Pardee School Launches Global Decolonization Initiative
The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies has launched the Global Decolonization Initiative (GloDec). Directed by Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor at the Pardee School, the initiative brings together undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty to develop an intellectual community passionate about understanding the ongoing processes of decolonization through studying borders, borderlands, partitions, identities, race, citizenship, and political violence.
The new initiative launched with two research projects — one on territorial partitions and the other on nuclear borderlands — to develop two separate databases with in-depth case studies.
The Partitions Project is GloDec’s flagship undertaking. It is developing a comprehensive database of territorial partitions from the 1800s to the present. Some case studies involve Ireland, Germany, India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia.
The Nuclear Sites Project of GloDec is developing a database with in-depth case studies of nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, and mining sites that are located in the world’s borderlands with fraught political, social, and legal histories from 1945 to the present. Some case studies involve the Lap Nor test site of China, Nevada test site of the United States, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone of Ukraine and Belarus, Reggane test site in Algeria, and uranium mining sites in Niger and Madagascar, among others.
The two databases and their related case studies will be used in future research and undergraduate and graduate teaching. To assist in the development of these databases, GloDec is looking for research interns for both projects for summer and fall 2020. Student research interns will be leading the projects working in teams managed remotely. While the 2020 internships are unpaid, interns will be encouraged to develop independent case studies that they themselves can use in their B.A. honors thesis or M.A. thesis at Boston University. The application form can be accessed here until May 29, 2020.
To learn more about the Pardee School’s GloDec initiative, click here.