he Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation closes out the 2024-2025 academic year during what can only be described as a season of consequence and challenge. In the most important ways, this grant cycle has been enormously successful.

Numbers tell part of the story. Across all grant types, CGII saw over 100 proposals totaling nearly $1.3 million in asks. We awarded nearly $500,000 to 51 projects involving 68 faculty principal investigators and co-principal investigators, 40 graduate students, and 8 undergraduates, hailing from 7 of 11 schools.

The real story, though, is about far more than numbers. Researchers and learners pursued topics that clearly demonstrate the complexity of a global world in flux, and of the rigor and imagination required to engage it. Projects have involved a wide gamut of concerns, including:

• Extending palliative care to older Māori adults in New Zealand
• Studying dust and ice in the cosmos
• Learning about the intersections of law, race, and rights in the history of the Indian Ocean
• Understanding the art of resistance among Indigenous people in relation to Cold War nuclear colonialism
• Creating innovative ways of curating art museums
• Developing building supplies made of living mycelium and demolition waste
• Pioneering computer-science education in rural Colombia and southern Virginia
• Improving surgical data equity in Africa
• Combining scientific and humanistic research to understand lucid dreaming in Bhutan
• Charting refugee movements in humanitarian design in Greece
• Considering China’s role in a newly destabilized world
• Rethinking the role of Bitcoin in supporting democratic advocacy across the globe

Graduate students from a dozen departments and schools have pursued dissertation and master’s topics across six continents.

Undergraduate students have worked with faculty on climate-change resilience in Hawai’i, the Namibian genocide, the effects of border militarization on migrant health in northern Mexico, and an occultation of Pluto in South Africa.

All this at an especially difficult time, as taken-for-granted sources of federal funds have been lost, upending research agendas. In small ways, CGII has tried to respond to this crisis by helping researchers continue projects interrupted by grant cancellations—offering stopgap/bridge funds for projects on humanitarian crises, migration, refugees, asylum-seekers, and related topics from the Ruth-Young-Forbes Fund for the study of humanitarianism in global context.

In the face of this challenge, the variety and vibrancy of global research projects is a reminder that whatever may be going on across the world, inquiry remains vital to the human project of seeking the truths of living together on this planet.