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Appendix: Questions in Newcombe-Supported Scholarship
The Newcombe Fellowship is not organized around a fixed list of approved topics or questions. Rather, it is organized around an ongoing inquiry into questions that remain open, contested, evolving, and consequential.
Applicants often assume that Newcombe-supported work must take the form of an explicitly normative argument. While many projects do take that form, others approach questions of religion, ethics, morals, and values through historical, descriptive, interpretive, ethnographic, or analytical inquiry. Some projects ask what ought to be done. Others seek to understand how people, institutions, traditions, or communities have understood and navigated such questions.
The frameworks that follow emerged from observing recurring patterns across decades of Newcombe-supported scholarship. They are not intended as eligibility criteria, nor are they exhaustive. Rather, they are offered as intellectual tools that may help applicants think more clearly about the questions at the center of their own work.
Some applicants will recognize their projects within one of the categories that follow. Others may find that their work spans multiple categories or suggests entirely new ones. All of these outcomes are entirely appropriate. The purpose of these frameworks is not classification. The purpose is clarification. Applicants who believe their project is best understood through a different form of normative complexity are encouraged to say so. Newcombe-supported scholarship continues to evolve, and the categories presented here are intended to remain open to revision, expansion, and refinement as new questions emerge.
Categories of Normative Complexity
- Embodiment as Epistemology
- Definition: Values and ethical tensions are revealed through the body—how bodies carry pain, bear identity, and enact belief. The body is not just studied, but experienced as a site of knowledge and morality.
- Illustration: A dissertation tracing how dietary practices in diasporic communities link bodily health to liberation, showing how eating becomes a spiritual, ethical, and political act.
- Power in the Margins
- Definition: Projects that center those historically excluded or silenced, showing how the “edges” of society generate new insights into justice, ethics, and value. Marginality is not deficit—it is revelation.
- Illustration: A study of citizens navigating racialized and religious identities in diaspora, revealing how they negotiate belonging while confronting nationalist and exclusionary politics.
- Religion as Contested Ground
- Definition: Religion as a dynamic terrain where meaning, authority, and morality are debated. Traditions appear both as refuge and weapon, subject to contestation from within and without.
- Illustration: A project examining how local religious practices, dismissed as exploitative, in fact serve as ethical projects of self-fashioning and community building.
- Time as Terrain
- Definition: Ethics understood not as fixed but layered across past, present, and future. Projects reveal how injustices echo forward or how imagined futures shape action today.
- Illustration: A dissertation studying communities confronting environmental collapse, guided by obligations to ancestors and to future generations yet unborn.
- Ethics of Memory and Witness
- Definition: How societies remember injustice and suffering, and what responsibilities emerge from those memories. These projects ask: who remembers, how, and to what end?
- Illustration: Research on how categories of “human” or “inhuman” might be created, showing how the haunting of past violence unsettles present claims to order.
- Normativity in Everyday Practice
- Definition: Ethical reasoning embedded in daily routines, rituals, and habits. Moral worlds are made not only in theory but in kitchens, marketplaces, streets, and temples.
- Illustration: A dissertation reframing pilgrimage exchanges between priests and laypeople as ethical practices of memory and meaning, rather than mere transactions.
- Complexity without Cynicism
- Definition: Projects that resist easy answers or relativism. They dwell in nuance without collapsing into despair, modeling intellectual rigor with ethical humility.
- Illustration: A study of emerging bioethical debates that carefully traces competing claims without dismissing or celebrating any side, showing that ethical stakes demand patience and seriousness.
- Institutions and Normative Order
- Definition: How laws, bureaucracies, or states embody and enforce moral orders. Institutions, often invisible, become sites where ethics and power entwine.
- Illustration: A project on how nation-states define “monsters” at their borders, exposing how the classification of citizens and outsiders encodes moral violence.
- Aesthetics as Moral Inquiry
- Definition: Artistic expression as a way of asking ethical questions and reimagining values. Art is not decoration but a field where moral imagination takes form.
- Illustration: A dissertation on ecological artworks using living organisms, exploring how art challenges human-centered perspectives and invites reciprocity with nonhuman life.
Non-Normative Approaches that Still Show Normative Complexity
- Genealogies of Value
- Definition: Projects that trace how concepts of morality, ethics, or religion have been constructed and reconstructed over time, without prescribing a particular outcome.
- Illustration: A dissertation examining how ideas of purity and pollution evolved across colonial legal codes, showing how categories of “moral order” were historically produced.
- Descriptive Ethnographies of Value in Practice
- Definition: Research that does not argue what values should be, but carefully documents how people enact, negotiate, or resist values in everyday life.
- Illustration: An ethnographic study of rural communities’ pilgrimage practices, not to endorse or critique them, but to show how rituals carry moral meaning for participants.
- Critical Analyses of Institutions
- Definition: Projects that expose how institutions encode assumptions about value, morality, or religion—even when those assumptions are implicit or unacknowledged.
- Illustration: A study of how bureaucratic categories of citizenship embed hidden moral judgments about belonging and exclusion.
- Interpretations of Texts or Aesthetics
- Definition: Analyses that show how literature, art, or cultural production grapples with moral or religious themes, without the author imposing a normative judgment.
- Illustration: A literary study tracing how mid-century novels engaged with the problem of moral responsibility after war, analyzing themes rather than prescribing ethics.
- Mapping Moral Worlds
- Definition: Projects that act as cartographies of value systems, laying out the complexity of religious or ethical thought as it is lived or imagined, rather than advocating for one view.
- Illustration: A project charting how diasporic youth understand Hindu nationalism—as supporters, resisters, or ambivalent participants—showing the moral diversity within a single community.
Closing Remarks
By now, you should understand not only what the application asks, but why it asks it. The strongest applications are rarely the most complicated. They are the clearest. They help reviewers understand the project, the questions that animate it, and the work that remains to be done. The goal is not to present a perfect dissertation or a perfect scholar. The goal is to provide an honest and thoughtful account of a project in progress and the intellectual journey that has brought you to it. We look forward to reading your work.
Susan Billmaier, PhD