ENCATC Research Award

The ENCATC (European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centers) Research Award on Cultural Policy and Cultural Management will be granted for a recently published PhD thesis exploring issues at stake and taking a step from evaluative (descriptive) to comparative applied research, or to a PhD thesis that informs policymaking and benefit practitioners active in the broad field of culture. Application deadline is 31 May 2023.

This prestigious recognition aims to stimulate academic research in the field of cultural management and cultural policy with an emphasis on its applied implications. The ENCATC Research Award also has the ambition to contribute to the process of creating a network of scholars who are competent in doing ground-breaking research projects in cultural policy and cultural management.

For this Research Award, a very broad definition of culture is used, going from the arts, cultural heritage and culture and creative sectors. Doctoral thesis submitted to the call should be related to the domain of cultural management and or policy.

Granted each year, the Award consists in a new book based on the winning doctoral thesis being published in the ENCATC Advances in Cultural Management and Policy Book Series, a series of publications specialising in topics related to cultural management and cultural policy. The ENCATC Book Series is now edited by Routledge, the world’s leading academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences and STEM.

The ENCATC Award targets emerging researchers in the field of cultural policy and cultural management up to 35 years of age from Europe and the rest of the world. All the PhDs must be presented in English although the original version can be in another language.

2023 Schedule

The 2023 call for ENCATC Research Award applications is as follows:

19 April 2023: Launch of the 2023 Call for Applications
31 May 2023: Closing date for applications at midnight CEST Time
1 - 30 June 2023: Assessment of the applications
7 July 2023: Announcement of the 3 shortlisted candidates
11-13 October 2023 (exact date TBC): Ceremony

How to apply

1. Check your eligibility

To be eligible for the ENCATC Research Award:

Candidates may be of any nationality and reside in any country worldwide.
Candidates may be young or emerging researchers who have been recently defended their PhD thesis (up to 2 years after defence of the thesis) and be qualified with cum laude or equivalent highest qualification in the corresponding country’s higher education system.
Doctoral thesis submitted to the call must be related to the domain of cultural management and or policy.
Doctoral thesis may be submitted in any language. However, the applicant must submit an extensive summary in English.
The work submitted for evaluation must be original (except for material in the public domain and/or material included with written permission of the copyright owners). This work cannot have been published previously in any form, whether fully or partially. However, if required, the work can be made available on a university website or in a national library.
The work submitted for evaluation must not violate or infringe any existing copyright or licence or any other right of any person or party.
Candidates can apply once only.

2. Find support to your application

Each Award applicant must be supported by his or her university in the form of two letters of recommendation by the members of university’s jury/assessment board involved in the public defense process.

3. Prepare your application and submit documents

Applicant must fill in the online application form and upload the following documents into the online application system:

CV
A cover letter
Original table of contents of the doctoral thesis and a link to the full text
A 3,000 word summary of the doctoral thesis in English including:
- Aim of the study and research questions
- Theoretical framework
- Methodological approaches, data collection and analysis, and ethical considerations
- Main results of the study
- Theoretical and practical contributions to the field of cultural management and/or policy
- Main references
Letters of recommendation of two members of university’s jury/assessment board involved in the public defense process

Applications which are incomplete, do not meet eligibility criteria or do not respect the application procedure will be rejected automatically by the system.

ENCATC will send an e-mail to the applicant confirming the acceptance of the entry and facilitating a registration number which should be quoted in all subsequent correspondence.

If the documentation furnished contains correctable errors, ENCATC will notify the applicant to this effect, granting a non-extendible term of five calendar days after the original deadline, in which to rectify the flaws detected, so the entry may be accepted for consideration.

Assessment criteria

The Assessment criteria will be based on:

Thematic area;
Quality of the research and the research methodology;
Originality of the research topic;
Innovative character of the research design;
Relevance and inspiration for the field and/or for policy makers;
International and comparative dimension of the research;
Quality of writing.

Assessment Procedure

An international Jury will evaluate the applications and select the 3 finalists.

The selection process will take place in two steps:

A pre-assessment will be carried out to select the best candidates. For this, all eligible applications will be individually read and evaluated privately, according to the assessment criteria, by at least two Jury members.
Once the best candidates are selected, an individual, quantitative assessment of the different criteria by all Jury members - except for those with a conflict of interest, who will be excluded from the process - , will be carried out. After this, Jury members will select the shortlisted candidates upon discussion in an online meeting. Qualitative measures such as the expected overall quality of the resulting book, the timeliness of the topic and its alignment to ENCATC priorities, or the insertion of the resulting book in the ENCATC Book Series, among others, will be factored into this discussion, in a genuine peer review assessment process.

Announcement and acceptance

The winner will be selected and announced at the occasion of the ENCATC Research Award Ceremony to be organised on the 11-13 October (exact date TBC) in Helsinki, Finland, as part of the ENCATC Congress 2023, and publicly disclosed through the ENCATC website and social media channels.

Upon acceptance, the winner must also commit to personally attend the Award ceremony

Depending on the design of the Award Ceremony programme, finalists may be invited to present their work to an international audience.

The fact of participating in the ENCATC Research Award signifies the acceptance of its conditions and the Jury decisions, and renunciation of any claim in their respect on the part of the applicant.

If the wining candidate does not accept the Award, it will be offered to the candidate that came in the second place.

When accepting the Award, the winner must commit to provide ENCATC with a proof edited manuscript in English - ENCATC will not cover proofreading costs - within the 5 months after the Ceremony.

The winner will be requested to sign an agreement with the publisher, Routledge.

The winner shall also commit to actively contribute to the dissemination of the book and promote it via different channels and events formats.

Deadline to apply is May 31 2023.

Check the full Call for Applications here.

ENCATC is the leading European network on Cultural Management and Cultural Policy education. It is a membership NGO gathering over 100 members in 40 countries. ENCATC is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

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