RCD Request for Proposals

A substantial amount of the funding for the Reinventing Civil Defense Project is earmarked for sub-projects that will help to increase our understanding of the possibilities of raising nuclear salience.

Saturday Evening Post, fallout map from 1963
A watercolor map of nuclear fallout from the Saturday Evening Post, 1963

The form of these projects is intentionally vague. A few of the ideas suggested in our original funding proposal include:

  • A virtual-reality experience for understanding the scale and scope of nuclear weapons
  • Targeted histories of the American and Soviet Civil Defense experiences, with a focus on their successes and failures at raising salience
  • A meta-review paper of the psychological/sociological literature on how messaging and training changes risk awareness and perception over the long-term
  • Explorations into the mediums of theater, graphic novels, video games, etc., as a means of raising nuclear salience

These are meant to be suggestive of the breadth of the scope we are interested in. These projects would have to be “completed” to some degree on a relatively short (in most cases, under 1 year) timescale, and so many of these may only be projects to create “suggestive prototypes” that we can use in our workshops and discussions.

If you are interested, please click here to read the full Request for Proposals. Note that submissions are due by 5:00PM EST on Friday, October 20, 2017. We have tried to intentionally keep the amount of application materials to a minimum. Funding decisions will be made by our Advisory Committee.

If you have questions, please contact reinventingcivildefense@gmail.com; we are happy to give more information and clarify anything that is unclear here.

Applicants need not be academics, or in or affiliated with academic institutions.

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