Call for Concepts: “Unruly Intelligences” and “Normalization and Its Discontents”

Higher Learning’s Open Call for Concepts supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import. Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students, and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. The Mellon Higher Learning team will review all submissions and invite a small number of the most promising concepts to be developed into full proposals for potential grant funding.   This funding opportunity is overseen by Mellon’s Higher Learning program. Applications must be demonstrably grounded in the humanities and led by scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Experimental methodologies, interdisciplinary and community collaboration, and pathways to informing campus and/or wider policies and practices are welcome. 

The Mellon Foundation invites institutions of higher education to submit applications for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the following two areas:

Unruly Intelligences

The emergence of generative AI has triggered a firestorm of techno-utopian promises and apocalyptic predictions alike. With so much at stake, the humanities have an urgent role to play in shaping contemporary understanding of artificial and other intelligences – and in making practical, informed recommendations about how to regulate and/or adopt AI in our learning, work, and most intimate lives.

Normalization and Its Discontents

The concept of normalcy is paradoxical. It entails the statistically average that is at the same time a moral imperative, a completely ordinary state that is nonetheless much to be desired, a cultural ideal. Moreover, the normal often functions as the ideal even when it is not numerically average. How does the concept of normalcy govern notions of human life, and when doesn’t it? What are the structures and systems that keep it in place, in realms as disparate as the aesthetic, socioeconomic, psychological, physiological, political, spiritual, and ethical? What, if anything, does the historical knowledge of its recent invention – and vigorous social rejections – enable?

Contact limitedsubs@uw.edu to receive 2 pdf files with more information about these grantmaking areas, including project examples, as well as eligible fields of study.

Application Instructions

Please submit as one combined pdf labeled with PI’s Lastname, Firstname:

1. A one- to two-page letter of intent that clearly state the subject area (Unruly Intelligences or Normalization and Its Discontents), a project description, the project’s goals, its potential impact, and the fitness of the PI/grant team for the proposed work.
2. CV (not biosketch) of the PI

to limitedsubs@uw.edu by 5:00 PM Wednesday, November 19, 2025. If given the go-ahead by the limited submissions review committee, registrations are due to the sponsor 12/1/2025 and concept notes are due 2/17/2026. A member of the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations will assist applicants with their registration.