Are you passionate about using your art for social change, or bringing your research to new audiences?

Supported by the Open Societal Challenges Fund and the British Association for the Study of Religions, the Open University, King’s College London and Pitik Bulag cartoon collective are launching a competition to bring together outreach focused academics and cartoonists to collaborate on a series of images that make the latest research about pressing social challenges accessible to audiences.

Five successful cartoonists will each be awarded a £300 fixed commission to collaborate with the five successful academics with similar topical interests. Each academic-artist partnership will then have six weeks to work together to produce a cartoon and one paragraph accompanying text in English. The five resulting works will be exhibited at a series of international academic conventions and gallery installations, and put forward to a final competition with prizes for judges’, people’s and academics’ choice. Copyright will remain with the creators.

If you have any questions about the call, please email one of the organizers: pitikbulagph@gmail.com and precious.chatterje-doody@open.ac.uk.

Applications procedure:

Cartoonists and academics should submit a one-page Expression of Interest (EoI) to precious.chatterje-doody@open.ac.uk by 12 noon (GMT) on April 3, 2024.

For cartoonists, they should also submit between 1 and 3 examples of their previous work. Their EoI should say the following: 1) Why you want to collaborate with an academic; 2) What experience you have of working with others, and if you have worked with academics before; 3) What kind of social challenges you are most interested in, and how your art could help address them.

For academics, the half of their Eol should be dedicated to the applicant’s motivations for, and any relevant experience of, academic-artistic collaborations. The other half should provide an outline of the
academic’s research topic and the particular finding/s that they envisage rendering as a cartoon. Joint applications from academic co-authors will be considered, but should state a lead applicant to be matched with the cartoonist, if successful.

Work on any social challenges is eligible for the competition, but we particularly welcome EoIs related to: international relations, history politics, disinformation/counter-disinformation, and the political roles of religious organizations.

Successful cartoonists and academics will be selected on the strength of their previous work and EoI on April 5, 2024.