Group items tagged

The funding program is designed to be interdisciplinary and to facilitate projects in which there are varied dimensions to the examination of abandoned cities. At the same time, there should be a focus on causal correlations, both with regard to specific individual cultures and spanning all cultures, and on specifics of place and time. Thus far, such places have emerged for very different reasons, including military destruction, natural disasters, epidemics, environmental pollution, economic collapse, financial speculation, mobility, migration, centralization, deindustrialization, or post-colonial change, to name but a few. The aim of the program is to describe the tangible cultures of interpretation, knowledge and perception within these different contexts. Lost Cities are part of a distinct culture of memory, for example, which serves for the negotiation of identities, the preservation of knowledge cultures, the formulation of criticism of progress, or the construction of mythical or sacral topographies as part of a veritable "ruin cult". On this basis, the focus here should not be on the question of which factors led to the city's abandonment. Rather, it is the abandoned cities themselves that are of particular interest, as well as the different forms of their interpretation, instrumentalization and coding in various cultures and time frames.

This Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the Foundational Science Research Unit (FSRU) of the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) solicits new proposals for its fiscal year 2017 program of basic research in behavioral science. It is issued under the provisions of paragraph 6.102(d) (2) and 35.016 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which provides for the acquisition of basic and applied research and that part of development not related to the development of a specific system or hardware procurement through the competitive selection of proposals. Proposals submitted in response to this BAA and selected for award are considered to be the result of full and open competition and in full compliance with the provisions of Public Law 98-369, Section 2701, "The Competition in Contracting Act of 1984" and subsequent amendments. The U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences is the Army's lead agency for the conduct of research, development, and analyses for the improvement of Army readiness and performance via research advances and applications of the behavioral and social sciences that address personnel, organization, training, and leader development issues.