Joseph E. Schwartzberg Workable World Trust Fellowship

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The Joseph E. Schwartzberg Workable World Trust Fellowships support outstanding students who are clearly committed to global governance.

Award Description

Awards will serve as a supplemental fellowship in the amount of $4,500 offered annually to students who are in their second year or later.

Funds may be used to support research projects or substantive internship or practicum projects related to global governance. For the purposes of this fellowship, we understand global governance broadly as institutions, practices, and norms that are used to collectively address transnational problems and issues. If you are not sure whether your area of research falls within the scope of global governance studies, please contact ICGC to inquire.

Recipients of Joseph E. Schwartzberg Fellowships who are in PhD programs may use the award to support pre-dissertation or dissertation research travel and related expenses.  

Award recipients will be invited to make a presentation in an ICGC forum on their supported projects. Reports outlining work undertaken and impact or findings related to global governance (3–5 pages) are due to [email protected] by October 15 of the fall semester immediately following use of the fellowship funds.

Schwartzberg Fellows

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Megan Manion (Department of Political Science)

Abstract forthcoming

Snigdha Kumar (Department of Sociology)

Through an in-depth analysis of India’s understudied FinTech industry, Kumar hypothesizes that Big Data’s value is constituted by a set of economic, political, and social processes that operate at three levels stitched together by a network of elite professionals: 1) across the industry, 2) between state and industry, and 3) inside firms. By uncovering how Big Data’s value is brought to life not only by the workings of capital but also by political design to catapult India into a poverty-free and digital future, a social network of professionals that circulate between the public and private sector, and novel but culturally attuned forms of knowledge production, her research will offer insights to broaden the global governance of Big Data beyond its currently narrow focus on American Big Tech companies and data privacy measures in the West. 

Isaac Asante-Wusu (Department of Geography, Environment & Society)

Asante-Wusu's research advances our understanding of how forces of democracy and different forms of urban governance shape market-driven urban water policies, which lead to unequal access to potable water in urban Africa. Specifically, the work examines how state-civil society dynamics in water decision making processes, the capabilities of states to coordinate competing priorities in urban water policy implementation, and the institutional structures for the provision of municipal water services shape access to potable water in urban Africa. He draws empirical evidence from Accra, Ghana and Pretoria, South Africa to deepen our comparative understanding of the disparate experiences across democratic regimes.

Heather Wares (Department of History) 

Wares's research looks at aspects of global governance as related to the construction of South Africa’s maritime spaces as spaces of whiteness. This together with her previous work experience in the fields of maritime archeology and maritime and underwater cultural heritage, making permit decisions which potentially influenced people’s access to resources, will build a framework for the continued reliance governmental institutions, NGOs, and commercial enterprises involved in maritime security, environmental protection, and economic opportunity have on western epistemologies which inform the global governance of the ocean. This research intends to lay framework for a strong epistemological and ontological foundation for the greater project.

Beverly Fok (Department of Anthropology)

Fok’s research looks at how land reclamation projects in Singapore have fueled extensive sand mining operations across Southeast Asia, giving rise to a newly mobile, highly liquid form of land. That newfound liquidity puts challenge to existing frameworks of sovereignty and international environmental law. How to account for this latest, piecemeal method of land grabbing? Using the case study of Koh Kong Province in Cambodia, the research examines some of the obstacles local communities face in trying to make land claims and obtain environmental justice given prevailing regimes of international law.

Emily Springer (Department of Sociology)

Springer's dissertation research focused on the evaluation of women’s empowerment—a transformative, culturally-embedded social process. Broadly, how are accountability, development worker identity, and knowledge production affected when development organizations are contractually obligated to demonstrate results through quantified evaluation systems? Her research analyzed how people located throughout transnational evaluation chains feel accountable to metrics, and how this sense of responsibility is cultivated and reproduced by the recent focus on performance metrics. These "products" of evaluation and the expertise they embody provide the framework for new forms of global governance in an increasingly interconnected and measured world.