Matei Tichindelean, a graduate student in archaeology at the Cotsen Institute, received a 2020 Summer Fellowship from the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute. The $6000 award was given to help with research pertaining to his PhD research, which investigates cooperation strategies between mobile and sedentary populations in ancient and early-modern Egypt. His application highlighted the different ways that this includes acts of kindness and how these are often employed and preferred to violent or coercive acts.
The UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to research, education, and translational applications addressing the factors that promote or hinder kindness, at scales ranging from the interpersonal to the international, where kindness is broadly defined as the intention to benefit another party, such that the promotion of another’s welfare is an end in itself. The Graduate Summer Fellowship Program-supported scholarship can take the form of either a novel contribution to knowledge (such as a paper to be submitted for publication) or a plan to generate such knowledge (such as a proposal for a thesis or dissertation, or a grant proposal to be submitted to a funder). The focus can be either basic research, or translational projects that leverage existing scholarship to achieve real-world results.