The information collected here was prepared especially for faculty at the Alberta University of the Arts. Please do not circulate.
I don’t work for SSHRC, and this advice is not SSHRC-endorse; instead, it is based on my experience supporting SSHRC applicants over ~9 years, interviews with 49 SSHRC IG and IDG peer reviewers, and interviews with SSHRC research-creation grant-holders from diverse artistic disciplines. See also SSHRC’s own advice for research-creation applicants.
The column that I write for University Affairs is called “Ask Dr. Editor.”
Distinguishing Between Arts Council and SSHRC research-creation:
For the Canada Council, “research” is what you do as you develop your artwork. For SSHRC, art is what you do to develop your research project.
That means that, for SSHRC, you need to have clear objectives, a strong literature review, and a methodology that integrates artistic practice throughout—meaning that the data collection and analysis should involve artistic practices.
Examples:
“The urge to defecate commonly occurs to people browsing in a bookstore. The Mariko Aoki Phenomenon, as it is called, afflicts me when I look at maps. The exquisite network of rivers in a drainage basic. One to fifty thousand scale. I drew maps of my walks, their discharge.” (p. 112, Anatomic, by Adam Dickinson)
Letitia’s imagined (i.e. fake) expected outcomes for Dickinson’s project
- “By articulating how external environmental chemicals literally become internalized, this research-creation will be of value to scholars of the ecohumanities and those investigating human–nonhuman relations, as it will attest to the permeable relationship between human body and our lived environments.”
- “This work will also contribute to methodology, by developing the chemical autobiography as a form that results from bringing together artistic practice and scientific exploration of one’s own body.”
“Barbed wire remnants pop up unexpectedly, embedded in trees, tangled in the grass, stretches of fence fallen in places with time. Once a farm, these fences policed animals. Stay here. Don’t roam here. They continue to police our movement. Sometimes we become tangled in them unexpectedly. We wonder about their stories. We tell our own stories in the places they police. The meadows where we play, make jails, pick raspberries. Now we become police, who are welcome who are not welcome on these lands. What publics are welcome? What future publics can we imagine in this place?” (Thea Cammie, part of the WalkingLab project)
Letitia’s imagined (i.e. fake) objectives for Cammie’s project:
“The objectives of this project are to:
- Articulate how abandoned commercial infrastructure continues to shape human and non-human movement patterns and social relationships; and,
- Envision alternative futures for post-agricultural landscapes that prioritize ecological restoration and inclusive community access over historical patterns of exclusion and control.”
How Grant Peer Review Works:
SSHRC Insight & Insight Development Competitions
SSHRC Manual for Merit Review Committee Members | the real meat begins about half-way down, with the section “Before the merit review committee meeting”
Merit Review Committees is where you can find the list of the last competition’s peer reviewers. You don’t know which ones will be staying on and which ones won’t, so you google them and look up their areas of expertise only to understand just how broadly your reviewership will be.
SSHRC’s Award Search Engine can enable you to locate successful applicants from your institution, region, or professional association, whom you can then approach to ask if they’d be willing to give you guidance on which committee or committees they have submitted to previously, and their impressions of the cultures of those committees. Frustratingly, this search engine appears to have been discontinued effective 2023-24; SSHRC now only lists successful grants by year and competition, making it hard to search effectively.
Implications of Grant Applications’ Unusual Peer Review Processes
- If you are applying to the fine arts & research-creation committee, then your reviewers will be diverse: in addition to fine arts researchers (e.g. art historians), your reviewers will be musicians, composers, writers, sculptors, painters, photographers, filmmakers, dancers, choreographers, performance artists, sound artists, theatre directors and actors, and on and on. Applications that assume specialized knowledge are hard for reviewers to champion. So, help your diverse reviewers to understand what artistic creation looks like in your discipline, and speak broadly about your prior and expected contributions to artistic practice (e.g. innovations in form, performance, creation, practice, etc).
- Write your summary and first page as if they might be scanned during the committee meeting.
- Cite works that your reviewers might remember from their comprehensive exams (or earlier!). If you don’t include the well-known stuff, they assume your don’t know it (even though it is well-known!).
- In our competitive funding environment, clear writing gives your application an edge. Err towards short sentences, cut ‘is’, and balance abstract language with illustrative examples.
Unwritten rules for research grant applicants
Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Post-Secondary Research System is a report published by the Council of Canadian Academies in October 2024 (and it’s the source of Table 5.1, “EDI considerations in select federal grant programs”)
I quoted from this article: Boudreau, K. J., Guinan, E. C., Lakhani, K. R., & Riedl, C. (2016). Looking across and looking beyond the knowledge frontier: Intellectual distance, novelty, and resource allocation in science. Management science, 62(10), 2765-2783. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2285
- Know what your results will be before you propose the project
- Prioritize your contributions to scholarship (knowledge, methods & theory)
- The peripheral pieces are central to a successful grant
You can find additional unwritten rules in the form of quotations from peer reviewers by downloading the four PDFs that I’ve linked to at the bottom of this page.
“Ask Dr. Editor” pieces with grant-specific advice:
- Editing strategies: “Emphasize this: structuring highly readable sentences and paragraphs”; “Clarify this: structuring highly readable lists”; “A quick shave for your grant proposal: cutting your word count in page-limited texts”; “How to integrate storytelling into your next research grant application”; “Using the active voice strategically”; “Simple tricks to add clarity in complex sentences”; “Reducing the weight of your words”; “Writing well is hard: how to write like the best writers in your discipline”
- Impact & influence: “Demonstrating impact in your tenure dossier” (lists tools that you can use to show diverse impact); “Telling your research story with numbers: impact metrics for the humanities” (again, tools that attest to impact); “Against utility and instrumentalization: knowledge mobilization for the humanities”
- Budget & budget justification: “Your grant budget is a mess!”; “Drafting the budget for your first SSHRC grant application” (this three-part structure applies to any budget justification, not just SSHRC; it also links to a free budget brainstorming spreadsheet that I designed specifically for SSHRC)
- Figures & images: “Three ways to use colour effectively in grant applications”; “Quick, yet polished visuals for grant applications”; “Quick yet polished timelines for grant applications” (includes free timeline templates)
- Other specific components of a grant: “How to write a narrative CV”; “Drafting compelling letters of support for research grant funding” (for any partner letters, likely not for IG, IDG, or Discovery); “How to write clear objectives for your research grant proposal”; “On internal alignment: objectives, outcomes, outputs, and contributions in CIHR Project grant applications” (also relevant for SSHRC and NSERC)
- Funders beyond Tri-Agency: “Becoming an academic-artist: how to apply for your first artist’s grant”; “Preventing budget overruns for your CFI Innovation Fund request”; “Submit with confidence: CFI Innovation Fund best practices”
- Other relevant pieces: “Your reader is a little bit drunk”; “Making ambitious research look feasible”; “How to show your project’s worth in social science and humanities research proposals”; “Getting “is” right”
Let me email you these PDFs:
- I recently published the results from my 150+ interviews with former Tri-Agency peer reviewers. I published the SSHRC Peer Reviewers’ Perspectives doc in June.
- I was fortunate to be able to receive funding to hire three UBC graduate student interns to support this project: Andrea Kampen, Olivia Brophy, and Athena Pallas.
- Because I’m hoping to update these documents when I’ve done more interviews, I’ve asked for your email address. This approach means that I can email you with updated or new documents when they are available. Because I want to keep these docs up-to-date, I ask you to not circulate the PDFs at all; instead, please direct your colleagues to my column, where I’ve published the URL that folks can use to get an email with the doc they’re interested in.