Borderland Eng.ver #1 (Program overview, motivations and goals)
Hej! This is Yohei, thank you so much for your interest in my blogs. Since some of my non-Japanese speaking friends had told me that they were interested in my blogs, I decided to post English version for the first time (special thanks to DeepL!).
This time I will write about my experiences of the academic program held in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Since it was a super exciting program full of learnings and inspirations, I have decided to reflect on the whole experience and verbalize it in the organized way. It ended up in a quite long series (as always) separated in three different posts, it would be great if you read them till the end!
Program Overview
The program was entitled "Borderland: Critical approaches to field research in the Global South", and its overarching theme was "human mobility" (or immobility), such as migration and refugees. The fact that the program was held in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand near the border running between Thailand and Myanmar, was also in line with the theme of the program. Another key point of the program was that it was not focused on a specific region such as Thailand or a specific methodology such as qualitative or quantitative research, but aimed to critically examine the entire process of research on the so-called "Global South" (a highly problematic term though). In other words, it was intended to address questions that are fundamental to research on any region or methodology, such as "What ethical issues may arise when researchers go to the Global South to conduct research, and how should they deal with these issues? and "What does it mean to conduct research on the Global South in the first place?" These are fundamental questions that tend to become abstract and thought experiment-ish in nature, but thanks to the elaborated structure of the program, the students were able to draw on their own specific fields of interest and mobilize the first-hand experience they gained by doing fieldwork in Chiang Mai, a place with a high affinity to the theme. This enabled the students to address these questions in a down-to-earth manner.
The program was jointly offered by the Copenhagen University and the UC Berkeley. There was a university alliance of which those two universities and mine were part of the membership, and as long as one was a student of a member university of that alliance, they were eligible to participate (in addition to the students from Chiang Mai University). According to the organizers, there were participants from "17 nationalities, 16 academic disciplines, and 11 universities" (although there was some deviations, such as the fact that there were no participants from universities located in Africa, South America, or Oceania).
The four-week program was divided into three parts. The first part was the first week, which consisted mainly of participating in invited (mostly online) lectures by professors and others from the aforementioned member universities who were conducting research related to the program theme. The topics of the lectures ranged from immigration in Thailand to research ethics in field research. The second and third weeks were the second part of the program, during which students formed small clusters and were assigned to short-term internships at local NGOs, research institutes, and other organizations engaged in activities related to the theme. I was assigned to an NGO called BEAM Education Foundation, which provides educational and vocational training opportunities mainly for young immigrants from Myanmar who have come to Thailand. Together with three other students assigned to the same NGO, I engaged in some tasks, including the video shootings of English lectures which will (hopefully) be offered to students in the NGO.
The fourth and final week was the third part of the program, and this period was mainly used for completing the final program assignment and preparing for the internship debriefing to be held the day before the last day of the program (I myself was hospitalized due to food poisoning at the beginning of this week, so I was not able to do much). In order to brush up my final project, students were provided with the opportunities to have one-to-one supervision sessions with the teachers to improve my final assignment.
The final assignment of the program was to write a research proposal on a topic related to the theme based on what we learned in the program and our own interests. A Research Proposal in this program is a report of about 2,000 words that includes such items as "Research Questions" "Methodology," "Literature Review" and "Positionality and Ethical Considerations" etc.
As described below in detail, I have written a proposal on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is the field of my growing interest over the past six months or so.
Motivations and goals of the program
I decided to apply for the program because the program's theme and advertised contents were perfectly suited to my interests. More specifically, I had been interested in anthropology for a long time, and after visiting Israel and Palestine about six months ago, I had begun to pay attention to fields such as migration studies, peace and conflict studies, development studies, and religious studies. Therefore, the program on the theme of "Global South" offered by the Department of Anthropology was very attractive to me. In this respect, the fact that the program was not focused on Thailand or Southeast Asia, as mentioned above, also worked well for me.
The three goals I set at the beginning of the program were as follows.
Specifying my interests
Although I had become interested in the region and the academic fields mentioned above after visiting Israel and Palestine, I was not entirely sure what specific aspects of the region and academic fields I wanted to learn more about. I hoped that this program would help me clarify what specific "questions" I wanted to address. (The blog series below is about my experiences in Palestine. You can try to read them using translation apps if interested!)
Write a Research Proposal that will actually be useful in my future research
I was planning to put a lot of effort into the Research Proposal, as it counts as a concrete output of the above goal - to specifying my own interests. In addition, I wanted to make sure that the proposal I wrote was something that would motivate me to actually put into practice. It could inform my undergraduate thesis, but also my master's and doctoral research (I don't know how far I'll pursue my academic career though). Of course, there is the issue of feasibility, and as time goes by, my interests will change and I will probably realize myself thinking "I was so ignorant back then" (or at least I hope so), but even so, I thought it would be meaningful to formulate a research theme that I would most like to work on at this point of time.
Engaging in networking with people with common interests
I had a feeling that it would be very important for me to get to know people who have interests in common with mine and to build relationships with them so that I can rely on them when something happens (and also be relied on), both in building my career and in leading my life. I also feel that it is important to have such people outside of Japan, both in terms of my interests and my orientation. In this regard, I thought that this program would be a good opportunity for me to expand my network of people who have diverse backgrounds but also share similar interests and orientations to some extent. Networking is a dry word, but in short, I wanted to make friends.
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