The Brown Advanced Research Initiatve:
Toward an International Intellectual Community
In the summer of 2008, a pilot of the Brown Institute of Advanced Research was launched, encompassing four separate workshops for young faculty and post-doctoral researchers from around the world. Intensive workshops were run in four academic fields: international law and global governance; archeology; development studies; and Latin American studies. They brought together scholars from countries around the world, including China, Chile, Colombia, England, India, Ireland, Israel, Egypt, and Syria.
The pilot institutes experimented with programs of varying lengths and formats. In the field of international law, the week long program stressed engagement with leading approaches to global governance found in other disciplines. In archeology, the pilot program focused on convening young archeologists and curators to work with one another across lines of academia and practice in investigation knowledge production in relation to issues of cultural heritage and collective memory. Our third pilot program brought young scholars from several disciplines working in the field of development studies to share comparative research on inequality and to collectively investigate new methodologies to assess inequality. Finally, our pilot workshop in Latin American studies will bring young scholars from the region in diverse disciplines together to share perspectives on a common topic: the significance of social movements and new forms of public authority in Latin America.
From these pilot programs it was clear that convening workshops at Brown offers emerging scholars from the global South an opportunity to meet one another to share research and develop network relationships which may otherwise be difficult to establish and maintain. Brown’s innovative educational philosophy and interdisciplinary experience provides an ideal environment for convening scholars and building transnational networks; knowledge production is deeply aided by intensive collaboration among scholars from the global North and South working together. Using these lessons to plan for the future, we hope to inaugurate the Institute of Advanced Research on a more ambitious scale in the summer of 2009.