At the end of a busy year, looking forward to the fall
It is impossible to forget that the Weatherhead Center is first and foremost a research center. One of the ways it fosters research is through collaboration between faculty, students—graduate and undergraduate—visitors, and postdocs. This multigenerational engagement is about to get a big boost through four new projects coming up in the months ahead: two new Weatherhead Initiative Research Clusters to begin in the fall; a new summer research internship in France; and a new visiting scholar project on international organizational studies which will welcome its first cohort in September. Some of these are in conversation with the new focus on comparative inequality which I have developed through the organization of four faculty conversations (around race, gender, and stigma) which were held throughout this academic year and which mobilized scholars from several of Harvard’s schools.
The Executive Committee recently approved funding for two new Weatherhead Initiative projects, continuing the support of large-scale and groundbreaking research in the realm of international studies:
The Weatherhead Initiative on Afro-Latin American Studies will be led by Professors Alejandro de la Fuente (History, African and African American Studies), Doris Sommer (Romance Languages and Literatures, African and African American Studies), and Davíd Carrasco (Anthropology, HDS). They will coordinate a group of faculty, visiting scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates who share an interest in studying the people of African descent in Latin America. The project will focus on the complex intersections between nationalist ideologies of racial democracy, mobilization, and the implementation of race-based redistributive policies in Latin America.
The Weatherhead Initiative on Climate Engineering: The Economics and Governance of Solar Radiation Management will be led by Professor David Keith (SEAS, HKS). His research is concerned with solar radiation management (SRM), which aims to reduce the Earth’s absorption of solar energy by, for example, scattering aerosols to the upper atmosphere or increasing the lifetime and reflectivity of low-altitude clouds. Working closely with multidisciplinary colleagues, Professor Keith will research SRM from technological, economic, and governance perspectives. Together, the team will ponder questions such as: What are the consequences of SRM for continuing efforts to mitigate carbon emissions? How would SRM affect environmental politics? How would SRM be governed? What are the security implications? This is a topic with global impact, with complex implementation and regulatory issues. It is important that the WCFIA continues to support research related to climate change, in line with the WCFIA-supported research of Professors Dale Jorgenson (Economics) and Michael McElroy (SEAS), which is now supported by the Harvard Global Institute in China.
The WCFIA is collaborating with the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center’s Field Education Internship Program and the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights to launch Social Engagement for Social Inclusion: A Participatory Research Internship in France this summer to study Roma families and communities. Six Harvard undergraduates and graduate students will be placed in local host organizations in Paris and Marseille for eight weeks. The students will learn about the local host organization’s mission and activities, build upon the host organization’s existing research under close supervision of local experts, and conduct surveys and focus groups with Roma families living in informal settlements in close collaboration with the communities themselves. WCFIA faculty and advanced doctoral students will be tasked with the pre-departure research training and in-the-field oversight of these activities. With its focus on stigmatized populations, this undergraduate program also contributes to the broader Weatherhead Center focus I have initiated around the multipronged topic of comparative inequality.
Finally, a new four-year Weatherhead-SCANCOR Project in International Organizational Studies will launch in the fall. The core of the project is a visiting scholars program at the Weatherhead Center that brings together faculty visitors working on international topics using the tools of organizational social science. The partners are the Weatherhead Center and the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR), a membership-supported nonprofit organization funded by leading universities and business schools from Scandinavia. Under the direction of Harvard faculty member Frank Dobbin (Sociology), visiting scholars will connect with faculty and students across Harvard schools to study multinational corporations, transnational corporate networks, and other non-state organizations.
While planning these programs, we have simultaneously organized our spring around an important center retreat held in early April, where the Executive Committee engaged in deep discussion of the Center in preparation for an external review, scheduled for late September. We look forward to this milestone in the fall (the last review was held in 2006). We hope that from this review we will gain a clearer understanding of the road ahead and the best possible strategies for making the most out of our Center, our community, and our resources.
These and other exciting developments would not have been possible without the dedication of the deeply involved and caring faculty and staff who make the Weatherhead Center go. I want to express my heartfelt thanks for the ways in which all those involved made the year such a stimulating experience—even if we all felt that we were stretched too thin at times. I hope all will agree that it has been a very busy year, but an excellent one.
Michèle Lamont
Center Director