Trickeries of Grant Work

Abstract

This paper blends various accounts, materials, sources, and discourses involved in what I call “trickeries” of grant work. By combining different texts—academic, published, imagined, creative, and personal—I portray particular practices that highlight unpredictable and unreal processes of grant work. I share my experiences as a co-principal investigator (PI) in federally funded projects and offer images of projected conversations that have shaped my approaches to grant work. Even though I address some elements of grant proposals that have helped me secure external funding (e.g., the focus, innovativeness, manageability, collaboration, degree of detail, and epistemological and theoretical groundings of proposals), I also resist closure, singularity, and overly simplistic ways to describe how one can become or stay involved in funded research.