unlikely to happen by exhausted project managers completing digitization on a voluntary basis above and beyond our other work, including projects that were initiated after we thought PrisonPandemic was funded and staffed.

What unique contributions or breakthroughs might now be delayed or lost entirely due to these funding restrictions and terminations?

Funding restrictions and terminations, like the loss of our NEH grant, will, first, slow our work on the redaction, cataloguing, and permanent archiving of PrisonPandemic, delaying public and researcher access alike to the full range of materials in the collection. Restrictions and terminations, will, second, limit our ability to do the kind of outreach and best practices work we had hoped to develop over the course of the project. In other words, the project will ultimately be catalogued and accessible in the U.C. libraries, albeit likely on a much slower timeline than we had planned for, but we will certainly lack the capacity to do the analytic and outreach work to support other people using and replicating the PrisonPandemic archival materials, essentially stunting the impact of the project. And restrictions and terminations, finally, come with both the severe opportunity costs of other projects we must now forego to volunteer our labor to support the redaction and archiving work of the archive, not to mention the sense of futility we all feel about initiating new projects and seeking support knowing now that federal commitments can be wiped away at any moment with little recourse.

For those who may not be familiar with how federal funding supports academic research, can you share why stable, ongoing support is critical to both scholarship and real-world impact?

First, PrisonPandemic exemplifies the intense investments academic teams make in order to build and launch projects and, ultimately, secure funding to sustain these projects. We worked for four years and through dozens of grant application cycles (including receiving a smaller NEH “foundations” grant, a competitive pre-requisite to even applying for an “implementation” grant). Without consistent research application cycles and regular opportunities to pursue funding, such initial investments, like we made in PrisonPandemic in 2020 and 2021, seem futile, and motivation to build new projects shrinks. Worse, knowing that a project could be built, extremely competitive funding could be secured, but then removed on a few days’ notice, with no recourse, means that reliable commitments can no longer be made to graduate students, or community partners. In other words, the staffing, training, and relationships required to sustain large research projects have been rendered tenuous at best. We have had to tell graduate students we can no longer fund them on this project and community members we can no longer fund their time advising on the project or financially support their outreach efforts promoting the project within their networks. Relational defaults like this will require future repair work and make us hesitant to initiate new commitments for a long time to come.

How can members of the public, alumni, or community partners support your work and/or advocate for the continuation of essential research like yours?

Our team has already been so heartened by offers of financial and in-kind support both from within the university community and from among our community partners, but we know too well from our work building PrisonPandemic that local fundraising and volunteer labor alone cannot sustain large-scale research projects indefinitely. Consistent, sustained funding is necessary to take projects from initiation through the often-less-exciting work of processing, analyzing, digitizing, and ultimately making empirical data, analyses, findings, and resources available to the broader public, as we planned to do with our NEH Implementation grant. For that, we need two things. First, community members must continue to access, use, and share publicly available data and data-based research analyses, noting and objecting when access is thwarted by lack of funding. (Recent cuts have limited access to everything from our PrisonPandemic stories to basic criminal legal system data collected and analyzed by agencies like the Bureau of Justice Statistics, whose funding for both data collection and research analysts has also been slashed.) Second, community members must advocate, with elected officials at every level, for continued public funding – not just from private foundations whose funding and priorities are discretionary and variable—but from public agencies whose mandates are (or were and we hope will be again) to serve the best interests of us all.

Can you describe your research project that was impacted by the grant termination, and why this work is important for society at large?

My project, Citizenship, Democracy, and Political Inclusion, examines why some states make national citizenship accessible and others do not, and whether democratic pressure pushes states towards inclusion. Citizenship laws are important to study because they simultaneously define who belongs to the nation and who gets to participate in elections. Because of the potential that newcomers have to influence politics through voting, do we see democracies as more guarded in making citizens compared to autocracies? Or do we see the liberalizing pressures in democracy spill over into increased opportunities for naturalization? And how is the change of citizenship policy tied to immigration flow? These are some of the questions my project seeks to answer.

Citizenship, like any type of membership, has value in so far as we understand the rules for joining and the utility of being an “insider.” Let me give you an analogy: think about Costco. When do they raise (or lower) the price of membership? What factors affect the price point? Is your ability to enjoy the benefits of membership affected if others get membership? On the one hand, there might be a tipping point where the savings are not worth, say, the lines. On the other hand, you may also think all your family members should be able to get their own card (not just the two on the account). Citizenship is a big-box warehouse club for states. This project wants to know who gets to join and what are the political or economic factors that determine eligibility.

What stage was your project at when the funding was terminated, and what are the immediate and long-term consequences of this disruption—for your work, your students, and the communities involved?

This project has two major components: data collection and data analysis. I was in year 1 of 3, so I was just preparing to send a survey out to citizenship law scholars around the world to complete. We are collecting citizenship policies in 192 countries between 1960 and 2024. Having a large dataset lets us identify general patterns and trends over time, which makes us more confident in some of the relationships we may see between inclusive policy and, for instance, economic growth. So, we were about to send the survey to country experts when the grant was terminated.

This, obviously, was immensely disruptive. We had to stop data collection because we weren’t sure if we could compensate the 100+ experts for their time. I had to notify two graduate students who were going to be brought to the project over the summer that they would no longer be research assistants for this project. And I had to notify my co-authors that the project is delayed. Remember: it takes months (if not years!) to get one of these grants. They go through peer review, panel review, director review, and the chances of getting funded are basically minuscule. It’s very competitive and requires a lot of work. My co-authors and I put in a ton of time that I was now apologizing for.

I will speak personally here. All those emails were terrible to write. I felt like I was letting a lot of people down and that I was breaking professional commitments. I felt (and continue to feel) terrible.

What unique contributions or breakthroughs might now be delayed or lost entirely due to these funding restrictions and terminations?

We cannot collect a whole dataset. Due to generous support by the Provost, we are able to complete our first round of data collection, but it will be limited to only a few sets of policies (naturalization for individuals and spouses) because we can only afford to “contract” so much of our experts’ time. A limited dataset means limited analysis and limited insights. We won’t be able to study, say, refugee policy or affinity (why and when do states allow for citizenship due to cultural connections or special ties). So we learn a lot less about this vital institution, and how it makes or limits a community to have a say in government decisions.

For those who may not be familiar with how federal funding supports academic research, can you share why stable, ongoing support is critical to both scholarship and real-world impact?

Nearly everything that makes modern life safe and enjoyable—from vaccines to the internet – has come out of government-funded university research. And this includes the social sciences! Understanding why people take or resist vaccines and under what conditions internet usage creates cross-cutting communities or isolating echo chambers just as important (For instance, there is no point in developing a vaccine if no one takes it or if policy prevents widespread access). This vital research is done because the federal government has spent over half a century investing in higher education institutions. People come from around the world to be at the cutting edge of this science and innovation; it is our national comparative advantage.

Ongoing support is vital because we continue to face puzzles and questions in the world that need solving! And the thing about science that is so key to understanding its power is that it is cumulative. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and sometimes their theories and explanations prove timeless and sometimes they do not hold up to new threats or challenges. That’s how we know they are new!

How can members of the public, alumni, or community partners support your work and/or advocate for the continuation of essential research like yours?

Communities have never been more vital to higher education. Universities are not only hubs of innovation, but they are also the beating hearts of communities. They employ the community, they teach the community, they provide entertainment and art to the community. Yes, sometimes they challenge the community. Yes, sometimes they make traffic. But they do the important work of making our children into smart adults ready to face the challenges of a transforming and uncertain world. This is a worthy investment.

Can you describe your research project that was impacted by the grant termination, and why this work is important for society at large?

The goal of the CLIMATE Justice Initiative (CJI), funded by NSF’s Geosciences Directorate, was to bring on-the-ground challenges of environmental injustice and governance into the heart of geoscience research and education. Our approach integrated the social sciences into a curriculum delivered to annual cohorts of postbaccalaureate and Ph.D. students from historically marginalized communities. Our approach also centered work with community-based environmental justice organizations, aiming to learn both from them and about ways university research can support their work. A social science postdoc—James Adams—co-taught both a social science course designed for the program, and a weekly Climate Justice Practicum. He also mentored the CJI Fellows throughout their year-long engagement with community-based organizations, demonstrating in a very daily way what social science perspectives offer to research in the natural sciences, and to climate justice.

What stage was your project at when the funding was terminated, and what are the immediate and long-term consequences of this disruption—for your work, your students, and the communities involved?

Our six-year project was terminated about half-way through. The second cohort of CJI Fellows will complete the program at the end of summer 2025. The termination has been very distressing for these Fellows, and especially the postbacs and postdocs—all of whom received layoff notices on June 1, with expected layoffs on July 15. All, of course, have housing leases that would be expensive to break, exacerbating on-going financial anxieties. All were also deeply demoralized by the termination, upending our programmatic promise to build a sense of belonging in the sciences, and in the university, among students for whom this is far from straightforward.

Thankfully, UCI Provost funds became available in mid-June, allowing us to rescind these lay-offs. Many people helped make this happen. Dr. Holly Hapke, director of research development for the School of Social Sciences, played an important and deeply appreciated role.

Although the Provost funds solved near-term financial crises for CJI Fellows, it doesn't solve the longer term demoralization and alienation.

Further, we won’t have the opportunity to support two more CJI cohorts, as planned. These lost Fellows would have enriched the UCI community, and the climate science community writ large.

Funding cuts will also make it difficult if not impossible to adequately report on our approach and results—both within academic circles and more broadly. We have learned a lot, that should be shared and built upon.

What unique contributions or breakthroughs might now be delayed or lost entirely due to these funding restrictions and terminations?

Much is at stake. The project was helping build urgently needed capacity for interdisciplinary collaboration, and collaboration between universities and especially vulnerable communities. Escalating climate change certainly calls for this, as do many other social problems. The project had the potential to build interdisciplinary, community-engaged climate research capacity while also modeling this for other problem domains.

We won’t have the opportunity to further refine and develop our approach, nor write up our research findings to share with others. We also risk losing high potential young scientists—who are more and more likely to take their talents outside the university. Many want to leave as soon as possible. And this is occurring across many grant terminations. As many commentators have noted, we are likely losing a whole generation of researchers. This will substantially undermine our capacity to understand and respond to climate change, among other problems.

For those who may not be familiar with how federal funding supports academic research, can you share why stable, ongoing support is critical to both scholarship and real-world impact?

Federal funding for university research and education has allowed the United States to build a tremendous scientific research infrastructure, interlinked with one of the world’s greatest university systems. It is a recipe that has worked since the 1950s, when NSF was founded.

Federal funding for many social sciences was inadequate before the recent cuts. In 2024, for example, NSF’s Social and Behavioral Social Sciences Directorate received less than 4% of the agency’s overall budget. Yet social science research is ever more necessary today—given, for example, the ever-intensifying complexity of relationships between people and places, and between different kinds of coupled systems (political, economic, technological, ecological, etc.). Without the social sciences, these complexities cannot be understood, much less governed. Consider, for example, the effects of lost research on diverse experiences and perspectives, and on the conditions in which divergent perspectives can become a creative stimulus rather than a source of conflict. Democracies cannot be sustained without recognition of divergent perspectives. Nor can collaboration at global and planetary scales – which good environmental governance of course depends on.

How can members of the public, alumni, or community partners support your work and/or advocate for the continuation of essential research like yours?

Media reports, reiterated by politicians, claim that people have lost interest and confidence in research, science, and even education. I hope people will actively counter this claim, finding creative ways to demonstrate the importance of all of these for democracy and inclusive prosperity. We also need to keep researching and educating through the political storm we are now in—within and beyond the university and K-12 schools. Especially today, we need learned and ever-learning societies. Toward this, UCI EcoGovLab runs publicly accessible webinars for learning across places where people are working to build stronger environmental protections and governance. Soon, we’ll be launching a program called “EcoGovLab En Espanol,” which will be led by UCI alumni Joseph Trinidad (now pursuing a master’s degree at University of Southern California). The goal is to create Spanish-language spaces of exchange and learning about environmental governance, recognizing the importance of comparative and collaborative approaches.