New Geographies, New Pedagogies: Institute of International Studies; UC Berkeley
IIS Resources | Humanities Center | IAS Units
The Institute of International Studies (IIS) was established in 1955 to promote interdisciplinary research in the social and policy sciences in comparative and transnational research. In view of the historic depth of area studies on the Berkeley campus -- which is nationally ranked as the premier university in terms of the quality and size of its international studies centers and graduate student training -- IIS's mission was, and continues to be, in those intellectual domains which emphasis either connections and comparisons across regions, and the investigation of transnational and global processes. The Institute has typically promoted an interest in a number of broad substantive themes: peace and security, environment and population, comparative modernities, and the global economy. The particular inflections of these broad themes change over time of course and are driven in part by the realities of a rapidly change world reality.
Currently IIS is engaged in six sorts of programmatic activities, all of which involve close cooperation with the area studies programs, with the professional schools, and with other research centres, most especially the Women's Studies Center/Beatrice Bain Institute:
These activities are funded by a combination of core endowment monies form the Ford Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation, and from extramural research grants (currently from the Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation). Under the broad umbrella of multi-year extramural funding -- typically initiated through small seed grants to clusters of faculty -- the primary research foci, which change over time, are organized around linked seminars, workshops and faculty - student working groups. This model has worked exceptionally well and is especially well orchestrated electronically. A program on political Islam or environmental politics would typically have a seminar series, three to four working groups on related sub themes, an annual conference and perhaps a graduate seminar taught by a visitor. This provides a structure which links a diverse inter-disciplinary group of faculty and students and visitors. The development of a world class website -- which won an award from Netscape -- has permitted IIS moreover to both more effectively pursue outreach, more readily distribute its papers and policy documents, expand its outreach activities, and to create on the web rich sources of information (interviews, interactive video, papers etc) pertaining to each of the research foci.
IIS has a particular commitment to graduate student training and to the questions of how theory and method in the social sciences doctoral training in challenged by globalization. A Ford Foundation program on "New Geographies: Challenges to Area Studies" addresses this issue.
The Director of IIS is Michael Watts, Chancellor's Professor of Geography and Development Studies. Having worked geographically in West Africa, South India and in California, Watts' research has encompassed longstanding concerns with environmental conservation, agrarian change and food security, political Islam, and the forms and trajectories of global capitalism. He is currently working on questions of indigenous minorities and political conflict in Nigeria and Ecuador in relation to the transnational oil industry, and is completing a book on the history of post-war U.S. capitalism seen through a rather prosaic "commodity," the chicken. His most recent books are Reworking Modernity (1993), Liberation Ecologies (1995) and Globalizing Food (1996).
Institute staff include an Executive Director, Harry Kreisler, three senior staff, two junior staff, and several students assistants.
The IIS Executive Committee consists of:
In view of the number of ongoing colloquia, seminars, and workings groups, IIS draws under its umbrella in an active and participatory way several hundred faculty and at least as many doctoral students.
See more information on the Institute of International Studies
Within IIS the most important free-standing research cluster is the Human Rights Center. Established through the generosity of the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, HRC engages faculty, students and activists interdisciplinary research and advocacy to protect and promote international human rights and humanitarian law. HRC employs an inter-disciplinary approach, embracing law, medical and health sciences, and the social sciences, in its research and program activities. It attempts to insure that significant interests in other areas -- economic, cultural, humanitarian, commerce and trade, ethic, privacy -- inform the identification of issues and strategies on human rights but that human rights interests inform these other areas as well.
The activities of HRC include:
HRC is a focal point of activities around human rights activities on the Berkeley campus but it also works on collaborative projects with international NGO's including Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
The Director of HRC is Eric Stover who joined Berkeley in 1996 after serving as Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights. His work began in 1983 when he and geneticist Marie-Claire King organized the first HLA and DNA testing of "disappeared" children in Argentina. In the early 1990's he worked with forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner on similar investigations in El Salvador. Stover recently completed a three year project on the plight of Rwandan children following the 1994 genocide which was published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Stover is internationally recognized for his research and writing in the field of medicine and human rights. His book The Breaking of Bodies and Minds (1990) is a central text in the field, and his Witnesses for the Grave (with Christopher Joyce) was named a New York Times Book of the Year. His new book The Graves (1998) with photographer Gilles Peress has been widely acclaimed. Stover has also written on landmines, and since 1992 has served an expert to the International Criminals Tribunal for Rwanda and Yugoslavia at the Hague.
In addition to course offerings, lectures and symposia, HRC is current involved in two sorts of activities. First, Trial Monitoring in connection with the Boalt School of Law. And second, three major research initiatives: (i) Medicolegal Investigation of War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia, (ii) Justice, Accountability and Reconstruction in the Former Yugoslavia, (iii) Linking Women, Human Rights and Development in Post-Genocide Rwanda, and (iv) Refugees Communities and Access to Health Care in California.
The HRC Advisory Committee consists of:
See more information on the Human Rights Center
The Townsend Center was established in 1987 to encourage new configurations of humanistic scholarship within the university, to increase communication across disciplinary boundaries, and to forge new connections between humanistic scholarship and the community at large. With major funding for the late Doreen B. Townsend, THC has become a vehicle for communication and program development between humanities and other constituencies on and off campus. The Center awards fellowships to Berkeley graduate students and untenured faculty and offers grants for collaborative working groups, conferences and symposia. It also organizes lectures and symposia including a number of nationally known endowed lectures, most notably the Avenali Lectures
The Director of the Townsend Center is Professor Randolph Starn, Marian E. Koshland Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. Starn is an internationally recognized scholar of Renaissance Italy, Renaissance Culture and early modern European history. In addition, he has written extensively on questions of historiography and philosophy of history. His most recent books are Arts of Power (1992), Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1994) and Varieties of Cultural History (1999).
The Townsend Center has an Associate Director, Tina Gillis; five staff members; and two student assistants, and works in various ways to provide understanding for public and academic audiences. In its working groups for example, more than 40 collaborative associations involving some 800 faculty and students consider a broad gamut of topics: these include a number which have obvious connections to "The New Geographies":
One of the major initiatives of the Townsend Center is the program on "Death and Dying: Humanizing Medicine at the Margins of Life." This intersects with two other programs, one on Aging and the other on memory and identity in regard to memorializing the past. An important issue for the Townsend Center has been the need to emphasize the significance of the ongoing hermeneutic project, especially in regard to those of public concern. In its concern with social suffering -- of which death and dying is one -- the Townsend Center is expressly concerned with the tensions between the moral orientation that the subjects demands of the humanities and the pragmatic orientation of public institutions of support. The Townsend Center is concerned that view its activities in this realm in a frame which permits "grounded responses with the aid of social maps and theory, in more humanely valid ways of refiguring the predicaments of our time" (Deadalus 1996, Spring).
The Townsend Center Advisory Board consists of:
See more information on the Townsend Center for the Humanities
The primary collaborating units are the area studies research and teaching programs which are administratively anchored under the Dean of International and Area Studies [Dean David Leonard]. Dr. David Szanton, Executive Director of International and Area Studies, is the individual responsible for working with the area studies programs. These area studies teaching and research programs are as follow [Directors in parenthesis]:
Area Studies Programs
Undergraduate Teaching Programs
Departmental and Professional School Units
See more information on International and Area Studies
Next: CVs and Bio-Bibs of Key Faculty
© Copyright 1999, Regents of the University of California