The East-West Center Association Blog

EWC Alumni Summer Travel Grant Report
by
Naomi Leipold
EWC Student Fellow

Research Objectives:

This summer, I traveled to Okinawa to research their urban development with regards to its relationship with the existing U.S. Military facilities on the island. My goal was to concentrate on collecting economic models of factors of production, such as land, labor, and capital markets.

(EWC Student Fellow Naomi Leipold in front of Okinawa State Hall.)

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EWCA Summer Travel Grant Report
by
Anjali Nath
EWC Degree Fellow

(EWC Graduate Student Fellow Anjali Nath)

To the EWCA Summer Travel Grant Committee,

On May 19-21, 2011, I had the pleasure of attending the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Annual Conference hosted by the Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis and held in Sacramento, California. While there, I was able to present a research paper titled “Indigenizing Contemporary Transnational Feminist Pedagogies in the U.S. Academy” encompassing research I am currently doing for my dissertation.

Presenting my research was extremely rewarding, particularly considering that there were multiple people in my audience who were very familiar with the theoretical work I was engaging. As simplistic as that may seem, it is rare for me to encounter scholars face-to-face who have read some of the work I am analyzing. The Ph.D. students and professors I am referencing were extremely interested in my work, and we were able to have some very exciting discussions about similarities in the work we are currently producing. Needless to say, their research was extremely generative for me to consider as well.

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Dear EWCA Travel Grant Committee,

Thank you very much for your generous support for my preliminary dissertation fieldwork this summer from May 17th to July 28th. With your funding, I was able to travel to Beijing, China, as well as various locations in three Northwestern provinces, namely Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, Qinghai and Gansu.

(Provincial Hua'er songs inheritors with Man (Beryl) Yang at Danma Hua'er festival, Qinghai province. July 13, 2011. Photo taken by Beryl Yang.)

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Research Trip Report from China
By Mian Cui
EWC Degree Fellow

(EWC Degree Fellow Mian Cui at the CBS Beijing Office.)

Thanks to the travel fund granted by the EWCA Participant Affair Committee, my research trip has been very successful and fruitful. This research trip for collecting bilingual press conference data supported by various individuals and news organizations based in Beijing was eventually made possible by the EWCA Alumni Travel Grant.

I arrived in Beijing on May 30th and started my work the next day.  During such time, I worked at CBS Beijing office. The journalists in the bureau shared their audio and video tapes of previous pressers of Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) with me. Later, I visited the Associate Press office and talked to the cameraman who shot most of the MOFA press conferences. He kindly shared a lot of tapes with me and gave me a lot of insight about such event. Lastly, I met with some news assistants of foreign press, who gave me some audio files they collected over the years. This trip has been very successful for the large amount of data acquired from various news organizations, which is about 30 press conferences and other types of social interaction data, and the form of media, including video and audio. Those are exactly the data needed for my research on how politicians talk
to journalists.

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EWCA Hawai’i Chapter Travel Grant Report
by Pei-Luen Lu
East-West Center Degree Fellow
Phd Candidate in Botany

(Pei-Luen Lu collecting plants at Kohala Forest Reserve on Hawai’i.)

I did the field work to collect plant samples at Manuka Natural Area Reserve, Koahala Forest Reserve, and Pu’u Wa’awa’a Forest Reserve, in the Big Island this summer with cooperation from Natural Reserve Area, State of Hawaii staffs. I also did field work at Kanaio Natural Area Reserve and Makawao Forest Reserve on Maui for the species genetics comparison by cooperating with PEPcoodinator on Maui. During those field works, I was able to learn field skills and ecological knowledge with botany senior researchers and give them the current new informations associated to this subject.

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Field Report on
Domestic Violence against Married Women in Cambodia
by Chantevy Khourn
EWC Degree Fellow

(EWC Degree Fellow Chantevy Khourn in Cambodia.)

Domestic violence has gradually been recognized as a social problem and an issue of human rights among Cambodian people but the prevention and action have been slowly taken toward this incident. Every day, a lot of Cambodian women are suffering from excruciating violence. According to a survey by Ministry of Women’s Affairs in 2009, 22.5% of married women experienced violence within their homes and up to 89% do not report the incident.

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Summer Research Grant Report
by
Richard Forster
EWC Degree Fellow

(EWC Degree Fellow Richard Forster)

This summer, with generous financial support from the EWC Alumni Association, I was able to spend two months conducting archival research for my Master’s Degree thesis in South Asian history at the National Archives of India in New Delhi. One of the aims of this research is to better understand the process by which India, at independence, came to adopt Hindi in the Devanagari script as its official language, despite the Indian National Congress’s longstanding commitment to a more inclusive formulation of Hindustani in both the Devanagari and the Urdu scripts. In order to pursue this and related questions I spent many hours in the Private Archives section of the NAI consulting files from the collections of senior Congress leaders from the 1930s to the 1950s, particularly those of the first President of independent India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, as well as stalwart proponents such of Hindi-Nagari such Purushottam Das Tandon and Sampurnanand. I believe my thesis has potential to offer new insights into the history of “communal” tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent, an ongoing source of conflict that continues to destabilize the prospects of peace and prosperity in the region.

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Summer Travel Grant 2011
by Katie Butler
EWC Degree Fellow
M.A. student in Linguistics

Aloha EWCA Hawaii Board,

First of all, I must say MAHALO to the board for the travel grant this summer! I spent a total of eight weeks in Southwest China, primarily in Guizhou Province, and was able to accomplish a number of things pertaining to my linguistics research.

(EWC Degree Fellow Katie Butler interviewing an elder in Landge, a Qiandong village oustide Kaili in east Guizhou, China.)

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2011 Summer Travel Grant Summary
by Megumi Chibana
EWC Degree Fellow (Obuchi)
MA student in Political Science

I would like to express my gratitude to EWCA Hawaii Alumni Chapter and the East-West Center Alumni Association for their support that allowed me to participate in summer course at University of Victoria, Canada. With the Travel Grant, I was able to join in the collaborative seminar course offered by UHM Indigenous Politics program and University of Victoria Indigenous Governance program (IGOV).

(EWC Degree Fellow Megumi Chibana (standing: first from left) with community members from the Cheam First Nation.)

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2011 Summer Travel Report
by Xiaofeng Kang
EWC Degree Fellow
PhD student in Geography

(EWC Degree Fellow Xiaofen Kang (r) interviewing a villager in Xishuangbanna, China.)

Funded through the EWCA Alumni Summer Travel Grant, I was able to return China for the first time since I left three years ago. During the three-month summer, I got reunion with family and traveled several places in China for making connections for my research. By visiting each of the places and meeting people from different walks of life, I advanced my knowledge and understanding on the complexities of the interconnections between the land use change and social transformation in China. I investigated the track of local livelihood change of the farmers living in southern Yunnan and the implications of rubber plantation in their social economic transformation. The visiting of local villages and interviews with farmers enriched my knowledge on this topic, and the knowledge and findings from this trip will significantly contribute to my dissertation proposal formation. I appreciate the alumni summer travel grant, which enabled me to realize this meaningful travel and visiting.

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