The Open Society Fellowship 2025 Description:
Title: The Open Society Fellowship 2025 Thinkers and Practitioners Worldwide
Application deadline: December 16, 2024
Since 2008, the Open Society Fellowship has supported heterodox thinkers and practitioners from around the world. This year’s fellows will be selected exclusively from seven cities—chosen because they are home to a dynamic circle of public intellectuals and cultural producers engaged in high-level critical debate. The fellowship will help elevate new voices to take part in global conversations on the most pressing issues of our time – from human rights and social justice to climate change and inequality—and provide established public intellectuals new audiences for their work. Four fellowships will be granted in each of the seven cities, for a total of 28 fellowships. Selection is highly competitive.
The Seven Cities:
- • Beirut, Lebanon
- • Buenos Aires, Argentina
- • Colombo, Sri Lanka
- • Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania
- • Jakarta, Indonesia
- • Lagos, Nigeria
- • Taipei, Taiwan
WHO SHOULD APPLY?
Fellows may be academics, journalists, documentarians, think-tank experts, playwrights, poets, architects, urban planners, novelists, visual artists, cultural empresarios, or practitioners in other fields. They are original and contrarian intellects, working on fundamental open-society concerns—such as justice, equality, rights, climate—but beyond the bounds of current thinking. Their projects will help us see the world in more complex ways. Successful applicants will be deeply rooted in the local political, economic, and cultural milieu, but also conversant with issues of the region and the planet. As critical thinkers, they are not focused on advocacy or policy change per se. And, though they will not work in tandem on a specific theme, all fellows will be linked by their mistrust of received ideas, as well as by their aptitude for debate and contestation at a high level of originality and sophistication.
SELECTION CRITERIA
Fellows will be selected based on three main criteria:
- • Engagement: Successful applicants are already contributing meaningfully and critically to intellectual debates in a multitude of ways — writing for journals or other media, hosting podcasts, authoring plays, organizing public events or lectures, etc.
- • Mutuality: In a broad sense, fellows will share the interests of the Open Society Foundations—regarding rights, justice, and equality—even if they may differ on matters of strategy, tactics, or even high principle.
- • Trajectory: Applicants should possess the drive and the potential to break through to new audiences; with support from this program, they will gain many of the resources they need to do so.
FELLOWSHIP PROJECT TOPICS AND OUTPUTS
Applicants can propose a project on any topic of interest to them, within the parameters listed above. A typical fellowship output might be a book manuscript, a collection of essays, a series of convenings or podcasts, an art exhibition or the staging of a play, or something else altogether.
EXPECTATIONS
Fellowship applicants will propose a project of ambition and originality and will be expected to complete or make significant progress on that project during their fellowship term. They may undertake travel, with financial support from the fellowship, to advance their project. In addition, they will be expected to attend two fellowship gatherings per year (with expenses covered by the program) and interact in other ways with fellows, Open Society staff, and outside experts.
SUPPORT
Fellows will receive a living stipend for one year of $100,000, as well as up to $20,000 for project expenses, for full-time work on their fellowship. In addition, they will be supported to attend fellowship-related events. The term of the fellowship is one year, but fellows are allowed to request an extension, without further compensation, for up to an additional year.
For more information and application:
Click here for more information
Official website of the The Open Society Fellowship 2025 Thinkers and Practitioners Worldwide
