Fulbright Global Scholar Awards will enable Tim Oakes of geography and Brian Valente-Quinn of French to spend up to a year in travel, study, research and teaching

Tim Oakes and Brian Valente-Quinn have won Fulbright Global Scholar Awards for 2023-24, allowing them to spend up to a year abroad to pursue their studies, develop ongoing research projects and teach courses at other institutions.

The Fulbright Global Scholar Award allows U.S. academics and professionals to engage in multi-country, trans-regional projects. The Fulbright Scholar Program, funded by the U.S. State Department, is designed to “expand and strengthen the relationships between the people of the United States and citizens of the rest of the world.” 

Brian Valente-Quinn is a specialist of Francophone African theater and literature. His research focuses on the interplay of theatrical performance with contemporary societal issues such as decoloniality, immigration, diversity, and the various threats of extremism found across a range of national contexts.

Oakes, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Geography Department, will be developing his research project: “The hinterlands of global China: infrastructures of life beyond the urban.” He describes the project as a continuation and extension of his previous project, “,” which has been ongoing since 2018. 

China Made focuses on Chinese investments in infrastructure development, both in China and Southeast Asia. Oakes is project lead but works with researchers all over the globe throughout Canada, Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Oakes’ research centers around “urbanization, most recently new towns and new cities in areas that were most recently rural farmland in China.” Since 2020, Oakes has been unable to continue his research in China because of that country’s COVID-19 restrictions, so he will expand to surrounding countries for his Fulbright research.

Tim Oakes is an expert in his field. He focuses on social and cultural transformation in contemporary China and, in particular, the uses and reinventions of local culture as a resource for economic development and governance objectives.

Oakes will travel to Oslo, Norway, to work with fellow researchers, then go to Singapore to continue “laying the foundations of the project and getting it started,” Oakes said. He is particularly interested in “digital infrastructures that China has been building in recent years, and how those projects impact the surrounding areas where they are made,” Oakes said.

Valente-Quinn, a professor in CU’s French and Italian Department, will pursue his research in Francophone African literature and culture to address “questions of immigration and decoloniality in contemporary France and West Africa,” Valente-Quinn said. His research focus is Francophone theater and performance in West Africa.

“After spending years researching in Senegal, my proposal to Fulbright was that I want to take a more transnational perspective and broaden my research to countries like Mali, Burkina Faso and C?te d’Ivoire.” 

“I am interested in the question of extremism, and how these theater makers define extremism and bring the public together to address the threat of extremism in their own countries and in a global context. This is a current topic in Francophone Africa—not only because of terrorist threats in France—but because of extremist movements and rulership in some West African countries,” Valente-Quinn said.

He will teach a graduate seminar in Francophone African theater and performance, and another on theories of performance in Abidjan, C?te d’Ivoire, at the Université Félix Houphou?t-Boigny. 

Both professors said they are excited and honored to be awarded the Fulbright, and hope to use the next academic year to broaden the scope of their research, teach in new universities and collaborate with fellow researchers to continue building their projects.

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Tim Oakes won a 2023-24 Fulbright Global Scholar award for his project “The hinterlands of global China: infrastructures of life beyond the urban”. This is a collaborative project with scholars in Oslo and in Singapore to develop a theoretical foundation and a new research agenda for interpreting critically China’s deepening impact on everyday lives in the developing regions of the Global South. More specifically, they will be exploring China’s digital infrastructures and the growth of ‘platform capitalism’ in the rapidly urbanizing regions of Southeast Asia.

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Tim Oakes is the 2023 recipient of the AAG China Geography Specialty Group’s Outstanding Service Award. The award will be presented at the group’s business meeting on Saturday, 3/25/23 in Denver at the AAG conference.

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Professor Oakes is the Principal Investigator on the ChinaMade project, where he organized and hosted the 4th ChinaMade  (“From ‘China Model’ to Global China”) in May at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. This was the final workshop of the ChinaMade project and featured scholars from the US, UK, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Sweden. Professor Emily Yeh of the Department of Geography also participated.

As a result of a workshop Prof. Oakes co-organized in Switzerland last year, ChinaMade has co-published two  on Chinese export development. These factsheets are public-facing and intended for a more general audience (in addition to the scholarly work and books published by Oakes).

And as Principal Investigator on the Tale of Two Asia’s project, Oakes also organized a workshop last April in Boulder on “China’s Nuclear Belt & Road: Socio-technical Perspectives on China’s Expert Nuclear Infrastructures.” The workshop featured presentations by scholars from the US, Canada, Australia and India.

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Funding from U.S. Department of Education helps center realize its mission in ‘fundamental and transformative ways,’ interim director says

The Center for Asian Studies has won $2.2 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Education to support its role as a National Resource Center in Asian Studies and to provide Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for students at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Geography professor Timothy Oakes, interim faculty director of the center, noted that the award supports one of the center’s primary missions: to make Asia as accessible as possible to the whole 蜜桃传媒破解版下载 community.

“This funding helps us realize that mission in fundamental and transformative ways,” Oakes said.

FLAS fellowships fund the study of Asian languages and area studies both on the Boulder campus during the academic year and in Asia during the summer. The National Resource Center funding will also support several existing and future initiatives that seek to make Asian area studies more available to students and faculty from all corners of the university, as well as across the broader Front Range region, he said.

Those initiatives include expanding the existing Asia Internship Program and the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum program. The funding will also support the following:

• Instruction of Arabic culture and civilization in the Asian Languages and Civilizations Department;
• Tibetan language learning in the Anderson Language Technology Center;
• Collaboration with the College of Engineering to develop an innovative “Climate and Society in Asia” curriculum;
• Curricular partnerships with Metropolitan State University of Denver and with CU Denver’s Institute for International Business;
• Professional development seminars and programs for K-12 educators; and
• Curricular development grants for faculty to expand Asia-related teaching throughout the university.

Oakes noted that winning National Resource Center support is significant “and would not have been possible without the efforts and time of numerous individuals,” specifically highlighting the contributions of the center’s Faculty Director Rachel Rinaldo (now on sabbatical in Indonesia) and Executive Director Danielle Rocheleau Salaz, among many others.

“With this funding, the Center for Asian Studies will remain a vibrant, active and impactful center for interdisciplinary area studies on the 蜜桃传媒破解版下载 campus,” Oakes said, adding that the center’s efforts are also aimed at helping to carve out a “larger space on campus where other area studies centers can grow and thrive.”

Those include the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, the Mediterranean Studies Group, the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, and the recently established Center for African and African American Studies.

He added: “These days, we seem to be experiencing a time in the United States where suspicion of global connections, rising nativist populism and fear of challenges to an older world order are on the rise. We believe that this is a crucial time in which international area studies education is more important than ever.”

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We appreciate their service and offer our heartfelt congratulations.

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中国制造: 亚洲基础设施和“中国模式”发展.

After experiencing episodic but rather deep economic and political crises in the three decades following the 1949 Communist Revolution, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced very dramatic economic expansion over the last fifty years, and especially since the turn of the Century. Most notably, as per , the PRC’s economy has grown more than 5 percent, a figure considered fairly high, in 44 out of the last 50 years including each and every single year since 1991. This growth has surpassed the ten percent mark eighteen times in the last half-Century, including six times since 2001, when China became a member of the World Trade Organization, leading to over a four-fold increase in the size of its economy in this Century alone (from 2.37 to 10.16 trillion, in 2010 constant dollars).

This dramatic expansion has largely been the result of an aggressive promotion of export-oriented manufacturing. Since the mid-1980s, the PRC engaged in major industrialization efforts, which have over time made China “the factory of the world.” Initially, much of these transformations were focused in particular coastal and Northern cities and were enabled by foreign investment from overseas Chinese sources (e.g., companies from Taiwan, Singapore), and increasingly by Western investment, with State-owned companies and investments rising over time and becoming quite central to China’s development model since the turn of the 21st Century.

View toward Xinzhou by Tim Oakes 

As part of these investments, China has gradually invested in infrastructure development, accelerating considerably over the last decade and resulting in dramatic social and cultural changes in both rural and urban areas across the whole country.  This expansion, along with China’s already-strong clout in regional and, increasingly, global geopolitics, has also promoted an infrastructural development model beyond its borders as part of a newly aggressive foreign policy known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

To better understand the extent and implications of these transformations, scholars at the Center for Asian Studies (CAS) at 蜜桃传媒破解版下载 led by Tim Oakes, Professor of Geography, and the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (HKIHSS) began the , an effort supported by The Henry Luce Foundation to explore the domestic and international dimension of China’s infrastructure development, and to shift the academic focus from broader geopolitical and international relations perspectives to a finer-grained analysis of the infrastructures themselves and the on-the-ground social and cultural dimensions of their construction. 

China Made will involve the development of several interrelated , some thanks to funded postdoctoral and graduate research positions; conversations during three academic conferences – two hosted at CU (including one ), and one hosted by HKIHSS; and the development of online scholarly resources for project participants and the broader academic community.

Please contact Prof. Oakes if you have any questions about China Made.

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Center for Asian Studies wins three-year grant from Henry Luce Foundation to conduct trans-Pacific studies in ‘lively research field’ (article by Clint Talbot)

As the United States steps back from international development, China is launching huge infrastructure projects as a way to broaden its global influence. For scholars at the University of Colorado Boulder, this trend raises new questions they aim to address with support from the .

The 蜜桃传媒破解版下载 Center for Asian Studies has won a three-year Asia Responsive Grant from the Luce Foundation for a project called “China Made: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development.”

 support collaborative research to improve understanding between the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. During the China Made project, the Center for Asian Studies will collaborate with the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. 

China’s initiative raises questions in fields beyond political science, notes Tim Oakes, the center’s director. Oakes says there’s rising interest in infrastructure across the social sciences and even in the humanities.

“And that might seem kind of odd. Why would somebody in an anthropology department care about a pipeline or a road? But, in fact, it’s become a very lively research field.” At the same time, Oakes says, there’s a research gap: “There’s so much interest in this, and yet very few people who are writing about this are writing about China, and China is in many respects the world’s paradigmatic infrastructure state.”

China invests seven times what the United States invests in infrastructure, as measured by proportion of gross domestic product. “China’s entire foreign policy in many respects is all about building infrastructure in other countries.”

The United States has often tied its international-development expenditures to the promotion of human rights, democracy, “the kinds of values the United States likes to project abroad.”

“China likes to present itself as an alternative model in which it is saying, ‘We don’t need to get into ideology. We don’t need to get into the internal affairs of (other) states. We are simply there to help build things, and that’s a win-win for everybody.’”

Oakes and his collaborators, including Emily Yeh of Geography, will focus on infrastructure development both in China and in other countries.

He emphasized that the research goal is not solely geopolitical. “We really need to look at the infrastructures themselves. We really need to draw from what’s been going on in infrastructure studies.”

Such qualitative research is labor intensive, requiring time on the ground, language skills, cultural knowledge. “You can’t just look at spreadsheets. You can’t just go in and see a dam or building and say, ‘This is what’s happening.’”

The goal is to study the effects of the new infrastructure in the social and cultural contexts in which they’ve been built, or, according to Oakes, to look at: “What kinds of political effects do they have, intended and unintended?”

Such questions arise as some academic world views are shifting, Oakes said.

“In terms of social theory, we’re in kind of a post-human or post-humanist moment in which the material world that we live in is viewed as an increasingly important part of how we analyze the social.”

Part of the change in perspective reflects an understanding that climate change is a part of the world we live in now, “and that any study of social processes needs to account for the dynamic environment we live in and how that has effects on how society is constituted and organized and how it changes.”

He added, “People who just thought of themselves as social scientists are increasingly interested in thinking about the broader environmental world or the non-human world that impacts human society.”

Infrastructure undergirds that “non-human world.”

The China Made project aims to shift the academic focus from broader geopolitical and international relations perspectives to a “finer grained analysis” of the infrastructures themselves and the on-the-ground social and cultural dimensions of their construction, Oakes states.

China Made will include new postdoctoral and graduate research positions, the development of online scholarly resources for project participants and the academic community, and three academic conferences—two of which will be hosted by the Center for Asian Studies.

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Before the early years of the 21st century, the idea of combining a vacation with volunteering was unknown to most Americans. A decade and a half later, more than a million and a half people spend nearly $2 billion every year to participate in the global trend called “voluntourism.” What’s more, a whole voluntourism industry has arisen to meet rising demand, including companies that provide experiences for college applicants looking to buff up a personal resume.

Little surprise, then, that academics have been eager to examine the phenomenon. To date, there has been extensive research focusing on the motivations of travelers — are they altruistic, self-interested or a little of both? — and the outcomes of voluntouring for both travelers and tourist destinations.

Read entire article in 

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The Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellowship is awarded by the National University of Singapore to fund a brief period of work as a visiting fellow at NUS. Tim will be in Singapore in January, 2014, to work with geographers on developing new projects on the transformation of urban spaces and on changing Chinese consumption practices.

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