Stanford Global Studies STANFORD UNIVERSITY SGS PROGRAMS & CENTERS: CENTER FOR AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER FOR EAST ASIAN STUDIES CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES CENTER FOR RUSSIAN, EAST EUROPEAN AND EURASIAN STUDIES CENTER FOR SOUTH ASIA THE EUROPE CENTER FORD DORSEY PROGRAM IN INTERNATIONAL POLICY STUDIES FRANCE-STANFORD CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES GLOBAL STUDIES INTERNSHIP PROGRAM HAMID AND CHRISTINA MOGHADAM PROGRAM IN IRANIAN STUDIES INNER ASIA @ STANFORD MEDITERRANEAN STUDIES FORUM PROGRAM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SOHAIB AND SARA ABBASI PROGRAM IN ISLAMIC STUDIES THE STANFORD HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION INITIATIVE TAUBE CENTER FOR JEWISH STUDIES WSD HANDA CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE
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Vol. 3, Issue 2
SGS Centers Lead a Cross-Campus Effort to Secure Federal Funding by Mark Rapacz, Communications Coordinator
SGS is very pleased to announce that three of our centers have been selected once again as Title VI National Resource Centers by the Department of Education: the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES). “The competition for government funds for area studies centers has become increasingly intense,” said Director Norman Naimark. “We are proud of our centers’ accomplishment in this arena and others.” Since 2000, there has been a decline in the size and number of Title VI awards given by the Department of Education. Therefore, in order to receive the National Resource Center (NRC) designation, the centers underwent a rigorous application process. In addition to articulating innovative and collaborative projects to expand and deepen language, area studies, and outreach efforts to K-12 and community college educators, the centers had to demonstrate the university’s commitment to their respective areas. Though SGS NRCs will administer the federal funds, the application process and the projects proposed were a cross-campus collaboration with other SGS centers and programs, the Graduate School of Education, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford University Libraries, and the Stanford Language Center.
“Half of the grant proposal was devoted to demonstrating institutional support. The fact that we received the awards is a testament to Stanford’s commitment to our areas,” said CREEES Associate Director, Jovana Knežević. Designation as an NRC allows centers to strengthen access to training in the major languages of their respective regions, broadens area studies training across all disciplines, and provides centers with funding to pursue more opportunities with the community. “It allows us the capability to expand our outreach efforts,” said CEAS Associate Director, John Groschwitz. “We have three collaborative projects that we’re working on with other SGS centers and programs and continued on page 6
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IPS Announces Its New Dual Degree Program with GSB by Adam Gorlick, FSI's Assistant Director for Communcations
A dual Stanford MA/MBA program for students interested in international policy and business for graduate students has been launched. Students may apply to the program beginning this fall. The dual degree program allows students to pursue an MBA at the Graduate School of Business and an MA in International Policy Studies from the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences in three academic years, instead of four. The program is designed for students interested in working in fields that bridge businesses and governments in the United States and abroad. The cross-disciplinary courses will prepare students for leadership roles in international organizations, nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, consulting firms, and corporations that focus on a range of issues such as international development, trade and finance, security, healthcare, and the environment. "This is an exciting opportunity for IPS students and GSB students to supplement their learning in international affairs and gain the skills they need in a globalized economy," said Kathryn Stoner, director of IPS and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “More and more we find that students benefit from a multidisciplinary learning experience,” said Madhav Rajan, senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). “With Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences just down the street from the business school, it is possible to bring together the best resources in multiple fields for our students.” Students interested in the program must separately apply to and be accepted by both the GSB’s MBA program and the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies (IPS) at the School of Humanities and Sciences. Completion of the dual program requires a combined total of 145 units, including 90 MBA units and 55 units from IPS. Students who complete the dual program will earn two degrees: an MA in International Policy Studies and the MBA. Students will spend the first year of the program taking GSB courses. The second year will blend GSB electives and IPS core classes and electives. During the third year, students will complete electives as well as a practicum for IPS. More information about the admission process is available from GSB and IPS admissions offices. With seven schools on one contiguous campus, Stanford
University has long supported the concept of multidisciplinary learning to seek solutions to the world’s great challenges. Stanford MBA students have increasingly sought second degrees in recent years as the opportunities for cross-sector leadership in the workplace have grown. Among MBA students, approximately 1 in 6 currently pursue joint or dual degree studies. IPS students are trained in analytical and policy skills while gaining a deep understanding of the substantive issues facing today’s world. The program is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division. ]
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SGS MA Students Report on their Global Perspectives Research A generous gift from the Friends of Stanford University Foundation in Taiwan recently enabled the Stanford Global Studies Division to award “Global Perspectives” grants to help fund SGS graduate student research during the summer quarter.
“The applicants’ projects demonstrate the geographical range and academic depth of our MA programs,” said Norman Naimark, Director of Stanford Global Studies. “Their research took them to many parts of the world where they actively engaged with issues such as HIV transmission, police security, women’s soccer, Asian art, and more. We’re pleased to be able to provide this funding for M.A. students.”
Asia Chiao (CEAS), Co-Term ’15: “This summer, I worked as an intern at the Asia Society’s headquarters in New York City, where I assisted both the Museum Department and the Center on U.S.-China Relations. As a coterminal student at Stanford University completing both a B.A. in Art History and a M.A. in East Asian Studies, the internship allowed me to explore the career applications of my interest in contemporary Asian art, while developing ideas for my Master’s thesis. Overall, the funding that I received in support of my activities this summer gave me an opportunity to truly immerse myself in a rewarding internship in New York, supplemented by travel and research carried out in Asia.”
Students wrote extensively about their trips and share some research highlights below: Alexandra Broner (CAS), M.A. ’15: "My SGS-supported summer research internship in Nairobi, Kenya provided a valuable transition from graduate African Studies to post-graduate work in public health and development in Kenya—and now the East Africa region. This support, and the formative research experience it enabled, allowed me to actively launch my postgraduate career in international development in Africa." Jessie Brunner (IPS), M.A. ’14: "My experiences in Cambodia have served as an invaluable primer as I poise myself to begin a career in the field of transitional justice. I will very likely be returning to the region to continue community engagement and trial monitoring work connected to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). I also have a potential consultancy opportunity with U.S. Progress, a joint initiative of the U.S. State Department/Agency for International Development and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), both owing to my time on the ground in Southeast Asia.” Jessie Bullock (IPS), M.A. ’15: “A highlight of my visit was to a NGO called Rio Como Vamos, an agency that aggregates and publishes statistics and indicators on various issues in the city, from air pollution to robberies to preschool enrollment. I interned for them in 2012 and became familiar with their survey methodology, the breadth of the questions they ask on their surveys, and their organizational goals. I discussed the possibility of writing a questionnaire with them for my future research and they provided me with a great list of contacts, instructions, and advice on how to go about survey research in Rio. We also discussed the possibility of collaborating and including an expanded section on one of their existing questionnaires. This is an essential partnership for my thesis and this initial meeting and in-person discussion with them will prove to be very useful for the rest of my time doing research on this issue.”
Chen Fang (CEAS), M.A. ’15: “Thanks to the generous support of the Global Perspectives Award, CEAS and Professor Andrew Walder, my research on Yan’an went quite smoothly this summer. In July and August, I spent five weeks in Shanganning Region and interviewed 21 eyewitnesses of the history of Yan’an in the early 1940s. These people included senior CCP cadre, former working staff in central Party school, local peasants, second generation of CCP leaders (son of former Shan’xi party secretary), and relevant scholars. According to current progress, I plan to complete a first draft of my final paper on Yan’an Rectification Campaign in mid-October.” Taylor Mayol (CAS), M.A. ’14: “My time in Kigali helped solidify my interest in and deepen my knowledge of Rwanda. It confirmed by suspicions of the need for better-informed journalism in and about Rwanda and reinforced my desire to pursue a career in reporting. The Rwandan press is highly monitored and there is little room for public discussion of politics. Fortunately, I was able to establish contacts with two local newspapers and a couple of journalists. Now, I am pursuing employment in the field of journalism and plan on returning to Rwanda to cover the presidential elections in 2017, and hopefully well before then.” continued on page 6
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Prof. Bill Durham: The Value of an Interdisciplinary Education
William Durham is Co-Director of Stanford’s Osa and Golfito Initiative in Costa Rica (INOGO) and Bing Professor in Human Biology
Co-Director of Stanford’s Osa and Golfito Initiative in Costa Rica (INOGO) and Bing Professor in Human Biology, William Durham, has spent his distinguished career as a human ecologist focusing on indigenous resource management, human health, and environmental conservation. In 37 years at Stanford, he has worked in some of the world’s biologically and culturally diverse areas, from Tanzania to the Galapagos Islands to the forests of Central and South America.
SGS recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Professor Durham about his many experiences abroad, and delve more deeply into his belief that an interdisciplinary approach is truly a necessity when leading research projects in different cultural contexts. What follows are excerpts from that interview, edited for length and clarity. The full interview with audio recordings, where Professor Durham’s stories and experiences come to life, is available at SGS’s website: sgs.stanford.edu/news/2014/durham_interview Many SGS students are interested in policy and how it might affect particular regions of study around the world. Have you seen any examples where policy decisions have had a direct positive or negative impact on the ecology of some of these areas? One that comes to mind, because I spent a good part of my early career looking at it, was a policy by the World Bank in the 80s and early 90s to support rainforest colonization efforts. I was especially interested in a Brazilian project called Polonoroeste, which was a growth development plan in the middle of the Amazon, in an out of the way part of Brazil called Rondônia. Brazil was trying to promote greater productivity, and also trying to dodge pressure for land reform, by settling this area with poor and landless farmers. They received a gigantic, almost half-billion dollar, loan from the World Bank to put in a road called Brazilian Route 364. They had no idea how many people would show up in the middle of the Amazon! Brazil paved the road, opened
some colonization projects, and more than a million people came in a period of six or seven years. Not only did they overwhelm all the development plans and schemes, the habitat modification was so massive that the region was converted to an ideal environment for the Amazon’s most efficient vector for malaria, Anopheles darlingi, a fringe-loving mosquito. It was almost like some diabolical plan to see how much malaria you could create by bringing a million susceptible people into an ideal environment for malaria and its vector. An awful epidemic followed, taking a terrible toll on local and indigenous people. All together it was so bad that videographer Adrian Cowell called it “The Decade of Destruction” in his film series. Anthropologists saw this disaster unfolding and were smart enough to report it to US congressional subcommittees, including one that monitors US funding for the World Bank, to make sure it is being used wisely and appropriately. The subcommittee heard first-hand reports about BR-364 and all the colonists moving into the Amazon, about the impact on indigenous people, and about the suffering from malaria, but they still wanted to better understand the rate and magnitude of changes from Polonoroeste. So anthropologists and lawyers put together an information-seeking team that analyzed satellite photographs, rates of deforestation and population trends in Rondônia. They came back to the subcommittee with quantitative data, and for the first time in US history, the US Treasury withheld funds to the World Bank, pending guarantees that there would be more protection for indigenous people and more careful regulation of the rate and flow of immigrants into the rain forest. Partly as a result of this tragedy, the World Bank also added an environmental team to their staff, so that today we rarely see World Bank projects with devastating impact on indigenous peoples and environment.
You have led over 34 trips to the Galapagos Islands where you’ve focused your research on ecological and evolutionary anthropology, conservation, and community development and resource management. Having so intensely studied such a specific region, what advice would you would give aspiring area scholars who hope to do something similar? When you go to a new place, the key thing is not to assume that you know how to help anybody. Assume that you continued on next page
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don’t even know what the problems are and just listen. Just listen and be modest. Let me give you an example – not from Galapagos, but from nearby in Costa Rica. It is an example from the INOGO collaboration [mentioned above] between Costa Ricans and a group of us at Stanford in the Woods Institute. As we began the initiative, we spent nearly an entire year listening. We realized we did not know what all the issues or problems were in the region, and we were blown away by what we heard. We heard, first, that they already appreciate their natural surroundings. We had no homework to do to encourage locals to appreciate the biodiversity of their surroundings. They already saw this beautiful, complex, biodiverse rain forest as their number one resource. Second, we learned that the number two resource in many communities was civic participation: locals were already active in diverse organizations – like microfinance groups, watershed protection committees, etc. – attempting to improve local communities. At the same time, we learned, however, that there were gaps. We learned, for example, that communities operated pretty much alone, without many connections with other communities. Each community was basically confronting its problems heroically, on its own, with its own civic activism and leaders. The leaders were not in touch with each other: we were seeing multiple inventions of the wheel. Listening had made our job fairly easy: we started a leadership program, to put regional leaders in frequent contact, and it quickly became well known. All these leaders wanted to join because it involved outsiders and opportunities. Ultimately, other Costa Rican colleagues stepped forward and said, “You know what? We’ll run it from here.” We said, “Wow. Amazing.” The goal of SGS is to provide students and scholars with opportunities to explore the complexities of our globalized world from an interdisciplinary perspective. In your opinion, what is the overall value of an interdisciplinary education? One of the lessons of our work is that the major problems of the world today are intrinsically multidisciplinary. Take the major diseases of our time, whether Ebola or HIV. They have a component that’s clearly straight biology, while at the same time they are affecting human beings in a society. A researcher needs to understand enough of
both dimensions so that you’re not blindsided and can work effectively to resolve an epidemic like Ebola or cholera or whatever it might be. I feel that an interdisciplinary education was part of the success of our project in Costa Rica, as well. Professor Dirzo would say, “I’ll help with the tourism surveys you need to do.” And we’d say, “We’ll help demarcate boundaries and help with the resource inventories.” We all knew how important both our tasks were to understanding the complexity of the problems and to designing a sustainability option for the region. It hasn’t always worked like this at Stanford. I can remember going into projects and feeling, well, like it was a competition. I can remember feeling that the biologists wanted you to do everything their way. Eventually there came a real shift, associated with campus-wide discussions of an environmental institute. Partly the shift came from the individuals involved, and partly there was a groundswell. It’s a change in the way researchers perceive the skill sets we need to bring together to solve the world’s problems. I think it’s really useful to help our students, undergraduate and graduate, understand this new collaboration, and we should surely talk about it at the undergraduate level and perhaps even earlier. During my early years at Stanford, I was often in projects or discussions where I just kept scratching my head. “Why don’t they recognize the importance of social structure? Why don’t they realize that not everybody will respond the same way to this plan, this intervention, this idea?” I was fascinated that we didn’t have more crosstalk. There was a kind of a chauvinism within the disciplines. That’s now going away, happily. Programs like SGS are really helpful in eliminating the prejudice where one discipline believes they know best. Now it’s more about what each person can bring to improve the success of the collaboration. What tools do you have that can help solve this problem? I find that so much more engaging. ] The full conversation can be accessed on the SGS website: sgs.stanford.edu/news/2014/durham_interview
Centers Secure Funding (continued from page 1)
Questions about SGS? For general information or to sign up for the online version of this newsletter visit our website: sgs.stanford.edu For past issues of the SGS Newsletter visit: sgs.stanford.edu/newsletter
Contact SGS: NORMAN NAIMARK The Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division KATE KUHNS Executive Director kkuhns@stanford.edu JANE STAHL Office Manager jstahl2@stanford.edu JOANNE CAMANTIGUE Financial Assistant jcamanti@stanford.edu MARK RAPACZ Communications Coordinator mrrapacz@stanford.edu KATHERINE WELSH Program Administrator kwelsh@stanford.edu
other units across campus, not to mention the individual projects coming out of our centers.” Outreach programs focus on strengthening the internationalization of curricula and the professionalization of language instruction at K-12 schools and community colleges. SGS is particularly excited about its partnership with the College of San Mateo and the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, a key component of this cycle’s proposals, and looks forward to expanding this partnership to other California Community Colleges. In addition to outreach programming, Title VI funds allow the National Resource Centers in SGS to provide approximately $1.2 million for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) student fellowships to fund the study of Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL), such as Russian, Kazakh, Korean, Portuguese, Quechua, Turkish, and many others. “In the case of Latin American Studies, we are expanding Stanford’s current LCTL offerings to include Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs,” said CLAS Associate Director, Elizabeth Sáenz-Ackermann. ] Global Perspectives Research (continued from page 3)
Megan Shutzer (IPS), M.A. ’14: “In August and September 2013, I filmed more than 60 hours of footage of the Zanzibar women’s soccer team. With the generous support of the Global Perspectives Award, this summer I was able to turn that footage into a rough cut of the documentary Veils and Cleats: a Zanzibar Soccer Story.” Walter Thompson-Hernandez (CLAS), M.A. ’14: “I found the experiences of multiracial Belgians are shaped by life in their parent’s country of origin and throughout Belgian society. As opposed to many multiracial people in the U.S., individuals in Belgium, or at least those whom I met, explained the complexity and struggle of formulating their identities as Belgians and Africans. Often, they said they felt like they were occupying liminal spaces in society, as they were neither accepted by white Belgians nor their African relatives.” Xiang Zhai (CEAS), M.A. ’15: “Through research at the libraries in Beijing, I obtained a rich amount of secondary resources for my research. My time in Beijing also enabled me to reach out to a few distinguished scholars and officials in China for interview as well, most of whom were willing to support my research. I also used the award for a research trip to the Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park in late August where I found more excellent sources in the Roosevelt archives and the Chiang diaries.” Jinan Zhang (CEAS), M.A. ’15: “For my field study, I interviewed many local government officials involved with the government performance evaluation system. I collected documents about the government evaluation system, spanning more than ten years, and was able to look at the results of these years. I also collected the data from the officials’ promotion records during these years. What I want to do is find the function and the effect of the performance evaluation system by studying the relationship between the evaluation results and promotion results. To my knowledge, this is the first study to use this data to study the official promotion issues, which is a hot topic in both political science and economics.” ]
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