Why do academics spend so much time preparing funding applications? What do these highly competitive funding processes do to academic working conditions? And who decides what is ‘fundable’? Since finishing my PhD, I have unsuccessfully applied to four postdoctoral research funding schemes and three university-specific postdoctoral fellowships. These applications carried not just the promise of a funded research project, but more importantly paid work, job security, and imagined lives in new places. It was crushing to repeatedly dream up detailed research plans, sometimes up to 5 years long, which were attuned to the university, the department, and potential future colleagues and then … rejection. Sometimes one does not even get a formal rejection; one postdoctoral scheme for which I interviewed did not contact me post-interview to let me know the outcome. Such unnecessary cruelty in the academic job market is intensified for those who are precariously employed, because one's job and ability to stay in academia often depends on highly competitive funding processes.

This chapter is about the extensive work that goes into writing research funding applications within a highly precarious UK higher education (HE) sector. To do this, I examine how social science applicants navigate the Economic and Social Research Council Research Grant (ESRC-RG) funding application process, focusing on the multi-layered strategies required to translate research ideas and researchers into ‘fundable’ formats.