The University of California, Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and Sciences Po, a premier university based in Paris, France, have announced the recipients of the 2019-2020 Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration Grants, which provide funding to enable graduate students and faculty members to work together on a cross-institutional basis.
Sciences Po and UC Berkeley are two of the world’s leading centers of research in the social sciences; both are home to renowned experts in public health, urban development, security, environmental policy, and other pressing issues. The Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration Grants program was launched in 2018 to encourage partnerships between scholars from the two institutions. In addition to funding, Matrix and Sciences Po provide grantees with meeting and workspace, as well as administrative support.
Two teams of scholars were selected to receive grants for 2019-2020, following evaluation by faculty review boards from both institutions. Projects were selected in part for their potential to lead to ongoing partnerships; contribute to their home departments, schools, or programs; and create opportunities for graduate students to participate.
“Matrix is delighted to continue our partnership with Sciences Po,” says Jessica Stewart, Associate Director of Programs for Social Science Matrix. “The proposals selected this year represent new and established research collaborations. Both projects are significant, ambitious, and potentially impactful ventures, led by distinguished faculty. Their research promises not only to forge new ground but also to expand the scholarly connections between UC Berkeley and Sciences Po.”
Below are summaries of the projects that will be funded through this year’s Matrix/Sciences Po Collaboration Grants:
Revisiting Integration: A Cross-Atlantic Comparison of Pathways to Immigrant Civic, Political, and Economic Empowerment
The number of immigrants to the United States and Western Europe has grown dramatically in recent decades, stirring up echoes of nativist and populist politics and triggering urgent questions about the capacity of these advanced democracies to adapt to this growing diversity.
With the support of a Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration Grant, Taeku Lee, George Johnson Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and Laura Morales, Professor in Political Science and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, will launch a new initiative focused on examining the pathways of immigrant integration in the United States and Western Europe. In particular, they seek to better understand when immigrant groups pursue their individual and collective goals by pursuing economic advancement and when they pursue political engagement and empowerment.
“The specific topic for our proposed collaboration is immigrant integration, whether and under what conditions immigrants adapt to and become incorporated into social, economic, civic, and political life in their new host society,” the researchers wrote in their proposal. “Our interest is in the question of whether and when immigrant origin groups pursue exclusively socio-economic strategies for integration, and whether and when they see politics as an additional optimal pathway to integration.”
Funding from the Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration grant will help the scholars lay the groundwork for a full research proposal, as they will identify relevant data sources and background literature, develop a detailed research design, and identify potential collaborators. “The seed money,” Lee and Morales explained, “will immediately create opportunities for graduate students at both UC Berkeley and Sciences Po to become connected to an international collaboration and to gain the skills required to prepare strong research grant proposals.”
Diasporic Identities: Southeast Asian Incorporation Experiences in Europe and America-The Post-Refugee Generations
In December 2018, Khatharya Um, Associate Professor and Coordinator of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Hélène Le Bail, a political scientist on the permanent faculty at Sciences Po and a research fellow at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI), used a Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration Grant to organize a colloquium that brought together European and American researchers working on Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian diasporas to engage in critical, cross-disciplinary discourse on the post-refugee generations. The event drew more than 100 participants, including scholars from the fields of ethnic studies, sociology, history, clinical psychology, Asian studies, political science, and demography, as well as artists, authors, community organizations, and advocates.
This year, Um and Le Bail will build on the generative exchanges from the colloquium and use a Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration grant to continue their joint project. They will compile materials from the conference for a co-edited volume, to be published in both French and English, on Southeast Asian refugee and post-refugee experiences in France, centering on three themes: interrogating the refugee category, memory transmission, and claiming belonging, confronting racism. They will also begin collaborative field research focused on Southeast Asian communities in the Paris region, with particular attention to the ethnic Chinese communities from Southeast Asia that constitute an under-explored research area both in the U.S. and in France.
“Our proposed project builds on the overwhelming success of the 2018 colloquium that helped identify the intellectual gaps in the current scholarship on refugees and on Southeast Asian communities in France, which we aim to redress through our continued collaboration,” Um and Le Bail wrote in their proposal. “Ultimately, we hope to foster a robust transcontinental community of scholars, researchers, artists, and advocates working on critical Southeast Asian diaspora studies, a space that is emerging in the U.S., with Berkeley as one of the founding institutions, but that currently does not exist in Europe. Such transnational community would provide a much needed home for new innovative scholarship in and across the fields of migration, diaspora, transnational, and Southeast Asian studies.”
Applications will be accepted for 2020-2021 Matrix-Sciences Po Collaboration Grants in Spring 2020. Visit this page for more information.
