Seed Grants
Apply for a Seed Grant
The LCAE Prototyping Ethics Seed Grant provides support for faculty seeking to develop applied ethics programming at ASU, across research, pedagogy and engagement.
Priority will be given to collaborative, interdisciplinary projects with the potential for both intellectual and/or broader impacts. Projects with a strong likelihood of receiving external funding and/or public-facing outputs as a result of the seed grant are also prioritized.
The project team must include at least one person from the ASU faculty track (research, teaching, clinical or tenure track) as part of the collaborative team. Faculty across all campuses and disciplines are invited to apply and we encourage applicants to interpret applied ethics broadly.
The seed grant program is capped at $5,000 with a period of performance of 12 months. Workgroup proposals are encouraged to remain within a $1,500 budget unless a compelling reason exists to request additional funding.
The Spring 2026 application period has closed, but exciting opportunities are just around the corner. Sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know when the next application period opens, so you can take the next step toward bringing your vision to life.
2024 Seed Grant Awardees
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.
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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.
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Arheum Lim
Emma Frow
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.
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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.
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Current Workgroups
The AI and Sustainability workgroup scrutinizes the environmental justice dimensions of deploying AI and the long-term sustainability of this technology from the perspective of environmental humanities.
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The AI Ethics workgroup is a collaborative forum dedicated to navigating the complex ethical challenges arising from the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. Comprised of experts from fields such as tech ethics, data science, and critical technology studies, the group endeavors to establish ethical guidelines and frameworks for the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies.
Meet the members
Sarah Florini, Co-Chair
Nicholas Proferes, Co-Chair
Marisa Duarte
Alexander Halavais
Jaime Kirtz
Michael Simeone
Shawn Walker
Camilla Fojas
Past Workgroups
This working group will explore and experiment with questions related to data colonialism, the counter archive movement, postcolonial archives, extractive data technologies, Collections as Data, AI and cultural heritage work, reparative practices for medical humanities, the affordances/limitations of existing digital archival platforms, and dismantling white supremacy in the archives (Caswell). Our discussion and outcomes will focus on strategies for repair, and alternatives for when repair is not possible or preferred.
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Liz Grumbach, Co-Chair
Purdom Lindblad, Co-Chair
As museums and universities globally are tasked with providing information about their collections that is both accessible and equitable to their communities, major questions have arisen regarding the role of technology and ethics as knowledge production expands into the realms of machine learning, artificial intelligence, mass digitization platforms, and virtual reality exhibitions.
The working group in digital museum ethics seeks to establish a set of conversations, critical readings, workshops, and–eventually–guidelines for museum ethics in both the physical and digital realms. We anticipate that the findings of this working group will explore our relationship to physical and digital artifacts as representations of a distant past that allow us to imagine ethical, inclusive futures.
Meet the members
Chelsea Haines, Co-Chair
Ninabah Winton, Co-Chair
Liz Grumbach, Advisor
Cristóbal Martínez, Advisory Committee
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Advisory Committee
DB Bauer, Advisory Committee