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Contact: Elizabeth Kanost, Spencer Museum of Art, 785-864-0142, [email protected], @SpencerMuseum

Spencer Museum, Charlotte Street announce Rocket Grants 2024 call for artists

LAWRENCE — The Spencer Museum of Art and Charlotte Street have announced the 2024 open call for Rocket Grants, with applications accepted through June 24.

Artists interested in applying can attend an information session at 6 p.m. May 23 at the Spencer Museum or at 6 p.m. June 14 at Charlotte Street, 3333 Wyoming St., Kansas City, Missouri.

With support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Rocket Grants provide direct funding to artists in the Lawrence and Kansas City area who are creating exceptional, under-the-radar and artist-centered projects in public spaces. Artists, curators, collectives and collaborative groups residing within an 80-mile radius of the Kansas City metropolitan area are eligible to apply.

The Rocket Grants program awards grants of $6,000 to individuals or artist groups for projects that exist outside established venues such as museums, galleries, theaters or arts districts. Artists are encouraged to address the community at large or choose a smaller targeted audience.

The long-term goals of the Rocket Grants program are to encourage emerging and nontraditional artistic practices in the Lawrence and Kansas City area, to contribute to a thriving arts community, and to build bridges between geographic and cultural communities.

“It was so inspiring to see all of the Rocket Grants come to fruition this year – and to have the Fruit Tree Community Choir be a part of this endeavor to grow public art in our region. Rocket Grants is so important for this work of funding local artists and nurturing a creative ecosystem,” said Hazlett Henderson, a 2023 Rocket Grant recipient whose project planted fruit trees outside the Lawrence Public Library.

Rocket Grants projects are selected by a jury of four arts professionals working both locally and nationally. Proposals are evaluated on criteria including innovation, thoughtful context, feasibility and meaningful impact.

To apply, artists must submit a Letter of Interest (LOI) online by June 24. The LOI should include a project summary, the artists involved, the intended audience, the specific context of the work, budget needs and relevance of the project. The jury will assess submissions and invite selected projects to complete a full application in July 2024. Rocket Grants recipients will be announced in September 2024.

For any questions regarding the application process, please contact Kimberly Kitada by email.

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KU News Service

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Lawrence KS 66045

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Fax: 785-864-3339

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http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]

China’s ‘puzzling’ sanctions approach decoded using new data

LAWRENCE — The United States and China might best be described as “frenemies.” But while outright military hostilities are currently kept in check, intensifying economic competition between the two superpowers can be observed in their use of sanctions.

“Governments can use economic interactions as carrots or sticks. Essentially, a sanction is a stick,” said Jack Zhang, assistant professor of political science at the University of Kansas.

“You use these to take away economic benefits, whether that’s through trade by withholding exports or through finance by freezing assets.”

Zhang explores this factor in a paper titled “Measuring Chinese economic sanctions 1949–2020: Introducing the China TIES dataset.” It introduces both a new dataset on sanctions involving China and a research framework for expanding knowledge about non-Western economic sanctions more generally. It’s published in Conflict Management and Peace Science.

“There is a big difference between U.S. and Chinese sanctions,” said Zhang, who co-wrote the paper with KU doctoral candidate Spencer Shanks. “Chinese sanctions are often informal in nature, and China denies they’re doing a lot of them.”

The U.S. is the country that imposes the most sanctions “by a long shot,” according to Zhang. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (part of the Department of the Treasury) plays a primary role in administering and enforcing many such programs.

“Especially after the end of the Cold War, it’s the instrument that presidents have reached for the most and the fastest. Like we have multiple sanctions against Russia right now, and there are new sanctions being implemented against Iran, North Korea, Cuba, etc. We also consider the Trump-era tariffs on China and export controls on technology to be sanctions,” he said.

The European Union as a bloc issues the second-greatest number of sanctions, but China’s unilateral use is a close third and will likely soon surpass the EU, Zhang said..

Why are Chinese sanctions far more prevalent in the last decade than in the past?

“To be able to use sanctions, you need to have economic benefits that you can withhold. China has become much more of a global economic player over the last 20 years,” Zhang said.

“If you think about sanctions, you only have leverage if you are hurt less by the thing that you’re threatening to withhold. Small countries can, in theory, choose to embargo trade, but then they may need that trade more than the sending country.”

The Chinese Economic Sanctions dataset (aka China TIES) includes 135 episodes where China is the sender and 88 episodes where it is the target from 1949 to 2020. Zhang and Shanks use the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions dataset (TIES v.4) as a baseline for identifying and coding sanctions episodes, and they provide a set of standardized narratives documenting each episode with secondary sources. The result is a dataset that is interoperable with TIES but also contains new variables that better capture the informal nature of many Chinese sanctions.

“I see this almost as an expansion set,” Zhang said.

“But there are two things we’re adding. One is temporal coverage. TIES is the workhorse dataset in the literature, but it only goes up to 2005. Most of these new Chinese economic sanction episodes and behaviors in the last 15 years are not covered. The second thing is that the original TIES data set doesn’t do a very good job of documentation, which makes it difficult to deal with informal sanctions.”

Ironically, sanctions rarely work the way they are intended.

“A common finding is that the threat of a sanction is more effective than the imposition of one for change of policy,” he said. “But with China, there isn’t this dynamic of threats that we usually see – which is puzzling. If threats often work better than actually imposing sanctions, why not go through the threat stage?”

A professor at KU since 2019, Zhang is also the founder and director of the KU Trade War Lab. His research explores the political economy of trade and conflict in East Asia with a focus on explaining why interdependent countries use military versus economic coercion in foreign policy disputes.

“One of the important contributions that I hope our paper will be able to show is to contextualize China sanctions behavior in an international context and in international benchmarks,” Zhang said. “I also think our approach strives to establish a new gold standard for how to build these quantitative datasets that are rooted in expertise in the region.”

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KU News Service

1450 Jayhawk Blvd.

Lawrence KS 66045

Phone: 785-864-3256

Fax: 785-864-3339

[email protected]

http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs