Building the new transnational academy, scholar by scholar
The first Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI), held in June, brought 148 scholars from developing nations to College Hill for discussions that challenged their research assumptions and techniques. Through intensive discussions, lectures, and research presentations, participants forged connections with academics of diverse worldviews and, in many cases, came away inspired to refocus their scholarship.
Envisioned as an intellectual exchange among scholars from the Global South, and developed with support from Banco Santander, the initiative offered four two-week programs on economic development, global governance, technology, and critical traditions in the humanities.
BIARI participants attend a dinner talk in the Faculty Club.
“By all reports, the institutes were world-class, intellectually rigorous, and eye-opening for participants,” says Ileana Porras, director of BIARI in the Office of International Affairs and a visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies.
BIARI is “a mutual thing. You learn; you give,” agreed University of East Anglia Ph.D. candidate Patricia Agupusi, a participant in the Development and Inequality Institute. “Everyone is given the opportunity to articulate how a particular issue is applicable in their own region and country.”
The participants’ presentations and subsequent discussions formed the program’s centerpiece, in keeping with BIARI’s goal of sparking global dialogue. Disagreement and debate defined question-and-answer sessions, spurring rigorous small-group discussions on issues ranging from income inequality to gender.
Zhilong Huang, who made his first trip to the United States to attend BIARI, presented research on the rigidity of social stratification in Latin America. Though in the past he had studied financial reform at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Huang presented a paper on social processes to “broaden the field of [his] study” and take advantage of other scholars’ expertise, he said.
“At present, Latin American society is still a pyramidal structure,” Huang said, identifying six reasons for rigidity in Latin American social hierarchies.
“You cannot treat Latin America as a whole,” objected Rodrigo Orair of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil. In turn, several BIARI participants suggested ways Huang could nuance his analysis by taking into account the diversity of Latin American nations. Jakir Hossain, a BIARI scholar from the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh, commended Huang on his “brave research.” Chinese scholars who study Latin America help realize the ideal of a global intellectual dialogue, he said.
Other scholars spoke about issues closer to home. Shenjing He of Sun Yat-Sen University presented the results of a 2007 survey on the concentration of poverty in urban sectors of her native China. Between city neighborhoods, workers’ villages, and urban villages, “the old inner-city urban neighborhood has the highest urban poverty concentration,” He reported.
In addition to dialogues with their global peers, participants also engaged with leading academics through faculty lectures and panels. Lest the BIARI scholars doubt that contention and disagreement define scholarly interchange throughout one’s career, faculty presentations frequently became forums for debate.
“I worry about Tony’s pessimism,” said Watson Visiting Professor Bhupinder Singh Chimni, referring to University of Utah Law Professor Antony Anghie, with whom he co-led a lecture in the Law, Social Thought, and Global Governance Institute. Chimni claimed that Anghie’s theory of Third World interactions with international law overlooks individuals’ capacity for resistance to postcolonial oppression.
Anghie admitted that the dialogue with Chimni and the audience had spurred him to see his own ideas in a new light. “What is the story I’m telling?” he asked.
Several participants commented that their experiences at Brown will change the course of their research. Agupusi plans to restructure her Ph.D. thesis and learn more about statistics. “I found out it’s necessary if I want to move forward as a researcher,” she said.
Likewise, Dinesh Kumar of Punjab University decided to attend the conference so he could become familiar with topics that are under-researched in his native India. “This is what I’m learning here,” he said. “If we don’t teach the economic aspect, then our research won’t be so useful to the economy of the country.” Kumar plans to suggest an increase in the number of law courses offered at Punjab.
Young academics compare notes at a BIARI lecture.
For Brown’s Porras, one of the biggest rewards of organizing BIARI 2009 was the interactions between participants. “Nigerians remark[ed] on how great it was to meet Brazilians, and Brazilians [were] excited to meet Chinese,” she said, adding that many scholars are discussing collaborative projects.
To help strengthen such connections, BIARI organizers are investing in a “state-of-the-art social networking tool,” said Eli Marienthal ’09, ’09 A.M., who helped coordinate the conference. Scholars will be able to identify potential collaborators based on responses to a survey about their interests, Marienthal said.
Paul Mukwaya, a Ph.D. student at Uganda’s Makerere University, is confident that his connections with global peers will outlast his stay at Brown. “The network is on,” he said. “It started the day I arrived, and it’s still growing.”
Juliana Friend ’11 is a student rapporteur at Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.