REVISED Call for Applications: Integrative Graduate Humanities Education and Research Training (IGHERT) Fellowships
Theme: Indigeneity in an Expanded Field: Transnationality, Migration, and Human/Nonhuman Belonging
NEW Deadline: Monday, March 31, 2014
Award consists of:
• Stipend in the amount of $24,500 per year for 2 years ($7,000 per quarter, plus $3,500 in the summer)
• Tuition, in-state fees, and health insurance
• Travel and associated expenses to Canberra (Australia), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), and Giessen (Germany) over the course of the two-and-a-half-year span of the project
Number of awards: 2
The Institute for Humanities Research, with three other humanities centers across the globe, is participating in a pilot program for an innovative international model in Integrative Graduate Humanities Education and Research Training (IGHERT) funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). In addition to the IHR, the humanities centers include the Center for 21st Century Studies the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany; and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra.
The IGHERT program brings together faculty and doctoral students in a series of structured collaborations to undertake jointly mentored, international research. The four humanities centers will engage graduate students in a series of collaborative training and research activities, and will test, refine, and assess a scalable model of skill training and digital archiving that can be applied in multiple contexts and to multiple themes.
The IGHERT program seeks to bring an interdisciplinary, problem-based approach to graduate training, in which mentors and students, working across diverse fields and geographies, may develop innovative research projects and cultivate lifelong habits of internationalized, collaborative inquiry.
IGHERT will support pursuit of their doctoral studies at their home institutions while also providing them the opportunity to participate with one another in doctoral symposia, workshops, master classes, and graduate conferences to be held at each of the partner humanities centers.
In conceptualizing the theme for the pilot—Indigeneity in an Expanded Field—we have differentiated four topical foci that will organize our discussions and facilitate communication across disciplines and geographical locations. Although the foci are interrelated and overlapping to some extent, we will utilize them to lend an identifiable thematic emphasis to each of the various collaborative occasions on which we will assemble the faculty-student group and to consider in depth different facets of the complex issue of indigeneity. These four foci are:
§ Memories / Objects / Stories: pursues how artifacts and narratives (histories, legends, literary fictions, testimony) work together to construct indigenous memories, and how in turn memorial processes spur culturally creative production or reinterpretation of objects and inherited narratives. Especially considering contested colonial histories and claims in the present to speak for an authorized indigenous past, we will build upon thinkers such as Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty to broaden our understanding of how indigenous peoples “make history.” Guha, for example, discusses how both Indian history-writers during the Raj and the personal meditations of the poet Tagore may be understood as different symbolic expressions of indigenous experiences of historicity, which remain largely unrecognizable within Western notions of world history.
§ Territories / Spaces / Environments: considers dynamics of place and displacement in indigeneity, with special attention to how traditional conceptions of territory interact with more abstract notions of space and with highly contested, often transnationally scaled conceptions of environment. Michael Hathaway, for example, has documented how recent environmentalist concerns in China have led Chinese public intellectuals to designate an expanding range of rural peoples in environmentally sensitive or unique spaces as “indigenous,” to help strengthen their environmentalist case before transnational institutions like the World Bank and World Wildlife Fund.
§ Peoples / Migrations / Claims: concentrates on two major forces redefining indigeneity, geographical/cultural displacement in migration and the diversifying range of domains in which claims to indigeneity may be made (legal, political, cultural, linguistic, genomic, etc.). For example, in Australia’s Northern Territory, a Catholic Mission Station still owned by the Church and the attachment of the aboriginal “Mission people” to this “alienated” land rather than their traditional homeland together considerably complicate their indigenous identity. Local, national, and supernational contexts, expressed through interwoven cultural, territorial, and legal factors, have shaped their sense of tradition, their feelings of belonging with respect to both land sites, and their migratory movements between the sites in response to changing social contexts.
§ Human and Nonhuman Belonging: expands the defining frame of indigeneity to include human and nonhuman actors (e.g., climate, animal and plant species, topographical aspects of land, technical instruments) and their complex interactions. The internationally best-selling success of Lü Jiamin’s 2004 novel Wolf Totem, which draws together Lü’s memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution with the long trajectory of Chinese subjugation of the Mongols, the extermination of the Mongolian wolf, and the environmental devastation of the inner Mongolian grasslands, provides a useful example of how indigeneity is being redefined globally in relation to both human and nonhuman contexts. In parallel, Lü’s novel condemns Maoist collective agriculture and Han ethnic domination of the Mongol people, the ecological consequences of Chinese communist control over Mongolian territory and the destruction of indigenous nomadic forms of life in favor of stationary farming. Its impact in depicting the status of Mongol indigeneity cannot be separated from China’s economic liberalization and its prominent role in globalization, nor from the extraordinary global translation and dissemination of Lü’s book.
Eligibility:
The student must be:
a) enrolled in a graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz
b) within normative time and in good academic standing
c) enrolled for at least five credits of graduate-level coursework
d) advanced to candidacy after January 1, 2013 or advancing to candidacy before December 31, 2014 (must be certified by program’s Graduate Chair)
Application consists of:
i) letter of application outlining the student’s interest in the program and how their research relates to indigeneity and one or more of the four foci. We are not looking for your dissertation prospecturs nor do we expect a comprehensive summary of your dissertation proposal. Rather we are interested in how your project / your dissertation research draws on and relates to the project focus on indigeneity.
ii) one page curriculum vitae
iii) letter of support from the faculty advisor a) evaluating the student’s academic work to date, b) addressing the student’s timetable for completion, c) verifying that they are within normative time and in good academic standing and d) addressing the benefit of project participation to student’s research and contribution of student to project group (no more than 2 pages)
Terms of Award:
The IGHERT Fellowships are multi-year fellowships. Students receive two years of twelve-month dissertation support, which includes $24,500 annually plus in-state tuition, campus fees, and graduate student health insurance for the first two years of the program (Fall Quarter 2014 through Summer Quarter 2016). The IGHERT project will continue through Fall Quarter 2016, however, and the IGHERT fellows are be expected to participate in the culminating conference in Giessen, Germany, during Fall 2016. Participation in all workshops is mandatory. Travel and associated expenses to all workshops, including the final conference in Germany, will be provided to participants by the grant.
How to Apply:
Please submit your application electronically, as a PDF file, to ihr@ucsc.edu. Advisors should send the letters directly to ihr@ucsc.edu
Questions? Please contact Irena Polic, Associate Director, Institute for Humanities Research at ipolic@ucsc.edu