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.
2026 Seed Grant Awardees
What does it mean for the Moon to be used for the “benefit of all countries” when exploitation becomes technologically feasible? As lunar development accelerates, treaty commitments shift from aspiration to operational test. This project develops a public, experiential installation in which participants construct and stress-test interpretations of shared benefit under escalating conditions of scale and resource pressure. Using modular architectural design, participants build and adapt systems of benefit as scenarios intensify. The resulting patterns will inform a scholarly analysis of Article 11(5) Moon Agreement regime activation and produce a reusable ethics module for curriculum and public engagement.
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Escalating book bans and restrictive state policies have positioned educational censorship as an urgent applied ethics issue, limiting teacher agency and students’ access to inclusive, democratic curricula. This project addresses censorship in Arizona by designing and studying the Censored Ethics Teacher Institute, a professional development initiative at Arizona State University. Convening an interdisciplinary cohort of secondary educators, the institute will foreground ethical inquiry, civically engaged teaching, and literacy as pathways for navigating censorship. Through collaborative learning and teacher-led action research, the project positions teacher agency as an ethical practice essential to sustaining intellectual freedom and democratic education in contemporary schools.
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This project advances applied ethics through community-centered storytelling as a form of ethical knowledge-making and relationship-building. Building from the Storytelling Learning Futures Collaborative (LFC): Re/Learning Our Spaces, Places, and Times, we will convene an interdisciplinary workgroup of faculty, graduate students, and community storytellers to co-develop ethical storytelling practices that bridge academia and lived experience. Through facilitated pláticas, public storytelling events, and collaborative design sessions, the project will prototype ethical frameworks, methods, and public-facing outputs that foreground care, consent, reciprocity, and community accountability. Outcomes include a public storytelling event, a community-informed ethics framework, and a competitive external grant proposal.
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ASU Farm seeks to empower its community through scholarship, education, and agriculture experiences. As a Principled Innovation initiative, it also aims to cultivate students’ capacity to imagine, innovate, co-create, and nurture ethical futures that promote human and nonhuman flourishing. I propose a survey-based evaluation of the psychological and knowledge impacts of student participation at the farm. Funds will be solely utilized to incentivize participation in the survey evaluation. Findings will inform future grant proposals to scale this initiative at ASU, other institutions, and through randomized controlled trials.
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Space ethics needs to keep up with the rapid advance of space technology. Here we propose to research the attitudes that govern ethical decision-making related to the treatment of space environments. Should humans settle Mars, if Mars has indigenous life? Do we have any ethical obligations to planetary bodies without life? How do we balance the benefits and risks of using space resources? We will finalize and deploy a psychometric survey, both at ASU and among the U.S. public, building on past studies of Earth environmental ethics. Finally, we will leverage our results to develop curricular material for a new general studies course about space ethics.
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Joe O'Rourke
Andrew Hudson
Kathryn Johnson
Caitlin Roe
Jameson Wetmore
With the increasing popularity of video games and their role in informing perspectives and shaping citizens, we will continue our project that began with support from LCAE 2025 grant funds. Last grant cycle, we achieved our goal of consolidating scholars from across ASU studying, making, and teaching video games with an ethical eye. With this established foundation (~20 people), the group has been actively making introductions, sharing opportunities, and imagining collaborative grant projects. The next step is to build on this established foundation so it may grow into a formalized research group with actionable objectives and tangible goals.
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2025 Seed Grant Awardees
The retreat and diminishment of public goods and commons is a major driver of social, economic, and political dysfunction. The need for these spaces, however, has never been stronger, and we have the opportunity to reimagine the role of public goods in our economy, bringing to bear the tools of speculative fiction and world-building. This project convenes multidisciplinary experts, creatives, and world-builders to co-create imaginaries that can help develop new theoretical
approaches to ethical thinking about public goods, and to enliven the public’s imagination with possibilities for a flourishing commons. Expected products are tangible artifacts illustrating commons-based scenarios, a repeatable design charrette process, and an example of how generative ethnography might advance economic theory.
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American undergraduates are often challenged to create new technologies or innovative solutions to solve problems for communities in the Global South. Unfortunately, studies of engineering and technology courses show that many students exhibit implicit bias when it comes to understanding the context, cultures, and the conditions of such communities. Students therefore ask “incorrect questions” and produce uninformed designs that can make local situations even worse. This project will develop two scenario-based exercises that can be plugged into courses and other teaching venues to help students recognize and overcome their biases and increase the chances that their designs help communities.
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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.
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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.
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Chelsea Haines, Co-Chair
Ninabah Winton, Co-Chair
Liz Grumbach, Advisor
Cristóbal Martínez, Advisory Committee
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Advisory Committee
DB Bauer, Advisory Committee