The making of a funding call text: How funding professionals craft interdisciplinary research opportunities for Social Sciences and Humanities

Whilst it is well-known that research funding significantly shapes research landscapes, there is too little known about the processes that sit behind the funding opportunities — and specifically the publicly-shared funding call texts. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate the processes experienced by EU funding professionals in authoring and operationalising funding call texts, to surface the different ways in which interdisciplinarity is understood. In seeing these texts as artefacts of situated practices, we conducted a case study on the European Union (EU) Cluster 5 Work Programmes (on climate, energy, mobility) as part of Horizon Europe, including its predecessor calls in Horizon2020. From our analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews, we identified 10 roles that funding professionals adopt, across three stages of a funding call text lifetime: within the Call Creation stage (led by European Commission Policy Officers), there was Steering, Feedback Integration, Quality Control, and Disruption; the Call Dissemination stage (led by EU National Contact Points) involved Awareness-raising, Matchmaking, and Gap-spotting; and the Proposal Selection stage (led by Commission Project Officers overseeing evaluations) involved Expertise Cultivation, Consensus-building, and being a Critical Friend. This study provides empirically-driven insights into the dynamic social processes and institutional interactions, through which funding calls are negotiated, interpreted and ultimately travel. As such, we also contribute to literature on interdisciplinarity, by examining the ways in which different forms of interdisciplinarity are imagined, designed-in, rewarded and excluded by funders. We make clear how integrating Social Sciences and Humanities, and doing interdisciplinarity, consistently represents hard work by funding professionals.