I’m applying to the MSCA fellowship again, sucker for punishment. My current draftsummary as of 10 august is:
| AquaCurious: Cultivating Curiosity-Driven, Gameful Coalition Culture for Sustained Civic-Led Water Partnerships. I ask what capacities let civic and intermediary actors contribute to, rather than draw down, the care that sustains coalition-based water governance, and then work to design gameful approaches to nurture these capacities. AquaCurious bridges three fields: polycentric governance, gameful design, and feminist ethics of care, treating care-laden coordination labour as a design principle rather than a diversity problem to legitimise afterward. The design of a pocket park in Tampere serves as vehicle, anchoring the development of a design framework through iterative, workshop-tested engagement, using deep canvassing and behavioural coding of curiosity and cognitive labour. Gameful approaches that inspire the design include parkrun, already studied elsewhere as a coalition-governance actor and World of Warcraft guilds as holding structure. Outputs include a practitioner toolkit, ritual-template infrastructure recommendations, and a specific policy recommendation aimed at municipalities to pre-institutionalize mechanisms for intermediary and civic-actor participation. This proposal is aimed at converting my demonstrated but institutionally unrecognised leadership into sustainable, fundable independent practice. |