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Searching for a Better Understanding of Mentally-Disordered Perpetrators of Violent Crime |
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Rockefeller Grant Funds Joiner Center's Project Diaspora |
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Two New Computer Labs in McCormack Hall: Students Networked for Success |
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UMass Boston is about to become the site for one of the most important programs to emerge from the continuing study of Vietnam, Vietnam-US relations, and the Vietnamese community abroad. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and under the administration of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, a four-year Rockefeller Fellowship Program will bring to this campus distinguished scholars and writers from around the world to be involved in what's called "Project Diaspora: Study of the Vietnamese Overseas."
This program grows out of the unique place UMass Boston already holds as a center for academic, research, and outreach programs in this area. Since 1982 the Joiner Center has sponsored courses, research, workshops, and public forums; facilitated humanitarian, literature, and educational exchange programs with Vietnam; and earned high regard as a scholarly institution in Vietnam studies. Other partners in the project include the Asian American Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Program&emdash;offering courses in their respective fields that are often cross-listed with disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences; the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth (CAPAY), providing support services and educational resources for high school youth; and the Institute for Asian American Studies, which gathers resources from the University and the community to conduct research and support Asian American development initiatives in Massachusetts.
The faculty and staff committee whose hard work developed the successful proposal includes Kevin Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung of the Joiner Center; Hiep Chu of the Institute for Asian American Studies; Madhulika Khandelwal of the Asian American Studies Program; Peter Kiang of GCOE; Michael Lafargue of the East Asian Studies Program; Trinh Thi Tuyet Nguyen of CAPAY; and Rajini Srikanth of the English Department.
This project fits into the wider discipline of diaspora studies. As explained by residency program director Nguyen Ba Chung, some historically significant diasporas&emdash;Chinese, Japanese, South African, Jewish, among others&emdash;have been well studied; the Vietnamese diaspora, both before and after the Vietnamese-American war, has not. Now, 25 years later, he says, "there is enough distance to look at it objectively," and as he notes, in Vietnam as well as elsewhere, the diaspora and the questions it raises are "one of the bigger issues at the turn of the century."
Those questions, according to the project's initial documents, include, for example, "Can a fragmented community develop and sustain a sense of collective identity and common purpose?" and "Is there a set of facts, a body of literature, an education curriculum, a model of community organization, etc., that can act as a catalyst for further dialogue and deeper exploration of the fragmentation itself?"
The project has called for proposals from prospective fellows, each of whom would be on campus for one or two semesters. Decisions on the first group of fellows are expected in March. So far eighteen proposals have been received, from respondents in the US, Great Britain, France, Norway, and Vietnam, where some of the most important Vietnamese writers concerned with Vietnamese overseas have expressed interest. Joiner Center director Kevin Bowen says the decision process won't be easy, due to the quality of the proposals. Fellows may be undertaking their scholarship in either English or Vietnamese, and built into the project are some first-time events, like Vietnamese journals publishing a selection of scholarly work in English.
Bowen has hopes that this new program will spark even more interest in Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American studies at UMass Boston, and it seems probable that, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, those involved with the Diaspora Project have already done much to bring that about.