2008-09 International Scholars Program
Award Recipients
The International Scholars Program provides an opportunity for students to deepen their academic explorations by integrating their curriculum and their international experiences in innovative and thoughtful ways. The program will create an enhanced context for students to prepare for and probe the challenges and opportunities of international engagement through reflection and dialogue with a community of scholars and mentors.
Elizabeth Adler ’11, Nepal
A pre-MD, pre-global Health MPH Development Studies concentrator, Elizabeth’s academic focus at Brown centers on the socioeconomic, political, and cultural determinants of health. Her interest in improving healthcare for underserved populations will bring her to Nepal, where constraints on access to essential obstetric services severely threaten maternal health. Elizabeth will investigate sustainable interventions to reduce barriers to quality obstetric care. She will focus on the impact of social context—poverty, cultural norms and gender roles, lack of female autonomy, inadequate infrastructure, and the tensions between Western and traditional medicine—in shaping maternal health outcomes. Elizabeth will also act as the project coordinator for a women’s health camp in the rural Lalitpur District of Nepal, collaborating with local physicians and the NGO Society for Health, Environment, and Women’s Development to break down barriers to healthcare for Nepalese women.
Joshua Bernard ’11, Ecuador
Participation in the International Scholars Program allows me the unique opportunity to merge my academic interests of law, social justice, public policy, and environmental studies and to supplement my education with a truly international experience. I am the acting Vice President of Esperanza International, Inc., a non-profit organization that works to aid communities adversely affected by toxic contamination. Under my leadership, Esperanza is currently facilitating an initiative to create a new environmental regulatory framework for the country of Ecuador. Developed by a powerful coalition of local and national government agencies, non-governmental activist organizations, and top Ecuadorian and American schools of law, innovative legislation will keep multinational corporations more environmentally responsible and protect Ecuadorian citizens from lethal pollution both retroactively and prospectively.
Steven Daniels ’10, Kenya
I will be traveling to Western Kenya to investigate the use and adoption of technology by potential consumers living in extreme poverty, collectively known as the bottom of the pyramid. I will be working with the newly founded Africa Center for Engineering Social Solutions (ACESS) to develop affordable technological solutions for rural farmers that facilitate sustainable cycles of income generation, social progress, and environmental harmony. By working with and talking to community members, I will study various approaches to technological development, including homegrown solutions, community-based interventions, and market-based methods. Statistical research will focus primarily on the effectiveness of interventions made by ACESS, including tools for farmers of grain amaranth and complementary knowledge transfer, market development, and support services.
Lisa Gomi ’10, Japan
I plan to research Japan’s most recent move to experiment with privately financed prisons, and other aspects of the 2005 penal system reforms. This project lends itself well to exploring the increasingly unclear boundaries between private interests and traditionally public duties, greater worldwide trends of prison privatization, and philosophies of punishment in prison policy. I intend to draw from the many courses I’ve taken related to Japan, and my experience with the Japanese criminal justice system this past summer, to develop my findings into an International Relations thesis my senior year.
Rosi Greenberg ’10, Syria
Rosi will be working with Palestinian artists in Israel and Syria to develop creative arts projects for communication between organizations and across borders. In Jerusalem, Rosi will work with co-artist Ayed Arafah to open "ArtSpace," a studio space with a wide range of art media and materials-- acrylic paint, film, clay, and books on the rich history of Palestinian art. ArtSpace will invite many artists to bring their ideas, their used objects and trash, and their friends, to come create art together for four weeks. Rosi will then travel to Damascus for one month, where she will work with the Union of Palestinian Artists to host workshops for the 120 artists involved, then connect them through the internet to the community of artists in Israel. In addition, all throughout the spring Israeli and Palestinian organizations will be working to gather stones from the land to contribute to the creation of meaningful physical, historical, and conceptual space. One rock from each of the 531 Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948 will be collected in ArtSpace and then taken by Rosi to Damascus, where they will be laid out in the formation of a map of Palestine. Through this project, Rosi hopes to be a means of connection where communications are otherwise difficult, and to provide an international platform for the artists and issues.
Rosi is a junior Anthropology and Middle East Studies concentrator at Brown. She spent last year in Palestine learning Arabic, working with children, and attempting to understand the impact of the occupation and political situation there. Rosi hopes to write her senior thesis on her work with art in the Middle East and is grateful to the International Scholars Program for allowing her Brown education to include her work abroad.
Caitlin Ho ’10, Cambodia
As a concentrator in Ethnic Studies and Political Science, I have studied questions of community empowerment and grassroots movements. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I will work as an intern for Women's Network for Unity (WNU), a women's union which organizes for sex worker's human rights. Through interviews with union members, I will examine how recent anti-trafficking legislation is experienced by the women it seeks to aid. My research will be channeled towards creating a senior thesis, examining how a women's group brings local perspectives to the global conversation about trafficking, women's rights, and the role of sex workers.
Ariel Hudes ’11, Honduras
I will be traveling to El Progreso, Honduras where I will study and work with Teatro La Fragua. La Fragua was founded thirty years ago by an American Jesuit priest and since then it has thrived as a cultural influence and institution in the rural area. My project has two overall objectives:
1) To expand my performance vocabulary through observing the rituals and performative traditions of the people of Honduras.
2) To look with a scholarly eye at how theatre functions in a developing community and nation.
I will spend some time working directly with La Fragua, some time studying them, and two weeks traveling to week-long cultural festivals where I will be immersed in the Honduran peoples’ rich and diverse performative traditions.
At Brown I am studying theatre arts and literary arts. This project will allow me to enrich the research component of my theatre education and, as a performer, playwright, and creator of multi-disciplinary theatre, will provide me with “material” to use in the theatrical projects I work on at Brown and after Brown. As a capstone, my plan is to use my increased performance vocabulary and cultural immersion experience to write a play not based on the story of my experience, but rather, on the things I learn about the people and culture of Honduras.
Rashid Syed Hussain ’10, India
Rashid will conduct an ethnographic research project on the polio disparity in India, which disproportionately affects the minority Muslim population. Though this disparity has largely been blamed on resistance from clerics and radicals to the polio vaccine in the popular press, Rashid’s project seeks to understand the complexity of this problem. With participant observation of the vaccination campaign and the quality of life in Muslim ghettoes; and interviews with patients, clerics, and government and health officials, Rashid will synthesize his academic work in Human Biology and Anthropology, to ultimately write a thesis presenting his findings.
Scott Lowenstein ’10, Mexico
II will be traveling to Baja Calfornia Sur, Mexico to study the economic and environmental costs and benefits of using coastal ecosystem resources along the Gulf of California. I will use data from fishery catches, ecological assessments and government tax and poverty assistance programs to tease out which styles of coastal management are the most effective at maximizing long-term, sustainable economic development. I will also include a before-and- after analysis of the impact of a large federal poverty reduction program on local fishery catches, to see how coastal resource use changes with more or less pressing need for resources. All of these data should shed some light on what coastal management programs are most effective in promoting long-term economic growth in coastal communities and how governments can best facilitate this growth.
Patrick Martin-Tuite ’10, South Africa
I will travel this summer to Cape Town, South Africa, to investigate recent debates and developments in the country’s national health policy surrounding HIV and male circumcision. As my Brown curriculum has mostly focused on politics and civil society in the developing world, I intend to examine how various political forces, both international and national, have entered this controversial debate and posed important questions regarding the meanings of culture and tradition, the political economy of health, and the status of science in South African culture. My research will be conducted in a variety of methods: archival research at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies, participation in the International AIDS Society’s July conference, interviews with local professors and public health officials, and field research with the Treatment Action Campaign. In the fall, I will use my findings as the foundation of my thesis for the Development Studies concentration.
Emily Segal ’10, England
I plan to study a collection of print ephemera from the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in the Prints & Books collection at Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The Great Exhibition was the first world's fair, a vast performance of industrialism that displayed raw materials, machines and products from all over the world. When Marx, who was living in England, visited the exhibition himself, he described it as a kind of international tutorial on commodity fetishism. It was also the surplus funds from the exhibition, and many of the objects in it, that formed the museum that would become the Victoria & Albert; the museum is indebted to the Great Exhibition both conceptually and financially, which means the way they organize their collection of materials demonstrates three things: how they organize printed material, how they organize historical information about this watershed international event, and how they organize the materials of their own history. I plan to examine the collection to see what the Crystal Palace can contribute about museums, archives, material culture, and commodity fetishism; how this exhibition contributed to the way exhibition practice assigns aesthetic and material value to objects. I plan to situate this study specifically in the way ephemera, would-be trash, is conserved in the museum. Ultimately, I'm interested in investigating what kinds of alternative museum practice could manage these issues in a richer and more complicated way. One way of looking at this kind of study of print culture is as the study of "design for reading" the organization of physical elements that form and inform the process of textual interpretation, a focus of my studies in Comparative Literature. The process of interpreting non-literary printed texts as literature, as well as interpreting institutions as sites of aesthetic and cultural exchange, are two other vectors of interest that relate to Comparative Literature.
Kona Shen ’10
Megan Smith ’10, Jamaica
As an Africana Studies concentrator, I have been tasked to learn and investigate the impact of colonialism on the African Diaspora. In the past three years, I have been drawn to courses inside and outside of the Africana department that analyze literature as not only an art form but also as political commentary. This past semester I took a class entitled History, Literature, and the Caribbean Novel with Professor George Lamming which inspired me to pursue the International Scholars Program. With the help of the International Affairs Office, I will be traveling to Mona, Jamaica this summer to attend the University of West Indies. I will also be complementing my studies abroad with a research project into the influence the legacies of plantation society have had on contemporary Caribbean fiction. I am very appreciative of the opportunity I have been given, and I am excited to discover the conclusions my travels and research will bring forth.
Shang Song ’10, Canada
Cartilage is a living tissue that lines the bony surface of joints. It provides shock absorption, enabling complex range of motions from performing daily activities to athletic endeavors. Unlike other connective tissues, it grows and repairs more slowly once it is damaged. My research focuses on analyzing drug release from helical rosette nanotubes (HRNs), which have great potential in orthopedic applications due to its injectable, self-assembled, and functionalized properties. The drug loaded HRNs can be used to promote tissue healing. Aiming to improve current treatments with nanotechnology, my research will take place in Prof. Hicham Fenirri’s lab at University of Alberta under National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in Summer 2009. With the generous funding provided by Brown University, I’d like to bring back most recent findings and knowledge, and strengthen communication in the scientific field.