Announcing the Call 2021 Alliance Joint Projects Grantees

July 13, 2022

The Alliance Program is delighted to announce the grantees of the Call 2021 Joint Projects Grant.

Alliance Joint Projects Grants are intended to support transatlantic projects of the highest quality, both in scientific research and collaborative teaching efforts, between faculty members of all disciplines within the Alliance network.

The newest grants, amounting to $60,000, are being awarded to Principal Investigators from Columbia University, Sciences Po, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. These institutions will work in partnership to promote new efforts in joint research proposal development, pilot research, collaborative teaching endeavors, and other activities in order to create new international collaborative initiatives. 


The Call 2021 Alliance Joint Projects Grantees are:

International migration patterns have shaped and reshaped individual and collective identities throughout history and across the world. In the present time of globalization, these dynamics have posed particular political and social challenges in both the United States and Europe and have commanded the attention of scholars working and teaching in diverse disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic. This project will offer an interdisciplinary and comparative graduate course on transnational migration and citizenship in the United States and Europe. Beyond the subject matter of migration and citizenship, it will more broadly expose students in the U.S. and France to international perspectives and connections.  The course will be co-designed and co-taught by Riva Kastoryano, a Sciences-Po political sociologist and Mae Ngai, a Columbia historian, and offered simultaneously to students in New York and Paris, using video conferencing and personal faculty exchange. 

This French-American collaborative pilot study is intended to test the feasibility of a larger study on the comparative experience of frontline workers during the Covid-19 pandemic which is beginning in France. Led by Denis Peschanski of Paris 1 and Kristina Orfali of Columbia, both involved in the large French study (C19-S), this pilot project will focus on the personal narratives of frontline healthcare workers interviewed in a small comparative qualitative study in the US and in France, using the framework of previous work on how memory builds up and evolves through time after the terrorist attacks of Nov.13th, 2015 in France (https://www.memoire13novembre.fr/content/english) Through the lived experience of the frontline workers, we hope to understand how different systems responded (or not) both at the micro level of an intensive care unit, an emergency room or as a first responder as well as at the hospital, state or even national levels.    
In the long term, this pilot project will hopefully help initiate a sustainable academic and professional network devoted to the study of the Covid 19 pandemic across national and disciplinary boundaries. A future larger international comparison could yield interesting information during an unprecedented worldwide crisis for future public health policies on how to handle such event; what worked and what did not. It will also build an invaluable historical and social archive of the memory of the pandemic in several countries for future research.

This project, will study the origins, patterns, and responses to anti-Asian hate from a comparative perspective, focusing specifically on the United States and France. Both countries witnessed a spike in anti-Asian hate incidents since the onset of Covid-19, and both have also witnessed waves of mobilization to address anti-Asian violence and hate. The central question this project addresses is how do we explain the similarities that emerge in two different contexts? Relatedly, how do anti-Asian hate incidents—and the responses to them—diverge in the US and France? The first step to addressing these questions is to organize a workshop that spans boundaries and brings together leading scholars studying Asian Americans and Asian Europeans and journalists, community leaders, and civil society actors who will share their research and insights. A comparison of France and the US—two countries with different migration histories, ethnic diversity, and attitudes toward multiculturalism—is vital to understanding the emergence anti-Asian violence and hate despite these differences in order to carve a path forward. 

 

Amid an international resurgence of authoritarian populism, democracy may be failing in West Africa. Mali, which enjoyed thirty years of democratic institution building and donors’ indulgence, has now experienced three coups d’état in a decade. Like several other African nations, it  may be witnessing the return of “Khaki Rule” (Nugent 2012). Yet much of the existing literature on African politics—and the paradigms in which it is based—fails to confront this reality. Rather, it is largely focused on democratization and its corollaries, such as elections or civil society. The current context requires accounting for an increased internationalization of government and the growing involvement of transnational operators of various kinds. While the existing literature on Mali describes the action of international organizations in the social and political transformations of recent decades, our interdisciplinary group proposes to study their articulation with a military regime and the sanctions that emerge in reaction to it. The project is part of a broader collaboration on politics in Mali. The first concrete steps in this collaboration are two conferences, to be held in 2023 (Paris) and 2024 (New York). The first will analyze a particular form of civilian rule characterized by a tension between internationalization and autonomy amongst the political class. The second will explore the relationship of the military regime with the many international and foreign organizations involved in the administration of the country, as well as its own internal transformations. We will examine the relationship between the military, the civil service, and the political class, looking at the competition for resources, recruitment and appointments within the state apparatus, and the conflicting discourse on political values. Trans-Atlantic collaboration is vital to this project, which combines an historical orientation with the distinct methodological and epistemological characteristics of political science as practiced in France.