Seed Grants

Meet our first cohort of seed grant awardees:

Apocalypse Pop-Up Cafes

We seek funding to hold three Apocalypse Pop-Up Cafes from Spring 2025 to spring 2026. Each two-hour event will consist of semi-structured activities designed to develop relationships among participants, building trust and open communication to enable ethical reflections that support cross-cultural understandings in times of crisis (re: both fictional apocalypses and the real-world events they are based on). These events will build a foundation for future collaborations that are not possible with a more instrumental approach, especially across interdisciplinary lines and the faculty/student binary. 

Student-centered Biomedical Ethics Course Redesign

We propose to convene a group of undergraduate biomedical engineering students to help turn the current, required ethics course in their program (BME 213) from a 1-credit to a 3-credit offering. This group will help us co-design meaningful and relevant activities and case studies designed to help students build community, reflect on their individual relationships and responsibilities as engineers (micro-ethics), and grapple with broader social and ethical dimensions of the biomedical engineering system (macro-ethics). We will bring an ethics of care orientation to the co-design process, and to developing content that empowers students to negotiate the complexities of engineering practice.

Inaugural Workshop on Race, Politics, and Ethics 

The Inaugural Workshop on Race, Politics, and Ethics (RPE) is a two-day event focusing on philosophical scholarship of all traditions related to topics at the intersection of race, politics, and ethics. Though focused on philosophical scholarship, the RPE is an opportunity for all ASU members (faculty, staff, students, and alumni) to reflect on how philosophical inquiry into topics related to race can influence investigation into applied ethical issues and aid in nurturing our collective ethical future aimed at human and societal flourishing.

Critical Game Studies Workgroup

With the increasing popularity of video games, and as questions turn to their potential role in informing perspectives and shaping better citizens, we will consolidate scholars from across ASU to create a workgroup for those studying, making, and teaching video games with a critical eye. This will facilitate collaborations and support for seeking external funding to produce a cross-campus support system for this work while also strengthening ASU’s output on ethical games-related work. Ultimately, we will share materials produced through the workgroup as part of a website that will provide publicly accessible snapshots of our research and game making processes.