cally, strategically, or ecologically quite near. To learn more about
values or social conditions in a particular area, then, means to
learn more about how that area is situated in events and processes
going on outside its borders, but not thereby outside its culture or
economy or ecology.^8Similarly, the WWNFF’s Women’s Studies Dissertation Grant pro-
gram was created to “encourage original and significant research
about women that crosses disciplinary, regional, or cultural bound-
aries.”^9 In the foundation’s newsletter, WWNFF past president Rob-
ert Weisbuch justified support of research in women’s studies by cit-
ing the interdisciplinary character of this field of scholarship, its
questioning of hardened boundaries, its role as a catalyst for ener-
getic debates, and its immediacy (women’s studies is a field “not
merely academic, divorced from our lives”).^10 The WWNFF program
has played a very important role in the promotion and development
of the field of women’s studies in the United States.
The five funding programs’ formal criteria of evaluation are sum-
marized in Table 2.1. These criteria are in line with those typically
used at other funding agencies, such as the National Science Founda-
tion. Making formal evaluative criteria public increases accountabil-
ity and makes winning democratically available to all (since success
depends on the display of technical proficiency), as opposed to a do-
main of the talented few. These technical criteria, which address the
quality of the proposed research, are discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
Beyond assessing quality, however, funding agencies also consider
the interdisciplinarity of proposals, and the diversity (by institution,
discipline, geographic location, race/ethnicity, and gender) of appli-
cants. Chapter 6 takes a close look at the various meanings that pan-
elists give to these criteria and how these are used in conjunction
with the formal specifications.
26 / How Panels Work