SGS launches global research workshop program

In an effort to foster the sharing of research across academic fields and national boundaries, Stanford Global Studies (SGS) has announced a Global Research Workshop program, which will support workshops that explore interdisciplinary, transregional themes.

“One of our priorities at SGS is to facilitate research that advances our understanding of the world,” says SGS Director Jisha Menon, who established the Global Research Workshop program this year. “Our hope is that these workshops will provide a forum for faculty, graduate students, and scholars from Stanford and beyond to collaborate and share innovative research on issues of regional and global importance.”

This academic year, SGS will offer four workshops that examine several important topics, including decarbonization, enslavement, and heritagization. In addition, SGS will provide partial support to an ongoing workshop series, entitled “Research Conceptualizations and Pedagogical Structures in the Global Humanities.”

SGS is now accepting proposals for workshops to be offered in 2022-23. The deadline to apply is March 15, 2022, and you can learn more by visiting this webpage.

2021-22 Global Research Workshops:

Decarbonization in India and Africa

Lead organizers: Ines M. Azevedo and Gireesh Shrimali

The impetus towards sustainable development and decarbonization is particularly visible in developing countries. Increasing electrification and energy access efforts in these countries have been coupled with the aim to concurrently develop net-zero emissions energy systems. That said, systems-level change will require systems-level collaboration amongst different organizations, fields, and geographies. Especially from the purview of developing regions such as India and Africa, a lot of research has already been conducted across the world that can be catalytic for transforming their respective electric power sectors and decarbonization efforts. The intent of this series of workshops will be to engage utilities, government leaders, private energy service providers, and academic researchers from the United States, India, and Africa, with the objective to think about systems-level solutions for energy, development and decarbonization.

Law and Literature in the Global South

Lead organizer: Hector M. Hoyos

Law and Literature in the Global South broadens the horizons of the Law and Humanities critical paradigm. Rather than conversations that center legal and cultural practices from the Global North, which are then brought to bear on “objects of study” from the South, this workshop engages with practitioners whose expertise constellates around global concerns and addresses theorizing subjects in the South. At its heart, Law and Literature in the Global South is an interdisciplinary group that adopts an expansive approach to the understanding of literature (i.e., novels and poems as well as cinema, visual culture, etc.). In this way, the group will open spaces for Law and Humanities debates at Stanford and proffer a shared platform to develop the research agendas of various faculty and graduate students related to legal cultures and cognate literatures from different locales (mainly China, the Middle East, and South America).

Neoliberal Heritagescapes: Culture and Urbanism in Post-Conflict Cities

Lead organizers: Anna Bigelow and Thomas Blom Hansen

This series brings into dialogue the relationship between heritagization, transposing economies, and urban struggles in selected post-conflict and post-colonial cities around the globe. Our goal is to examine the similarities and differences of approaches in which differently positioned actors and various national and international stake holders mobilize past, particularly by using cultural heritage as a practical vantage point to act upon urban spaces. We aim to explore the conditions and practices through which growing heritagization of historic neighborhoods enables local governments, local elites, and real-estate developers to engender massive spatial and social changes in the urban landscape. And how and why cultural heritage is placed at the heart of the urban development schemas that claim to accommodate the nostalgia of past in the ever-evolving urban present, guided by neo-liberal sensibilities. Programs and frameworks that promise social uplift and common good often provide tools for marginalizing the bearers of heritage themselves and thus become vessels of capital accumulation and commodification of heritage. We bring into question the problems of history, culture, economic development, an old/new urban aesthetics, real estate values, and housing struggles, gentrification, and ghettoization, forced evictions, segregation, citizenship, nation-branding, religion, and other political and national interests. 

Reframing Enslaved Pasts

Lead organizers: James T. Campbell and Grant Parker

In this series we plan to discuss critical data practices around enslaved pasts, focusing on the methods and choices that underlie digital data projects. While there are already many such projects for the Atlantic world, there remains much scope to generate a transregional discussion (with some emphasis on the Indian Ocean World). The goal of this series is to bring well established projects on enslavement into conversation with emerging ones.

In addition to the workshops listed above, SGS is also providing partial support to an ongoing series:

Research Conceptualizations and Pedagogical Structures in the Global Humanities

Lead organizers: Charlotte Fonrobert and Alexander Key

This series asks how we may conceptualize positions on global humanities, and how these ideas have created teaching structures at institutions of higher education across the world. These workshops will bring scholars from around the globe together with faculty in the Stanford Humanities Core to discuss global humanities pedagogical structures and research conceptualizations of the field. They have the potential to catalyze and develop the curricular structures at each of our institutions, in addition to continuing the work of the international research community towards conceptualization of academic fields of study appropriate to the world and its histories.