Merit Research Awards

About MRA

With funds from the Ford Foundation, this Program seeks to advance theoretically grounded social science research. The research priority areas are:

  1. Social justice, poverty, and well-being;
  2. Civil society, social change, cultural- and spiritual- based values;
  3. Asset building and social capital formation in community-based health, education, shelter, and natural resource management;
  4. Cultures of work, conflict, and peace; and
  5. The impact of globalization on people's everyday lives.

Within these thematic clusters, specific substantive areas would include:

  • Religious change and transformation
  • Families, childhood, youth, and aging
  • Culture, political leadership, and state power
  • Critical analysis of citizenship and civil society
  • Forms of governance
  • Corporations and private authority
  • Social dynamics of agriculture and the environment
  • Articulations of the global-local nexus
  • The coexistence of "modernity" and "tradition"

The research awards, open to the staff of the Ateneo de Manila University, can have a maximum budget of P500,000.00.