Environment submissions database

COVID-19 Annex Challenges: The combined impact of a global pandemic and changes in the external environment unsurprisingly took its toll. The effects of COVID-19 on our finances, via lower student recruitment, and on research expenditure sat alongside challenges to both existing and new sources of funding—not least due to Brexit, which showed in a drop in European Union funding to only 4% of our new awards in 2019/20. Strategic and practical response: For all its long-term challenges, the COVID-19 crisis has also provided us with an opportunity to rethink our research culture and priorities in the context of the School’s 2020 restructuring project, which thoroughly examined and reorganised our governance, financial and research-oriented infrastructure. The deep structural effects of COVID-19 evident in diaspora communities in the UK as well as in Asia, Africa and the Middle East have led to us focusing our expertise on new research initiatives, including our work with multilingual communities in London and a £490k UKRI/AHRC project, awarded to study COVID-19-related health information in several local community languages. Led by a Director, Baroness Valerie Amos, who had previously served as the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, SOAS drew on internal expertise in managing complex humanitarian crises to institute our response. Researchers-at-risk, whether due to their own or their research communities’ underlying health and social conditions, were offered wellbeing and work-related advice, including detailed Remote Working guidance. In addition, managers were instructed to consider the inequal impact of COVID-19 on all staff with caring responsibilities. We moved nearly all of our teaching and examinations online, improved the accessibility of our virtual research resources and made the delivery of our on-site Library services as safe as possible. People: Many of our UKRI projects obtained extensions and we were successful in winning COVID-19-related funding. SOAS received £322k in UKRI COVID-19 grant extension funding. Our research infrastructure now includes an Associate Director of Research tasked with co-ordinating and helping promote all SOAS COVID-19-related research, which is highly interdisciplinary and promising in terms of its intended social impact. Our institutional participation in the $1bn-endowed Open Society University Network has secured novel research opportunities for SOAS staff and students, including two new funding schemes for those whose scholarship incorporates community-based research and supports sustained community partners as long-term collaborators, which could be particularly attractive to researchers interested in the many aspects of the COVID-19 global crisis. Finances: Over this period, there was a sharp rise in new grant applications—especially in Development Studies, Politics and History. The average value of bids increased to £308k. We supported 14 Seed-corn Fund applications, awarded in July 2019, for a total of £96,160. Because of COVID-19, some project teams were not able to travel and outputs were not achievable; some of the available funds were therefore allocated to support COVID-19-related applications. We awarded £19,494 across ten grants specifically related to COVID-19-concerned projects. These covered topics including waste management; understanding cultural, social and linguistic differences; community resources; and COVID-19-related misinformation.