We are now accepting applications for the 2025 Junior Scholars Forum, which will be held at ESSEC Business School Paris, Cergy Campus, on June 19-20, 2025.
Overview
The goal of the forum is to highlight exciting work being done by young scholars and to contribute to the development of their scholarship. It brings together newer researchers, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty, working in the general areas of civil society and philanthropy, to increase the sense of intellectual community and enhance the overall quality of research.
In summer 2014, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society hosted its inaugural Junior Scholars Forum, a gathering that brought together newer researchers with senior scholars for two days of presentations, intensive discussions, and socializing. The forum highlighted exciting work being done in the fields of philanthropy and civil society. The 11 junior scholars selected for the inaugural forum were drawn from a competitive pool of applications and came from political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines.
For the 2025 edition, Stanford PACS is partnering with ESSEC Business School’s Philanthropy Chair and Social Innovation Chair to co-host the Junior Scholars Forum in France. The goal of the 2025 Philanthropy and Civil Society Junior Scholars Forum is to support junior scholars (PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty) working and developing research in the general areas of civil society, philanthropy, and social innovation.
The 2025 Forum will be limited to 30 participants: 10 organizing faculty; 10 early-stage junior scholars in the first three years of their PhD programs; and 10 advanced junior scholars, including PhD candidates nearing the job market, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty. Early-stage scholars will be invited to present their work in a supportive, 2-hour session organized in thematic roundtables. They will benefit from constructive and intimate feedback from more advanced junior scholars. Advanced junior scholars will present their work in a dedicated 1-hour session and benefit from two discussants (a senior faculty member and a fellow junior scholar working on similar topics) as well as questions and feedback from the whole group of participants.
Themes
The 2025 Junior Scholars Forum encourages submissions from scholars working and developing research in the general areas of civil society, philanthropy, and social innovation. We welcome applications from a wide range of disciplines including management, economics, sociology, political science, history, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences. We are open to a wide variety of perspectives and topic areas including, but certainly not limited to, the following:
- Alternative ownership and governance models;
- Artificial intelligence, tech ventures and platforms “for good”;
- Collective social entrepreneurship processes;
- Corporate philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and other business initiatives;
- Cross-sector partnerships, collective impact, collaboration of multiple stakeholders;
- Decision-making processes and criteria in grantmaking foundations;
- Democratic organizations and the democratization of the economy;
- Elites, capitalism, and plutocratic tendencies in civil society;
- Hybrid organizations (e.g. B-Corps) and the challenges of hybrid organizing;
- Impact investments, social impact bonds, blended finance, and other hybrid funding;
- Impact measurement and management and its consequences;
- Legal and fiscal frameworks encouraging or impeding civil society;
- Political innovation and initiatives to foster democracy and political change;
- Social movements, protests, and advocacy groups;
- Systems thinking, systems change, and its funding challenges;
- Tainted money, dirty gifts, and the ethical dilemmas in fundraising;
- Trust-based philanthropy and the power asymmetry between funders and grantees.
Please see the attached Call for Applications for the 2025 Junior Scholars Forum for more detailed information on selection criteria, instructions on how to apply, and important deadlines.