Jonas Pontusson

Jonas Pontusson
Professor of Comparative Politics
Biography:

Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva and a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, for the academic year 2016-17. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University before moving to Geneva in 2010. He has written extensively on the politics of inequality in OECD countries. He is currently working on the distributive implications of macroeconomic growth models and, in parallel, preparing a research project on the consequences of inequality for government responsiveness to low- and middle-income citizens.

Jonas Pontusson presented a paper entitled “Inequality shocks and the politics of compensatory redistribution in the OECD world, 1990-2013” in a seminar organized by LIEPP on October 19th 2016. He also took part in LSE-Oxford-Sciences Po ‘Young Doctors’ Political Economy Workshop held on April 20th-21st 2017.

Learn more about Jonas's work:
unequaldemocracies.unige.ch unige.ch/jonas-pontusson/
On the relationship between economic and political inequality

How does inequality look like through the political lens? What are the true details behind Government bias toward certain sectors of the population, and what is to be done about it?

By conducting a survey in countries like Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, Jonas Pontusson, Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva, explains the intricacies of political inequality in developed countries, the importance of representation through political parties, and the role of these same parties in modern day politics and society.

We spoke with Prof. Jonas Pontusson in Geneva during the conference: Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilisation, organised by The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD).

The title of his presentation was:
On the Relationship Between Economic and Political Inequality: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go from Here?

Find out more about UNRISD here: http://www.unrisd.org

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Jonas Pontusson's Video here ◂

Jonas Pontusson: Hello, I am Jonas Pontusson. I am a professor at the University of Geneva and I work in Political Science.

Nerina: Thank you for joining me. You are at the conference about Overcoming Inequalities, what is the topic of your presentation?

Pontusson: I’m going to talk about advanced countries or rich countries, mostly North America and Europe, and I’m going to present research that I’m doing now or just started doing, which is about political dimensions of inequality and why governments are more responsive to some citizens than others. So I think in addition to economic equality, about which we know a lot, there is an important political dimension. Economic inequality, which is present in most countries, has important political implications; not only in terms of who participates, but who is prioritized or given more voice by political parties and by governments.

Nerina: What is political inequality?

Pontusson: So, I think political inequality, in an academic sense or in my area of research, means that if we look at what citizens want in terms of policy changes or political changes, we can measure, we can ask citizens what they want, and then we can look at what governments do, and we can ask ourselves the question: The support for policy change in some particular area among low income or working class voters, does it matter if 20% of them are in favor are in favor of these policy changes or if 80% of them are in favor of policy changes? So, can their preferences predict something about what governments do? And we can do the same for high income citizens.

The studies that we have, so far at least, tell us that whether high income citizens were a 20% support in policy change or a 80% support in policy change, has a big effect on whether we will see policy change in the next four, five, ten years. Whereas by contrast, if low income citizens support policy change, it doesn’t help us predict what happens, so we have some evisennce that political parties and governments are listening a lot more to affluent, well educated citizens that they are to low educated citizens, and then of course, we don’t exactly know why that is or how that works itself out.

That’s what I’m trying to study, and I’m trying to do is in a cross-national sense, trying to looks at different countries and ask whether this bias in the political process is bigger in some countries than in others, and maybe most importantly, I’m trying to see if this has changes, if it is the case that the voice of different kinds of citizens was more equal in, let’s say, the 1960s and 1970s than it is today.

Nerina: Which countries are you going to analyze and why?

Pontusson: A lot of people have already worked in the United States for this, and I’m not living in the United States, so I’m trying to talk to people in the United States, and there we know there’s a lot of unequal representation or unequal voice. We also know that in U.S., poor or low income citizens are much less likely to vote. So I’m way more interest in European countries, which is where I’m from, where the distribution of economic resources is more equal, and where it has increased a lot, and where differences in voter turnout or participation in elections are not so big. And yet in Sweden too we find that more affluent citizens, well educated, citizens, governments or politicians are more interested in what these people think and what they want. So Sweden is certainly one case I’m very interested in.

Switzerland is another case, with a very different political system. I live here, I work here, and the people who work with m on this research are mostly Swiss, so Switzerland is certainly going to be part of the mix. I’m interested in the U.K. and probably France and Germany, so those are the main countries. But we’re also doing a survey that will look at about fourteen, almost all West European countries, where we will ask people about what their policy preferences are, how important inequality is, are they aware of inequality as a rising topic. We are also going to ask them, and I think we will probably be the first survey to do so, about how they feel being represented and do they perceive these gaps of representation, and I think we know that at least the people who vote for populist parties probably do think that they are not very well represented in the political process.

Nerina: What aspects are you most interested in?

Pontusson: One of the big things that have changed, especially for left parties – social-democratic or labor parties -, is that people who are in there, who are candidates for public office, and especially at a national level – less obviously at the local level -, are now all university educated and they mostly come from white collar professions, and that didn’t use to be the case-

One for the things we are trying to do is to look at who are candidates for office and how that has changed over time and in different countries, and is it the case that candidates for public office who come from working class backgrounds or have been trade union members, which, at least in Sweden, used to be a very common path to public office, that you worked in trade union and then you became a politician at some point in your life. Whether those people are, to the extent that they’re still around, are they more responsive do they behave different in parliament and ask different questions or have different policy priorities, so we will do surveys of parliamentarians and some of those kinds of surveys already exist.

I think this has happened to many parties, but its change is more pronounced to traditional social democratic parties, and not only as the people who are politicians for them changed, but these parties, in their electoral campaigns, rely much more on media rather than on party activists or party members, and I think everybody would agree that a big gap has opened up between the working class constituents of these parties and their leadership and their kind of way of doing politics.

It seems fairly clear from the evidence we have that many working class voters have abandoned these parties. So my project is partly about what is happening to political systems and to democracies in general, but it is also very much about the crisis of mainstream left parties, and why they are having such difficulties maintain support of people who used to support them a lot and you would had some interest in the kinds of policies that these parties claim that they represent.

Nerina: You mentioned the media. What role do they play?

Pontusson: There is some research that says that social media and reliance on this more democratic form of media makes people only talk to people like themselves and at least in the U.S the evidence seems to suggest that this contributes to polarization in the sense that republicans only access media that has a republican intent or they only communicate with republicans, and democrats are the same.

I’m interested in segregation, and I think that media would be one aspect of segregation, as in obviously that people these days live in places that are more homogenously with-collar, upper-middle class or working class. In that sense I think that obviously left parties and progressive parties that want to do something about inequality cannot appeal to low income citizens; they also have to appeal to middle income and middle-class citizens, and I think that for those kinds of reasons – partly because perhaps it has to do with the media, but also more importantly having to do with where people live and where their children go to school -, building common interest, or framing redistributed policies as a common interest in many people, is probably harder today than it was before.

There is no doubt that elite men of a certain kind of media has, at least, until recently, meant that certain kinds of social issues and things having to do with inequality have not gotten the coverage that it should have gotten. To go back to what I was saying about left parties, I think that media makes these parties less relying on social networks and local activists to reach out, and therefore they are in some sense the leaders or the elites that run for office and are part of these parties; they are freer today to do so.

There are two things that have happened, and partly related to media. One is that middle-class and working class citizens are perhaps less interacting with each other, have moved the part on certain kinds of issues, especially when it comes to immigration and things like that.

The other thing has to do with the relationship between voters and politicians or candidates. There used to be party members that were the kind of connection between voters and politicians, and now parties have lost a lot of members – the British Labour Party obviously being an exception, and that I think is an important thing to note -, but in many countries there is more separation between politicians and citizens. Parties have become less important, and media consultancy has become much more important to the way these parties do politics.

Nerina: On one hand we have a democratization of them but on the other hand, they are still dominated by the elite, right? Why is this happening, and what does it mean for democracy?

Pontusson: I don’t have a single theory of this. I think that one of the things that happened was, obviously, the technological change, which was perhaps inevitable in respect to media. Another important thing that I haven’t mentioned yet is the decline of trade unions, and especially the decline of low income private sector trade unions.

Trade unions today, in some countries, have held up fairly well, especially in the public sector. Trade unions are more white collar today than they used to be, so there has been a decline in Unions, but this decline has not been the same in all sectors or all categories of workers.

You could attribute some of that decline to technological and structural changes that are beyond anybody’s control, most obviously the kind of manufacturing and the fact that private sector low wage work is increasingly in the service sector and smaller shops and places. That has a big effect, but I guess my argument would be that much of what has happened to trade unions has been a result of political decisions that were taken mostly by parties of the center right, but it’s striking to me that left parties, when they come back to power, have very rarely reversed those decisions or changed things in ways that incentive people or make it easier to organize trade unions.

I think that’s true of the Labour Party under Blair in the 1990’s; there were a lot of reforms that Thatcher had introduced that could had been changed and they were not, and it is also true of the Swedish social democrats, when they returned to power in 2014; they didn’t change the reforms that had been introduced specifically to reduce trade union power.

One reason why some of this stuff happened was because of austerity and slow economic growth and the perception – and this is a very important thing -, that a lot of the demands of low income citizens cost money. Most demands of affluent citizens have to do with regulation, the freedom of taking your child out of school and sending him to a private one, a lot of the demands of affluent citizens have to do with choice and regulations, and they can be accommodated in an austere economic environment in the way that the demands of low income citizens are more costly in some sense, and more difficult to square with in balance budget and the like.

That is something about the economic situation. I also think that up until recently, a lot of left parties and others thought that low income workers citizens had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t particularly interesting to appeal to them because they would vote for them anyway. The option were not good, a and many of them didn’t want to vote anyway, so if they stopped voting, it wouldn’t be a major problem and it was thought that these categories of citizens were a relatively small group of people who would probably, with their knowledge of economy and with these transformations, would probably continue to diminish, and therefore wouldn’t be very important for elections.

If we wanted to win the next election, it was much more important to win the support of these what political science calls ‘swing voters’, who could just as well vote for the liberals or some other parties to the center right.

So it was thought that one could ignore these people, and of course one of the big lessons of the rise of populism is that there are more people who feel unrepresented, who fit into these categories. There are more people and they now think – foolishly, perhaps -, that they have options, and I think a big question becomes, can left parties reorient themselves? And if they do, can they win those voters back again?

You know, it is often said about trust in a marriage that if you do things that lead your partner not to trust you, it is very difficult to regain that trust. So, can you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Because I think, as you know, that they have done extremely badly in the last few elections and I think that, not so much for may academic research but for the more political and the more point of view, the big question for people like myself is, should we abandon these parties? Should we try to build other parties? Or is there still some possibility of revitalizing them? And that probably varies from country to country.

Nerina: Do we need the left parties or in general, what in your opinion, could you do? or should we do?

Pontusson: This is the nature of democracy. Elections do matter and it is a good thing that the democrats won control of the House of Representatives the day before yesterday. It has meaningful consequences; we cannot step back from that, I think. But obviously, and I think certainly this is the American case – I follow the elections fairly closely -, tge most important thing is probably the changes that re taking place at a more local level, but it is electoral politics.

Some of my friends say ‘forget about the electoral politics, this should all be about organizing social movement and communities, and trying to correct things at a local level’, and then there are other people who basically say ‘Well, we just have to live with the parties that we are stuck with, and elections do matter, so therefor we have to vote for these parties and we have to urge other people to do so as well’.

I guess progressive people need to find an intermediate position, and that position probably revolves around elections at the local or regional level in the United States, so that it’s not just national elections or local activism, but that there is politics at a series of levels between those two extremes. Most importantly, political parties are an important institution in electoral democracies, so we cannot abandon a party electoral approach.

Nerina: If you could change one thing tomorrow what would it be?

Pontusson: I would say one thing. This is not a thing we can do tomorrow. As you now, there is debate around basic income; I’m not sure what the basic income is the magic solution. I think that the political conversation, especially on the left, needs to change. I think we should talk. Opportunities matter, but we need to build the safety net.

We can afford this, whether it’s basic income or other schemes. I think we have drifted too much towards creating education and opportunities. Education is important, but it’s a long term thing and we need relatively quickly social policy reforms that address income gaps and address the income problems which low-wage workers and non-workers face today, and I think that’s probably, if I were running as a politician, I would talk about.

And then more long-term, encouraging unionization and restricting or increasing regulations on financial corporations. We need to do something very soon, in my opinion. We don’t have the luxury of thinking about reforms that will change the way democracies work 15 or 20 years from now; I think we do need to do things and those things in the first instance have to do with what I would call ‘compensatory redistribution’. That should be the focus.

Nerina: Why do we need to do this now? Why the urgency?

Pontusson: Because I think there will be no left parties left, and because I think a continuous increase in populist support will have very bad consequences for all of us.

Nerina: What is the most important thing you have learned and you would wish people know more about or think more about?

Pontusson: I think the most important thing that I have learned is that it is not just a level of inequality that matters, but the structural inequality is very important, and that if the poor become separated from the middle class, as has been happening, this undermines the basis for progressive politics. In some sense, I am less worried about the top income shares, the top 1%, but from a political point of view, I am much more worried about a growing gap between low-income citizens and workers, and the middle class. That gap is what the left has to worry about.

Nerina: What is your dream?

Pontusson: My dream is that we will ultimately – and I thought this would happen before I die but it won’t -, create a society that is more equal and more tolerant. Both of those things are important.

Nerina: What is life about?

Pontusson: Life is about being the best I can be in my work, “succeeding” or doing as well as I can, and doing better than some, so there is a kind of work competitiveness that motivates me. It’s also about trying to be socially and politically relevant, and finding ways in which one can speak outside of this academic community that I am part of.

And then finally, and most importantly, life is about my family and my wife and my children.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Pontusson: Thank you.

Nerina: Thank you everybody for listening and watching. Keep wondering and see you soon again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva and a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, for the academic year 2016-17. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University before moving to Geneva in 2010. He has written extensively on the politics of inequality in OECD countries. He is currently working on the distributive implications of macroeconomic growth models and, in parallel, preparing a research project on the consequences of inequality for government responsiveness to low- and middle-income citizens.

Jonas Pontusson presented a paper entitled “Inequality shocks and the politics of compensatory redistribution in the OECD world, 1990-2013” in a seminar organized by LIEPP on October 19th 2016. He also took part in LSE-Oxford-Sciences Po ‘Young Doctors’ Political Economy Workshop held on April 20th-21st 2017.

Learn more about Jonas's work:
unequaldemocracies.unige.ch unige.ch/jonas-pontusson/

Mahesh Kumar

Mahesh Kumar
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering
Biography:

Dr. Kumar has received M.Tech degree in Solid State Materials from IIT Delhi and Ph.D degree in Engineering from IISc Bangalore. He worked at Central Research Laboratory of Bharat Electronics Ltd. (CRL-BEL) Bangalore as Scientist from 2005 to 2013.

During his stint at CRL-BEL, he has worked on industry-academia collaboration that involved CRL-BEL and Materials Research Centre, IISc Bangalore. He was involved in the development of GaN based blue LEDs, Quantum-well infrared photodetectors, Solar cells and III-V quantum dots based detectors. He also worked at University of Paderborn, Germany as visiting scientist under Bilateral Exchange Programme of INSA. He has received INSA Medal for Young Scientists-2014,the MRSI Medal-2016 by Materials Research Society of India, Young Achiever Award-2016 by Department of Atomic Energy and ISSS Young Scientist Award 2017 by the Institute for Smart Structures and Systems.

He has been awarded among top-10 outstanding reviewers for CrystEngComm (RSC) in 2016. He is founding Member and Chair of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (2015-2019), Member of Global Young Academy (2017-2022) and IEEE Senior Member from 2016. He has been selected for the prestigious Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy Fellowship supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum. He has published more than 80 research articles.

Learn more about Mahesh's work:
http://home.iitj.ac.in/~mkumar/ globalyoungacademy.net/mahesh-kumar/
Sustainable Energy, Science, Education: working for a better future in India.

What separates developing and developed countries? What does it take to close that gap and eliminate all progress borders? Doctor Mahesh Kumar explains the scientific and research steps to take to bring developing countries into the future.

As Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Doctor Kumar is developing new ways to bring sustainable energy to the farthest communities, working on building awareness as much as on the applications of better and friendlier consumption methods for India and the world.

Doctor Kumar is also Chair of the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences, which works on building a network that interconnects fellow scientists with each other and with government authorities in order to bring attention to the scientific and educational potential growing in the country.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Mahesh Kumar's Video here ◂

Nerina: Thank you so much for joining me. Could you please introduce yourself?

Mahesh Kumar: I am Doctor Mahesh Kumar, Assistant Professor at Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. I am also Chair of the Indian National Young Academy of Sciences.

Nerina: What is your research focused on?

Mahesh: I am working on electronic material for energy-efficient devices, such as light-emitting diodes and sensors for environment monitoring.

Nerina: Why this topic? What is its relevance?

Mahesh: If we see in the future, energy will be the biggest problem, and we have a limited stock of our hydrocarbon fuels. So now we have to start to think on renewable energy sources, such as solar cell, hydro, and wind energy. Also, at the same time, we have to think on energy-efficient devices; we have to make some devices. By using this one, we can save the power.

Not only the power production is important, but at the same time, power consumption also has the same importance. If we see the last 20 years’ data, worldwide we have increased the electricity production almost double. And if we see in the developing countries, for example in India, we have increased our electricity production by five times.

But what about the consumption? At the same time, our requirements also increase. So today’s demand is that we have to make the devices that can save the power and can give the same output at a low power consumption.

Nerina: What are you working on right now?

Mahesh: Right now, I am working on light-emitting diodes by using the gallium nitride, and in 2014, Professor Nakamura and two more professors got the Nobel Prize on this. So, if we see the worldwide power consumption, around at 10 to 20% power consumption is only on the lightening, and by using these LEDs, we can save around 80 to 85% of the power. If we compared it with our ordinary bulb, the power consumption is very less, and the same light we will get by using the 8 or 10 watt LED, when an ordinary bulb will have to use the 100 watt. This one is because of the conversion; in light emitting diodes, conversion efficiency is very high compared to the ordinary bulb.

Nerina: What are the challenges here?

Mahesh: The biggest challenge is the awareness. If you compared with the conventional bulb, light-emitting diodes are a little bit expensive, because to make these devices, initially we have to spend a lot of money. We have to grow by molecular beam epitaxy, or MOCVD, and this equipment is costly; we have to set up a publication lab for gallium nitride technology. So, in this early cost of these devices, it’s hard, but if we see it in two years, we will get the same, this benefit by saving energy.

So we have to aware the society to use light-emitting diodes in comparison to conventional bulbs.

Nerina: How is the situation in India and how can your research contribute to improve it?

Mahesh: One project I’m currently working on is the Perovskite solar cells. The basic idea is that we can make flexible solar cells, and with these solar cells the efficiency is higher than with the silicon cells. But again, the issue is how to make the long life, because this efficiency degraded very fast. Here, we have to make these solar cells sustainable, so we can use them for a longer time. We have increased our resources in this one. We have increased our production, but still, the power production is not sufficient for the country.

If you see the solar light, we are getting the maximum. For example, in Pushkar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, we are getting the maximum solar light. And the rain or cloudy duration is very less. So here, we can use these solar cells, and we can convert maximum photo energy into electricity.

Another thing is that in Rajasthan, we have minimum water resources, so we cannot generate the power by using the water, by using the hydropower. So, we can use these solar cells and we can convert the photoenergy into electricity, and basically we can make the system sustainable.

Nerina: What does it mean for you to be a scientist in India?

Mahesh: We have big responsibilities. As a scientist, not only I have to see the wide, wide problems, but I also have to see our local issues. For example, in the Rajasthan, the power transportation from one city, from one place to another place, is difficult here. So we have to see if you can use, if you can generate in local village or town energy by using the solar cells, and if you can make the village sustainable, and at least in energy, if we can provide the same energy watt hey will consume there, that will be good.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Mahesh: Basically, I want a society in which everyone should get the same right. We should not differentiate based on the economy, based on any religion, so everyone, all kids should get the same facility here.

If you see the worldwide view, we are all working for the human. We are the same. Our cultures are different, but sometimes we are facing multiple issues. I cannot go to that country, or I cannot invite from the neighboring country, or some other country. I would remove the borders, because all people are the same. I will not discriminate based on religion, based on geography, or based on any other practice. All humans are the same for me.

Nerina: What types of research are more needed in India?

Mahesh: In India we have much talent. We need some type of networking, some very good rue policy, and we need some interconnection between the scientists, and also between the government and the scientists.

Nerina: And you are contributing to improve this through your work with the young academy, right?

Mahesh: Yes. Indian National Young Academy of Scientists started in 2014, so you can say this is a very young academy. The main object of this academy is that we have to make more networking among Indian scientists. We have to discuss our local issues, and then we have to come up with solutions, because if we are pressing the problem, we should think, discuss, and try to give the solution to society.

Another goal is to promote our science to society. We have to into the rural villages in remote areas, and we have to explain to the government people what we are doing. We have to conduct our next game, and we have to basically attract more students to our science.

Nerina: What are the main points you are trying to contribute to?

Mahesh: On the main issue, we are working on health, how to improve our health facilities. The second one is the energy; how to make a sustainable energy system. The third issue is education; how to provide high quality education to everyone. And fourth one is the food here. In few parts of our country we don’t have sufficient food; our government is working on this one and our academy as well.

We have to aware our society to these issues. We have to implement these policies in all areas of our countries.

Nerina: If you could change one thing, what would it be?

Mahesh: If we focus on these issues, then we can work from a developing to a developed country.

Basically, all these things will come from education, so one thing I want to change is our education system; every kid should get education. Second, I want to aware society of what is good and what is bad. For example, our government has stared so many campaigns; if we see, we have a big campaign in India, and all these kids are throwing whatever waste that they have in dust bins.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Mahesh: I’m working on applied research. Basically my dream is that I want to make a few products, so that by using them, society can benefit, and I want to take my country from developing to developed country. In the coming ten, fifteen years, I want to see my country as a developed country.

Nerina: What is life about?

Mahesh: What is life about? I can say life is only relation. We have to make more friendships. We have to treat people equally, and listen to people, and try to solve their problems. This is life, and we have to learn from the mistakes. We should not think, always, I will get the success; sometimes failure is also important. We should learn from mistakes and failures and, again, we have to try. We should give our best to achieve something, and we should not worry so much about the result.

Nerina: What inspires you?

Mahesh: Generally, I read the biography of scientists. And if you see, many great scientists came from very poor families, and then they contributed to society.

Nerina: And what is your background? What is your story?

Mahesh: I was born in a very small village, and I have struggled a lot for higher education, but thanks to our government there are many fellowships, and by getting those fellowships I came to this level. My father only passed until sixth grade, and my mother never went to school. And I did my double Master, and I did my PhD. My parents believed in me, and because of their grace, today I’m in this position.

Nerina: What would you tell your parents, or what would you tell your children? Like a message for your parents or a message for your children, or for both.

Mahesh: For my kids, I want to make them good human beings. And my parents, I want to thank them, they have believed in me. They don’t know what research I’m doing; they know I’m a professor, but they don’t know about my research. So, I would just like to thank them. They are not higher educated, but they believed in me, and they believe on my education. They gave me the highest education.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Mahesh: Thank you so much.

Nerina: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering, and see you soon again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Dr. Kumar has received M.Tech degree in Solid State Materials from IIT Delhi and Ph.D degree in Engineering from IISc Bangalore. He worked at Central Research Laboratory of Bharat Electronics Ltd. (CRL-BEL) Bangalore as Scientist from 2005 to 2013.

During his stint at CRL-BEL, he has worked on industry-academia collaboration that involved CRL-BEL and Materials Research Centre, IISc Bangalore. He was involved in the development of GaN based blue LEDs, Quantum-well infrared photodetectors, Solar cells and III-V quantum dots based detectors. He also worked at University of Paderborn, Germany as visiting scientist under Bilateral Exchange Programme of INSA. He has received INSA Medal for Young Scientists-2014,the MRSI Medal-2016 by Materials Research Society of India, Young Achiever Award-2016 by Department of Atomic Energy and ISSS Young Scientist Award 2017 by the Institute for Smart Structures and Systems.

He has been awarded among top-10 outstanding reviewers for CrystEngComm (RSC) in 2016. He is founding Member and Chair of Indian National Young Academy of Sciences (2015-2019), Member of Global Young Academy (2017-2022) and IEEE Senior Member from 2016. He has been selected for the prestigious Bhaskara Advanced Solar Energy Fellowship supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum. He has published more than 80 research articles.

Learn more about Mahesh's work:
http://home.iitj.ac.in/~mkumar/ globalyoungacademy.net/mahesh-kumar/

Orakanoke Phanraksa

Orakanoke Phanraksa
Intellectual Property Laws and Policy
Biography:

Dr. Phanraksa received Ph.D. degree in laws from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2005. She is currently with the Technology Licensing Office, Technology Management Center at the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Pathumthani, Thailand, as a manager of the Intellectual Property Policy group.

She has involved a number of research projects, with a focus on intellectual property management and technology transfer such as the benefit sharing policy from intellectual property commercialization project; the interface between intellectual property and anti-trust laws project; and the access and benefit sharing for biodiversity in research and development institute in Thailand project.

She also serves as the working committee for the University-Business Incubation (UBI) Project and the Technology Licensing Office Promotion Project of the Higher Education Commission; and the Thai Patent Law Amendment of the Department of Intellectual Property, the Ministry of Commerce Thailand. Recently, she has engaged in a national research project with the National Science, Technology and Innovation Agency to develop a policy framework to promote the role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in research and development in Thailand.

A change-maker with a passion for people

When great ideas come to pass, researchers always find that there is an entire path to take that goes beyond discovery, and that is where Orakanoke Phanraksa and her team of Intellectual Property experts come in. Working with the National Science and Technology Development Agency in Thailand, Orakanoke is a member of the Intellectual Property Policy group, overseeing the creation of patents and the development of this field.

IP procedures are a major part of the scientific process, often overlooked until the time to file a patent comes. As co-chair of the Global Young Academy, Orakanoke works tirelessly to introduce Intellectual Property education to new professionals in the scientific field, opening new opportunities for both business and academy.

As a strong representative of the Asian scientific community in the GYA, Orakanoke aims to inject the values of her culture to the realm of interdisciplinary projects and increase the presence and value of IP concepts and applications in both researchers and Thai citizens.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Orakanoke Phanraksa's Video here ◂

Orakanoke Phanraksa: Good morning, Nerina.

Nerina: Thank you so much for joining me. Could you please introduce yourself?

My name is Orokanoke Phanraksa. I’m originally from Thailand. I work as an intellectual property lawyer at the National Science and Technology Development Agency; we call ourselves NSTDA. NSTDA is under the Ministry of Science and Technology in Thailand.

Nerina: What is your main work focus?

Orakanoke: Ok. So during the first, let’s say, five years, I’ve been providing intellectual property related advice to in-house researches, as well as to universities who received a funding from NSTDA. But later on, I had the chance to get involved with many national projects, including university test incubators, and university licensing office projects and that has allowed me to move further to work on IP related policy at a national level.

Nerina: Dealing with intellectual property, you move between research and business right?

Orakanoke: Look at it this way. At NSTDA, I’m working for the Technology Licensing Office; there, part of my job has been prosecuting the protection of research outcome at NSTDA, and later on, when we find potential customers or licensees, a contract will come back to my team to help review the contract in order to make sure that the research form the public sector could be properly licensed out to the private sector, and that’s how the research has been commercialized from NSTDA to the society.

Nerina: What are the challenges from a researchers’ perspective and from a business perspective?

Orakanoke: In the context of Thailand, this includes trade elements: the researchers, technology licensing officers and industry. Starting from the researchers themselves, it also involves the funding system, because in the beginning, if the funding doesn’t really focus on application, it’s really difficult for the middle person, like my office, to try to push the technology to the industry.

Also, oftentimes we’ve found out that the researchers are very proud of their babies; they believe that they could be used right up front, with the need sort of upscaling to make sure that it could be applicable at the industrial site. There’s a lot to do with the mindset and understanding from the researchers’ side.

As for the technology licensing officers, sometimes called licensing agents, in Thailand, it is kind of an emerging career. In other words, we don’t have many experts in Thailand, in particular when talking about intellectual property licensing, or international deals, as well, so the language could be a barrier, so that’s why at the moment, it’s being promoted as a career path and capacity for people in this field.

Moving to the third element, which is industry; because I work for the government, and therefore the government is trying to promote the transfer of technology to SME’s – small and medium enterprises -, not large scale, and therefore, there is a need in Thailand to catch up with what is ongoing.

They normally expect cheap or free technology from the government because they believe it is from the tax money, but nonetheless, we invest a lot in our research, and therefore, there’s a lot to do with educating our industry, and also the capability of the industry itself because, in order to use our research, it’s important for them to really learn, not just to buy out, like in the past, or get it for free without any charge. So that’s what I see happening.

Nerina: In your opinion, what are the steps or the changes that Thailand needs?

Orakanoke: At the moment, our current government is trying to promote the increasing numbers of patents filed by Thai nationals. There are three types of patents: patent invention, patent design, and petty patents. In Thailand, statistically, the design patent is the top one that many Thais have been flying, but in many developed countries, the file reports on the patent invention are more complicated, so when we look at the statistic of the Thai national filings, we find that we couldn’t really catch up with the foreigners who filed the patent inventions in Thailand. Because of that, our government is trying to explore better ways to motivate Thais, not just scientists, to find more protection on patent inventions.

I would say that for my office, which is under the Ministry of Science and Technology, we are finding this as a challenge because authority believes that we should be able to be a focal point to help build awareness of intellectual property rights, but at the same time, we also see that the Ministry of Commerce would help, and we work closely together to help build awareness.

But most importantly, there’s a lot to do with the research system in Thailand, because to come up with the great inventions, you need to come up with a systematic continuity of the funding because you cannot produce something within a year without a value. It may happen, but to find a bridge to technology requires lots of investment in R&D.

Nerina: If you had the power to change something tomorrow, what would it be?

Orakanoke: Regarding what my team and I have been working on, we have been insisting on trade elements. This is even with the proposal of our government. We’ve talked about intellectual property in the context of developing countries; I believe that human capital is the most important element, because it takes years for a licensing agent or a patent agent to become a professional, and therefore we insist in investment on human capital in this field. We would like our government to help promote the career path and capacity building of intellectual property professions in Thailand, and I would say that not just in Thailand, because we grow together. Thailand is part of the ten ASEAN countries in Southeast Asia so this is what my team in NSTDA has been working together with other colleagues in ASEAN.

So there is the element of human capital, but researchers are also important. When we talk about researchers or scientists in Thailand, we also include those who work in the academic environment, and when you talk about the academy environment, the main pillars are to teach, and clearly societal engagement, but also to do research.

How could they have sufficient time to do research in addition to an overwhelming teaching load? So with that in mind, we also would like to propose to our government to revisit the current curriculum, because when we talk with our colleagues from developed countries, they teach for about an hour for one subject. Why teach three hours for one subject? With that kind of time requirements, you also need extra time for preparation for your class, it is quite a challenge for the academicians to have enough time to do good research. That covers the insufficiencies of time for our researchers.

Now I have covered human capital, professionals and researchers. Next is the research funding. I’m aware that funding issues are everywhere, not just in developing countries, but to have a clear direction, and also to promote continuity is very important. It’s not just about changing the policy every year; it’s important to have a good national research plan, and also sufficient patent funding for the researchers.

Eventually, we see that the ecosystem is important, so education for Thais is also important. It’s not just about turning students into professionals, but Thai citizens, including the industry, need to be educated as well.

Nerina: And how did you get into this field of studies?

Orakanoke: Well, it was not my plan to become a lawyer. I originally wanted to be an artist; I love arts and painting, but it’s about the University process in Thailand, where you are allowed to choose five departments that you would like to go through. I chose Arts at the beginning, but then because of my family – my dad and my grandfather -, they were judges, so I was interested in following their path. On the one hand, I had been seeing that career since I was young, so I wanted to find something different, but on the other, I also see that it is such a respectful career, to be a judge.

I tried to go somewhere in between, to choose a legal path, but not exactly that which my dad is. I tried to contribute one way or another to work in the public agency and help provide advice to researchers, rather than being a businessman or a judge like my dad.

Nerina: As a lover of art and a lawyer, how do you combine these two passions?

Orakanoke: Being a lawyer is not completely separate from being an artist, because being an artist you also need to observe people, and a bit like a scientist, I study people and their backgrounds to make sure they get the best advice, but I also study who they are. As someone who wanted to be an artist, whenever I work with other scientists I look at them as persons. This has somehow taught me to learn to get to know people better.

Nerina: A very interesting perspective. How did your culture and your background help you on your journey?

Orakanoke: I would say that growing up in the Asian culture environment helped a lot because we are bonded together and we often remain together. This is a case of other people, as well. I’m the middle child, and when we went to school when we were young, it was my dad who gave us a ride every day; the traffic in Bangkok was really bad, so it could take you up to two hours one way, so when we got stuck in traffic I would do my homework in the car and ask my dad for questions or tutorials in the car, and that’s how I grew up.

That’s how things were with my family, and you can see that we spend time together, we have dinner together; it’s not forever, but I saw my parents raise three children up and that is how our culture plays into our children, into the people in Thailand, and I’m sure you’ve seen many Asians traveling overseas, but at the end of the day, they would love to come back to their home country, and this is the case for many Thai people.

Nerina: Is there something special that the world could learn from Thai culture?

Orakanoke: I would say that being considerate is the first thing because these days the world is so small. You connect to people and to be more considerate, to think about others is the way to be, because can you imagine if people became more considerate towards each other?

Nerina: You are an alumna of the Global Young Academy and you were a co-chair. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

Orakanoke: I’m not the champion co-chair, because it was not my intention to run for this position, it’s just only that I want to contribute to the scientific community, since it’s such a great community, as you may have observed. I also have to thank the GYA, because it has allowed me to meet many great people, not just at the same pier, but also at the higher ranking authority and this has allowed me to speak in front of a public, and normally I’m a quiet person.

It’s also allowed me to really learn and hear advice from our advance report members, who are so recognized at an international level. It’s given a great connection to key people in different continents, because for someone in Thailand, how could you reach out to people in Latin America, in Africa, in particular, if you talk about collaborations between Asia and Latin America? They’re so far away from each other, and the GYA allows me to reach out to friends in other continents, and in return, I’m not here to just gain. It’s important to me, and I believe I would advise other scientists or GYA members, to learn to return or give back to the GYA.

Whenever I travel, I try to see what else I could bring back to my desk here in Thailand, and also Asia, and that’s how I reach out to other connections and make sure that things work. That things that never existed before, I try to make them happen, just because I see that certain groups are out there, so why not make it happen in my own region?

Nerina: What is the most important lesson you have learnt?

Orakanoke: I enjoy seeing that it’s such a beautiful thing being with the GYA to learn, to be with different cultures, backgrounds, and disciplines, but the fact that to believe that you know people enough? It has never been enough. Because the rest might be aware that in working with Asians, Asians don’t speak out. We are quite shy, but as a matter of fact, it comes to the individual basis: people are different. Language-wise, even though you understand English, it comes to each individual person; you really learn to work with people.

Of course, working with a big community means there could be many disagreements, and you need to learn to work with people, so I have learned to be very diplomatic in order to make things work. That is how the leader or the co-chair needs to work things out because otherwise, you can’t really move things forward. So, I would say it has, by measure, taught me to learn to really be diplomatic, to really work with people from different disciplines and cultures.

Nerina: How do you see the role of researchers in driving change?

Orakanoke: To make a change, there are many levels. You don’t have to go big right at the beginning, because, for example, I see myself as a working ant, and you need to have a great group of working ants to make things happen. Also, priority and progress are important; you may want to solve many problems in the world, but it’s important to learn what is your first priority, what are you capable of because otherwise, you are achieving nothing.

Having worked with the GYA, I learned to share my experience with other junior GYA members, so I often ask them ‘what are you passionate about?’, because whenever you work from your heart, it tells you the direction to the next step. I always found myself wanting to do many things, but at one point, you find that you need to choose, and that is what tells you that you can make change bit by bit, but just pick the right project, and if you don’t find the right one, you have the right to change as well.

Nerina: How about you? What is next for you? What is your passion?

Orakanoke: My passion is still with human capital, because having worked with the GYA, I get involved with a group of young scientists, so I’ve been working with ASEAN’s Science Leadership Program in Asia; that is a scientific community, and when we talk about ASEAN it includes only ten countries, but now I’m trying to move to include East Asia and even Australia, New Zealand and India.

That’s what I’m working on at the moment for a group of scientists, but at the same time it has been my dream to inject the element of intellectual property rights to this group of young scientists, because apart from what I’m doing with the GYA, or young scientists or national young academics, I’m also directing another project, where NSTDA has been working with world intellectual property organizations.

We call this project the IP Environment; this is a project in Southeast Asia, so we are trying to work together with IP professionals in Thailand, and trying to connect them with other countries in ASEAN.

Whenever we at NSTDA, or other organizations, are hosting on this theme, we can invite some people from other communities to be our guests, but the big challenge for me is that many members from the National Young Academy or Global Young Academy are academicians, so IP may not be their interest at the moment. But sooner or later, it will be the key element in their lives, so I try to find a proper timing to inject this element into their daily lives.

Nerina: What do you like doing when you are not working?

Orakanoke: Work has become my life, and I don’t really have much of a personal life. Even now, being on vacation, I’m looking to work some more, because I see that there’s a lot to do, and it’s the right timing when you’re capable of making a change, so I say that whatever big part I can do, I’ll carry on with work.

Nerina: What is a personal dream?

Orakanoke: Having been traveling a lot over the past few years, I would prefer to stay home and spend time with my family, with my dad, my brother, my sister, and my dog. I often joke with my friends that my dog, a beagle, is one of the success factors in my life.

Nerina: Who is Orakanoke in three sentences?

Orakanoke: For those who don’t know me, I’m someone who works very hard, for whom work is her life, but people often come to her as a solution provider, despite her expertise as an intellectual property lawyer or as a friend, who will try every bit to help and solve the problems for you.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Orakanoke, for this conversation.

Orakanoke: Thank you a lot, Nerina. I had a great time talking to you this morning, so I hope you find some inspiring information from my story. Thank you.

Nerina: Thank you so much, and thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering and see you next time again. Goodbye and ciao.

Biography:

Dr. Phanraksa received Ph.D. degree in laws from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2005. She is currently with the Technology Licensing Office, Technology Management Center at the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Pathumthani, Thailand, as a manager of the Intellectual Property Policy group.

She has involved a number of research projects, with a focus on intellectual property management and technology transfer such as the benefit sharing policy from intellectual property commercialization project; the interface between intellectual property and anti-trust laws project; and the access and benefit sharing for biodiversity in research and development institute in Thailand project.

She also serves as the working committee for the University-Business Incubation (UBI) Project and the Technology Licensing Office Promotion Project of the Higher Education Commission; and the Thai Patent Law Amendment of the Department of Intellectual Property, the Ministry of Commerce Thailand. Recently, she has engaged in a national research project with the National Science, Technology and Innovation Agency to develop a policy framework to promote the role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in research and development in Thailand.

Hsiung Ping-chen

Hsiung Ping-Chen
Professor of History
Biography:

Hsiung Ping-chen is a Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who also carries the capacities of the Senior Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor and the Director of the Research Institute for the Humanities at the university. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2009 to 2011, and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Taiwan Central University from 2004 to 2007. Also, Prof Hsiung has been serving as the Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei since 1990, and K.T. Li Chair at Central University in Taiwan since 2006. An internationally renowned scholar in her field, she has also made remarkable achievements in academic administration.

Having received her B.A. in History from Taiwan University, she furthered her studies in the US and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Brown University and her S.M. in Population Studies and International Health from the School of Public Health at Harvard University. Her research interest lies in the areas of women’s and children’s health, gender and family relations, and intellectual and social history of early modern/modern China and Europe. She served as Director of the Humanities Centre at the Central University in Taiwan, and played an instrumental role in founding the interdisciplinary group ‘Ming-Ch’ing Studies’ at the Academia Sinica. Over the years, Professor Hsiung has held visiting professorships at many leading academic institutions in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, including UCLA, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Freie Universitat Berlin, and Keio University, Japan.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong
President, Asian New Humanities Net (ANHN)
(852) 3943 7134

Learn more about Hsiung's work:
history.cuhk.edu.hk/mhpch.html
The past and the present. What does the history of infants tell us?

Childhood becomes a social, spiritual and historical journey for Ping-chen Hsiung, History professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has dedicated most of her 40-year-spanning academic career to the study of infants and children in ancient China.

As the West has continually seen childhood as just the first steps taken into the richer and wider phases of life, Hsiung’s studies focus on the spiritual and social roles of the child we all were once, and how the maintenance of this role represents a key to understanding the role we take on as adults.

As well as her position as a History Professor, Hsiung’s takes the seat as the Director of the Center for Taiwan studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and her broad academic experience and research on childhood and infancy in China can be found surmised in her book A Tender Voyage, where she exposes through an interdisciplinary approach the comparisons standing between how we view children in the West, and how they were seen in China hundreds of years ago, in order to extract, from a view of the past in contrast to the present, the path to a more tender future.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Hsiung Ping-Chen's Video here ◂

Nerina: Today, I am sharing with you a conversation that I had a year ago with Ping-chen Hsiung. She’s a professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and she has done pioneering work on childhood in China. One of her favorite quotes id “To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man”, by Aristotle.

Hsiung: I am Hsiung Ping-chen, professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I am a trained historian, but I also have a secondary field in Public Health.

My main research topic is History of infants and young children in late imperial China, studied from interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. This is trying to answer historically how human life becomes possible, namely what happens every day now in the modern society whenever you give birth to a child. You expect this child to make it in life, but that’s not the given in pre-modern societies, so I wanted to answer that question, and given that Chinese documentation tends to be rich and available in many, many different angles from different areas, I started this study from Chinese sources, and then compared to information as we know it from England, Sweden, Japan, India, and colonial America. Then, I try to study it from historical texts left by pediatricians, by art historians, by objects and things, so it required an interdisciplinary angle.

Nerina: How did you get interested in this topic?

Hsiung: I was very curious, when I was maybe 7 or 8, about how we as very young children – preschool children – have a sense of identity, therefore when I was I teenager and saw the cover of The Second Sex – only the cover at the bookstore -, I thought maybe the second sex was about children and childhood, as a second identity. I opened it up and discovered it was about women and was a bit disappointed, although I am a woman, and thought therefore children should be called the third sex, that is: children as an independent domain in terms of their sense of self, their interests, the games they play, their everyday sentiments. If you see their behavior or other things that you now know, people acknowledge that age as a factor, and the phases of life – human life, however it is understood in different societies, at different times -, actually form a kind of a different existential sentiment.

How I got interested? I was just very curious. I went to college and picked History as a major at the National Taiwan University in 1971. I assumed that this was an often studied subject, and therefore you could just take a course called Childhood in World History, but I looked it up as a freshman and never found it. I graduated with a History major, then I went out to History graduate school at Brown University in the United States and got a degree in History and started teaching. By the end of the early 80’s, I discovered that, really, I had nothing studied. I was very surprised and couldn’t sleep with the idea of not knowing.

I knew by then that there was material to answer that question, so I decided I should just answer my own question so that whenever *4:30, unintelligible*

Nerina: What can we learn from this topic?

Hsiung: We discovered the details of how infants where brought from their first 24 hours, first week, first month, first year, and why they celebrated when they got to live, and that’s in the technical aspect. But also in that we see how people treasure life, because death, or not living, is a constant reality, and so I wrote my book that’s published in English – I published three monographs in Chinese and one in English on the subject. Published in 2005 by Stanford Press, it’s called A Tender Voyage, which is a rendition of a Chinese Buddhist term called Tz’u-hung, meaning that Indian Buddhism assumed that life is an endless suffering and so people would have to get out of this vicious cycle, but Chinese Buddhists, when they saw Indian Buddhism, they thought that the way to get out of this challenging situation is through compassion and mutual help, so that is called Tz’u-hung, a tender voyage where people could help each other to get through this very difficult journey called life.

Nerina: I wanted to know more about this book and there are different reviews about it. This is by Pei-yi Wu and you can read:

“Since Phillip Ariees groundbreaking and provocative book L’Enfant et la vie famillialle sou l’ancien régime was published in 1960, the West has been inundated with books on the history of children and childhood.”

Hsiung: The French book was actually translated into English and other languages starting in the 70’s and 80’s; I started my study at roughly that same period. That book made a very bold and startling, but also challenging, assumption, in Western Europe, or France, primarily, that childhood may be a modern invention. It has since been studied and responded by European historians, and turned out not to be the case, but still, that was a good start in terms of the discovery of childhood studies.

Nerina: The book consists of three parts; Part One is about the physical conditions, and this contains the most original and important findings: In contrast to Europe, specialized medicine for children appeared considerably earlier in China. The beginning of practicing pediatrics started at least since the second half of the ninth century.

Part number two is about social life, and here professor Hsiung gathered information from more than eight hundred chronological biographies. One fully developed topic is the bond between mother and son; we can read the depth and duration of this bond had few parallels in other societies and greatly mitigated the effects of patriarchy.

In part number three, that is about, for example, girlhood, I feel that there is also an interest in aspect, when she says; to further confront the superficial impression that gender prejudice could have worked only to the advantage of boys, it is useful to look at the privilege a young girl might have had in emotional warmth from family elders. Most families, if made to disclose, indicated their favorite child to be a daughter. Interesting perspective and, I feel, really interesting book.

What was childhood about?

Hsiung: You know, when people now speak of children or childhood or infants, because of the modern experience, since the nineteenth century originated in Europe but now it’s everywhere, people tend to think of human existence as defined by the biophysical existence, therefore they’re thinking about ‘infant’ and ‘child’ in a logical sense. That is, the earlier phase of a person’s life and of someone who is very small and needs tenderness; but if you look at the Chinese documents, it started off as understanding ‘infant’ and ‘child, the concept in three ways.

There’s the basic fundamental ways, which Chinese pediatricians share with everybody else, that have to look after the illness of a four month old or a two year old, which had a different physiological condition as opposed to sixteen year old adults. But then comes a second understanding, which is what we called a ‘social child’, that is a role, a status. Chinese people, because they would pay respect to their ancestors, so in Chinese New Year, including people who were in their sixties or seventies, would assume their role as the offspring of a genealogy; even the Emperor, the head of their empire, called himself Son of Heaven, which means that he is a junior, and that’s a basic humility and also it’s a generational concept that assumes that there’s people before you and there’s people after you. So, that’s the second definition.

The third definition, actually, is an existential and ethical understanding of infancy and childhood. That’s the understanding that, eventually, everybody would go back to become an infant; it’s something that’s cultivated, and if you look at, say, Charlie Brown or some painting, they’re people would always be a child, always a five year old, always a three year old. Because at that time people didn’t have a notion of time as a lineal progression, so people think ‘Ok, you could stay forever young’ or that you do your exercise and cultivate, and you would become a child again.

I think those three different ways of understanding the beginnings of life and the existential state and the social role, at least allow people to have multiple choices, and it’s a good cultural diversity, I would say. That is something that Chinese, or the habitants of continental East Asia, happen to start up with. I don’t like to say that Chinese civilization always held secrets to everything else, or that’s it’s older, because I think the relations between different cultures and civilizations is not a competition about who’s winning, who’s coming better, or who’s wiser, or smarter, or better; I just think that different people living in different circumstances in different places happen to have different notions, ideas, and practices, and this is one thing that I discovered in my studies and that I would like to share.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that you have learned?

Hsiung: When I talk about my studies, people always say ‘Oh, how can you document stories of six month infants from hundreds of years ago?’, and I say ‘Of course you could, as long as you give it your hardest attention and time’, because I think, as historians, we could also document silence, and then to interpret the empty space. The people whose lives have vanished will be just like the open space in the painting; there’s always the void. What is not there helps us understand and interpret what’s there. We have to be able, as historians, to document the missing lives and the empty spaces and the silences better.

Nerina: How can we use our past, our different pasts, to create our common future?

Hsiung: I think that historical relations have stored a database of circumstances. How they worked and enjoyed and endured these circumstances, so it would be a loss if it’s like a forest; if you only decided to preserve the most useful plant for current cosederation, the you would lose a lot, because in the forest, in the water, you want all forms of life to be able to carry on. So I certainly would like, when I talk to people in social sciences, to work with more contemporary data, or to think about future problems, I would say that this is also useful information. They’re humans too, and then it would be a shame if we decided to drop that and assume that we could still have enough information and inspiration and all kinds of stories to carry on for the future.

I also hope that humanities and art would not have such a confrontational relation with science and people who have other interests, because I see, in all kinds of real circumstances, unique people with different expertise, different experience, different interests, with common work together. No singular subject or discipline could complete a service or a task without the help of other people.

Nerina: If you could travel through time, is there a time you’d like to view? Is there a person you would ask something in the past?

Hsiung: If I were to be able to travel back in time. I know there are times and places where people really mingled and boundaries did not matter as much. For instance, in the Asian border, between the sixth and ninth century; I would like to be there.

I have just been to *foreign city name, can’t hear it right, 16:45*, because I know that there are Indian eye doctors who would fix people’s eyes, there are Persian musicians who would perform their show, and all kinds of traders, and people who spoke all kinds of languages, so that would be the kind of place that would satisfy my curiosity.

Nerina: What kind of question would you have for them?

Hsiung: Oh, no. It would just me going to the market everyday: I love to look at things, I like to go to different markets and to see what life has to offer. I don’t have any particular informative questions to ask them, but I think it would be a to to see how life flourishes in places and times when boundaries mattered less and when people mingled more easily.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Hsiung: I have lots and lots of dreams. I actually have a lot of real dreams every day; I dream easily, and even when I doze off for a few minutes I can have a dream, and sometimes, I can’t tell the difference between the cream and real life. I tend to think that the difference between dreams and real life is that the dreams that you have are so real, that they could become real life in the next step.

Nerina: What is your next book?

Hsiung: My next book is going to be documenting the life of a provincial intellectual in seventeenth century China, who somehow, because of his of sort of failed life, dreamed of something big, and then people said three hundred years later that he’s very modern. This is the book I’m publishing.

In terms of projects, because I have studied infants and children for thirty years, now I’m looking at the other end, meaning aging understood and observed cross-culturally.

Nerina: You research on childhood, and you are going to research the end of life. What is life about?

Hsiung: What is life about? You know, as I said, it shouldn’t only be about physical existence. It includes life socially, culturally, but it should also define affinity. I also teach History of Family, and I say ‘Your closest ones may not be the blood kin. It could be the people who rub shoulders with you when you have a flat tire in the winter, when people stop and help you. That’s your closest kin’.

What is life? It depends, but I would say life is what you decide to make of it.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Hsiung.

Thank you so much for watching, thank you so much for listening. Keep wondering, and see you soon again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Hsiung Ping-chen is a Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who also carries the capacities of the Senior Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor and the Director of the Research Institute for the Humanities at the university. She served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2009 to 2011, and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Taiwan Central University from 2004 to 2007. Also, Prof Hsiung has been serving as the Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei since 1990, and K.T. Li Chair at Central University in Taiwan since 2006. An internationally renowned scholar in her field, she has also made remarkable achievements in academic administration.

Having received her B.A. in History from Taiwan University, she furthered her studies in the US and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Brown University and her S.M. in Population Studies and International Health from the School of Public Health at Harvard University. Her research interest lies in the areas of women’s and children’s health, gender and family relations, and intellectual and social history of early modern/modern China and Europe. She served as Director of the Humanities Centre at the Central University in Taiwan, and played an instrumental role in founding the interdisciplinary group ‘Ming-Ch’ing Studies’ at the Academia Sinica. Over the years, Professor Hsiung has held visiting professorships at many leading academic institutions in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, including UCLA, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Freie Universitat Berlin, and Keio University, Japan.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong
President, Asian New Humanities Net (ANHN)
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Learn more about Hsiung's work:
history.cuhk.edu.hk/mhpch.html

Yongyuth Yuthavong

Yongyuth Yuthavong
Former Minister of Science and Technology
Biography:

Professor Dr. Yongyuth Yuthavong is a former Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Science and Technology, Thailand and an outstanding Thai scientist with a particular interest in the broad issues of public policies, especially those concerning the application of science and technology for development – as well as human development in general.

Dr. Yongyuth spent a long career at Mahidol University, conducting research and teaching. He was appointed Professor of Biochemistry in 1983 and was honored with the “Outstanding Scientist of Thailand” Award in 1984, from the Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Technology. During the same period, he was chosen as the Director of the National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) from 1985 until 1989.

Dr. Yongyuth became the first President of Thailand’s National Science & Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) from 1992 until 1998 and in 2004, he received the Nikkei Asia Prize for Science, Technology and Innovation from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan, for his outstanding work on antimalarial drug targets, as well as the prestigious “Person of the Year” Award from Thailand’s National Identity Board. Dr. Yongyuth served as the Minister of Science and Technology from 2006 to 2008, when The Nation newspaper named him one of “the 35 most influential Thais over the past 35 years”. Dr. Yongyuth has since returned to his research career with BIOTEC, where he now heads a research group working on the development of new antimalarials.

Learn more about Yongyuth's work:
www.researchgate.net/Yongyuth_Yuthavong
From science to innovation, development, and sustainability in Thailand

What is the more human side of science like? How is it linked with the human spirit? And what is the role this connection plays in the growth of an entire country?

Professor Yongyuth Yuthavong draws a detailed and thoughtful map on how science inspired him to grow from an avid biochemistry student, to a determined researcher in the fight against Malaria in Thailand, to the country’s very own Deputy Prime Minister.

As a pioneer and an investigator at heart, Yuthavong played an important role in the creation of Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency, focusing his research in the interactions of Malaria and the creation of antimalarial drugs. As a politician and as a professor, he puts sustainable, long-term development at the forefront of his discourse, and continues to dream of a brighter future in which the younger generation gets the chance to learn, experience and contribute to society, within and outside the scientific sphere.

With a life devoted to science, which brightest aspects can be found in his book Sparks of the Spirit, professor Yuthavong remains a shining light in the world of research and politics, reminding us that true passion touches not only ourselves, but those around us.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Yongyuth Yuthavong's Video here ◂

Prof. Yongyuth Yuthavong: My name is Yongyuth Yuthawong and I am a scientist, and I’ve been working in science almost all my life. Sometimes, I’m induced to do other things, such as policy, administration and even politics.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you so much for joining me. Science, policy making and politics; how are they related to each other?

Yongyuth: It may due to my nature, but I think everyone is the same, in that I have both a narrow and a broad interest. The narrow interest took me to science – I studied chemistry -, but then the broad interest took me to all sorts of things. I like to talk with people on policy of countries, on international politics and so on. When I was applying for a place in the university, I applied for a place in chemistry, and after the interview I was furious because the interviewer said ‘You are more suited to study general science’. So I thought ‘General science?! I want to be a chemist!’.

So that is how it always is with me. I tried to do work and I stayed true to my profession as a biochemist on my working life, but now and then I’m induced to various things outside of it, but always concerning science.

Nerina: Tell me more about your work as a scientist.

Yongyuth: I would like to say I’m quite successful in my intended career. I did work first of all in just basic biochemistry; enzymes and various membranes, biomenbranes, but I found that there was very little support in Thailand for basic science, so I needed to do something which uses basic science to solve the problems of my country, and at that time, Malaria was a very big problem, so I thought that maybe we should start to study the biochemistry of Malaria, so I’ve been doing that for more than forty years. It’s a bit long, until now Malaria is no longer a big threat in Thailand, but it’s still a big threat in the world.

Many people, many hundreds of thousands still die from Malaria each year, so I think my job is not done, but that is the narrow path which took me to being recognized by being given the Outstanding Scientist of Thailand Award; I was given the Nikkei award from Japan for science, technology and innovation, and I was recognized for various things. Right now, I’m now involved in developing antimalarial drugs, which has now gone into clinical trial, so it’s something that I’m very proud of. I think if the first synthetic drug from Thailand that has gone on to human clinical trials. That’s the narrow path.

Nerina: And how did you find the broader path?

Yongyuth: That probably stemmed from my interest in the broad areas of science and how we could develop science in my country. I think more than forty years ago, there was some friend of mine, I physicist from Oregon, who was a n expert in science policy. He was coming to Thailand, and he asked if some people would like to listen to him, and I said ‘Why not?’. So I organized a conference on science policy where people from all spheres, both the political people and the policy people, the administrative and the scientists came together at the National Research Council of Thailand, and that was the first main introduction for me into the area of science policy. People asking why Thailand had so little in terms of structures to support science, so that really paved the way for a group to be formed; I was part of that group to try to from the Ministry of Science and Technology, and it’s like a miracle. People thought that it would never be possible, but then in the end the Ministry was passed as a law.

We got the Ministry of Science and Technology, and I was induced into working for the Ministry. I was asked to be the director of biotechnology, and then that was the decision. Narrow path or the broad path. At the time I said, ‘Let me do my science first’. So we invited someone else who was more senior to become the director, so I could concentrate on my scientific work. But then I never left the area of policy, it just sort of drew m into all sorts of things.

Indeed, I became the director of biotechnology later on, and the we started to think of big things, like having a national agency for science and technology. This was also in part due to the grant from the United States – USAID -, a loan to the Thai government for science research, and we sort of melted the USAID project together with the Thai attempts to broaden the structure for support. That was how the Science and Technology Development was born around 1992, and I was the first director- now it’s called president – of the National Science and Technology Development Agency.

I could go on from there to build science and not just only for my own narrow interest in chemistry and biochemistry, but across all areas. Not only biotechnology, but also material science, electronics and computers, and various areas.

Nerina: How was your experience and what kind of challenges did you encounter?

Yongyuth: So that gave me an idea to write a book called The Sparks from the Spirit.

Nerina: Sparks from the Spirit. What is it about?

Yongyuth: In Sparks from the Spirit, the spirit is the spirit of science that I’m talking about and I think everyone has, right from childhood, but maybe we lose that spirit as we grow old because there are other distractions. But for other people – for scientists and for inventors and so on -, that spirit is never gone, it’s always with them. They’re like the core of an onion, so they can help to bring about technologies and innovations, and then the people from that outside can work together to lead to what is called development in very broad areas.

For example, the Green Revolution of the 1960’s; that is an example of development that came from science of agriculture, form the science of biology, but also from various areas. From broad areas in agriculture, in farming, in politics and various things that help to bring about water resource management and so on. It helped to bring about the agriculture, the Green Revolution of the 1960’s, but that was not sustainable.

Even though the Green Revolution was big, it was not sustainable, because it was too resource-intensive, so it required a lot of water and well-educated farmers and so on; also, it ignores another green factor, and that is the environmental factor. Son now, there is a kind of Evergreen development, where you take all this things that you forgot to take into account in the 60’s, now bring them together and hopefully this will go toward sustainable development. This is a part of the sustainable development movement that we’re having right now that the UN is really calling for, and we hope to achieve by 2030.

There are seventeen goals of sustainable development. I looked at these seventeen goals and I found that they all really have science as a big component, so I put this in Sparks from the Spirit. The spirit produces sparks that will go on, hopefully, to sustainable development.

Nerina: What is the role of the scientist here? What does it mean to be a scientist?

Yongyuth: Well, I think a scientist is not only useful in the sense that he can work on his narrow area – drug development or cancer -, but a scientist is also useful to the society as someone who appreciates the power knowledge; not only knowledge in his or her own area, but knowledge in general, and have the curiosity to go on to something new. That is really the essence of science: the curiosity and the wonder and the exploration, that’s in the nature and the spirit of humans, so I think a scientist can tell the society in general to keep these characters in you and don’t lose them as you grow up.

Nerina: In your book you wrote also about the fire inside us, right?

Yongyuth: We all have fires within us. Sometimes that fire drives you to your carreer, like a pianist who has a fire of performance, and she can go on to that stage. That fire drives her to something really great in her career and to the world, but in order to grow that fire, you really need to try very hard. It’s not easy to learn your trade very well, and for an artist, you need to practice very well, and not only just practice mechanically, but practice in terms of how you generate something new, something that is different from others, and yet recognizable. It can be out of this world, but it’s recognizable, even though it comes in a new form and new interpretation.

I think science is like that, also. We have the fire of discovery inside us; we always want to know, want to ask questions about this and about that, why not this, why not that, so that’s the fire within us, and if we manage this fire well and don’t quench it before time, I think we can go on to something that is really good.

I’m so sad when, in Thai society, many people, many mothers or fathers will tell their kids ‘Don’t ask too much! ’; you know? I scold you if you ask too many questions. For me, let them ask the questions. Of course, they may bother you a little bit; some questions are nonsense and so on, but we have to be patient we our new generation, and let them really goad their fires. Each one should be able to grow his or her own fires, so that it can really burn brightly and it can give out the sparks that we’ll enjoy later on.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Yongyuth: I think that it will not be radically different from what we’re having now, but I hope that this sustainable development movement will help make a better society, not only in terms of material’s well-being, but in terms of happiness, because in the last chapter of my book I think that society is not just aiming for sustainable development; in a way, sustainable is a little bit defensive, because it means that you get something and you want it to continue.

In the last chapter of my book, I ask what is beyond sustainability. Because what we need really is a happy society, and not only sustainable, but thriving and always going on to better things, so it is not stable, but going on, improving itself, so I hope that the society that we have in the future need not be materially rich, but it’s a society where people live together happily as a family, as an individual, as a group, as a city, as a country, and as the whole world.

I also look forward to the time when humans will go out of this world to other worlds. We are going to Mars already in 2030, and maybe some other worlds beyond Mars, but one thing that is important is that we must not leave this world in shambles, you know? As junk, and then we go on to find some other place. So we must take care of this world and have a sustainable society, or something that is beyond sustainability, here before we go elsewhere.

Nerina: What are the challenges for Thailand’s development, in your opinion?

Yongyuth: I could see that Thailand needs to change from just being an agrarian society to becoming more internationally involved and have a broader area of products and services, and not just agriculture and raw materials. I think the path is clear, that science and technology have to play a bigger role so that we can become more industrialized and also go into de digital society and become an “advanced” country.

There was no doubt science would play a big role, but then, how do you do it? Because there were so few scientists, technology and so few people who appreciate and understand science. I thought the way to do it was to talk to people; both the people who are running the country and the normal people, the students, the young people, the new generation, so we are all together in the sense that we can see that science is very important for the development of our country.

So, we cannot say we’ll go into trade or we’ll go into something that other people are doing well without science. We cannot do that. I think I have some success, but it’s still a hard job, because it’s not very easy to convince people that there is a difference between science and imported technology. Many people say ‘Oh, we don’t need to do basic science. We’ll just import the technology, import the materials, and then we can fabricate. ’; little do they know that in order to do that and be competitive, you have to have the underlying science, you have to have the knowledge in order to know what to import, what kind of things or knowledge or products to import and how would you integrate it into products, and finally, how to make the whole products yourselves.

This all concerns science as the basic infrastructure, and then from science would come the technology, would come innovation, and then, what I call “development”. Of course, development can’t come from just science alone, but it needs things like economic, business, design, and so on. It’s a bigger world, but science has a big role in it, and then if we do things correctly, we’ll have sustainable development, and not just fleeting development, nor just like a flash in the pan and then it’s gone.

I think Thailand is like a teenager growing up, so right now it’s a time of confusion. Sometimes you want to go back to the olds way, sometimes you want new things, and economically, we are right in the middle between developing country and developed country. Like with a teenager growing up, there will be a lot of turbulence, but in the end, but since we have survived and thrived for so long, I’m very confident that we will have a great society, but we are struggling to have one right now.

Nerina: What were you like as a teenager? Did you have a dream?

Yongyuth: I had many dreams. I still have dreams. I had a dream that I would become a very good musician. One day a friend said ‘Hey, let’s go and practice violin’, so I went with two of my friends for one year, but it was too late, I was at the last year of my school. I did learn something to play, when no one was home and no one was hearing, but that really is a dream unfulfilled.

I also have dream of literature and drama that I would like to follow very much. Here my dream is a bit fulfilled, because I found a wife that’s a dramatist, so she kind of fulfills one part of my life. She’s form the art side, I’m from the science side, so we can live together, with some conflicts now and then, of course, but everyone has that.

I still have dreams. Maybe if I could start life all over again, what profession would I choose, what dreams would I follow? In the end, I sort of fell on science again; probably another type of science and just chemistry and molecular biology, because I know a lot of it already. Maybe some other type of science, or maybe economics. Probably economics.

Nerina: And why economics?

Yongyuth: Because it tells you about the human conditions, it tells you about human wants and how do we go about to satisfy those wants, and how do we live with other people, because there is always limited resources; how do you share those resources, and how do you develop those resources? So, economics is an interesting subject. I refused to study it in my childhood because my uncle was such a big economist and I thought ‘Oh, I will never match him’, so I didn’t do this. There was even a scholarship for me; my uncle said I could sit at the scholarship exam, but I didn’t. I chose science.

Nerina: Is there somebody who inspired or inspires you in a special way?

Yongyuth: Well, I was just saying my uncle. My uncle was the longest serving governor of the Bank of Thailand, Dr. Puey Ungpakorn, and he really was responsible for the change of politics, as well, because he was the one who took up the call of democracy during a dictatorship and so on. I talked about him in the introduction to my book, and said he was a leading light for me.

Other heroes for me are Professor Paul Boyer, who was my mentor in University of California Los Angeles. He really started off my research career, and of course, my mother. My father died when I was very young, and my mother had very little education, and yet she brought up four kids – in fact five; she adopted one more. Five kids, with very little education, nut she was reading all the time. She was reading her books, and she managed to bring up five kids going to very good schools, just by being a tailor; she was so famous because she made such good dresses for very good prices.

So these are my heroes; my mother, my uncle, my teacher. Another teacher was Professor *23:14, foreign name, couldn’t find it*, who induced me into the world of science when I was just going on to University. I was a medical student, and he told me ‘You’re not suited for medicine, you’re more suited for science’, and I believed him.

Nerina: Sometimes we take the right path because of a teacher, but what is life about, in your opinion?

Yongyuth: I ask myself all the time. Sometimes it seems meaningless, you know? Although in Buddhism life is about going on from one to the next, to the next, to the next, until you reach Nirvana, the end of life as we now it. But for me, although I am a Buddhist nominally, I think my own life will just disappear, just like when I dream.

When I start to dream, it’s like a life starting. But when I wake up, the dream is gone, so that life is gone. So I think that when I die, my dream is over; it will disappear, I guess. Maybe it’s a pessimistic way of looking at things, but if there’s a good thing, it is that for the people who are still dreaming, part of what I did will be a legacy for them to go on later. But I will be finished.

Nerina: And where does your great passion come from?

Yongyuth: I often talk about passion. I think we need, it really enriches your life. It’s like a motor that drives you; you cannot go on without some kind of passion. I don’t know where the passion came from, but I think it’s something that is both inside you and also given to you from the outside.

I have been fortunate, perhaps by going to good schools and having a good family, so that really maintains my fire and my passion. I liked reading so much when I was young, so that gave me the fuel to go on with various things.

I’m passionate about science in general, not just chemistry. I’m passionate about it because it’s something that allows to go into all sorts of areas without fear; science gives you confidence to explore everything, and just science, but everything at all. That is the main source of my passion; it’s really the science that drives me. But as I said at the beginning, not just science, because this is just one area of human activity, and if you concentrate only in science, you can achieve something, but you will not be able to see the bigger world, and that’s a pity.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Yongyuth: Thank you.

Nerina: And thank you for listening, thank you for watching and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering, and see you next time again. Bye and ciao!

Biography:

Professor Dr. Yongyuth Yuthavong is a former Deputy Prime Minister and former Minister of Science and Technology, Thailand and an outstanding Thai scientist with a particular interest in the broad issues of public policies, especially those concerning the application of science and technology for development – as well as human development in general.

Dr. Yongyuth spent a long career at Mahidol University, conducting research and teaching. He was appointed Professor of Biochemistry in 1983 and was honored with the “Outstanding Scientist of Thailand” Award in 1984, from the Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Technology. During the same period, he was chosen as the Director of the National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) from 1985 until 1989.

Dr. Yongyuth became the first President of Thailand’s National Science & Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) from 1992 until 1998 and in 2004, he received the Nikkei Asia Prize for Science, Technology and Innovation from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan, for his outstanding work on antimalarial drug targets, as well as the prestigious “Person of the Year” Award from Thailand’s National Identity Board. Dr. Yongyuth served as the Minister of Science and Technology from 2006 to 2008, when The Nation newspaper named him one of “the 35 most influential Thais over the past 35 years”. Dr. Yongyuth has since returned to his research career with BIOTEC, where he now heads a research group working on the development of new antimalarials.

Learn more about Yongyuth's work:
www.researchgate.net/Yongyuth_Yuthavong

Clarissa Rios Rojas

Clarissa Rios Rojas
Molecular biologist, policymaking advisor
Biography:

Scientist who after finishing her bachelor in Biology in Peru (UNMSM) decided to look for new avenues of professional development. She did exchange studies in Finland at the University of Turku, got her master in Biomedicine at Karolinska Institutet University in Sweden, worked in a pharmaceutical company in Germany and later got a PhD in Molecular Biology in Australia at the University of Queensland.

While finishing the PhD, she started to feel the urge to contribute to the world with something else than only her scientific work at the laboratory. This feeling pushed her to create an organization called Ekpa’palek that empowers Latin-American young professionals through different free mentorship programs that align with the Sustainable Development Goals of reduction of inequalities, gender equality and education.

Encouraged by the impact these programs had on young professionals, she discovered the need for creating new local, regional, and international policies that could help to tackle global issues. Motivated by this, she applied and was selected to participate in numerous events (international conferences, forums, and workshops) in science policy, citizen engagement in policy relevant to science & innovation, science diplomacy, open science & education, science outreach and global governance in different countries (Argentina, Jordan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, India, Chile, Germany, Thailand and Morocco).

In 2017, she worked at the Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA) from the Ministry of Environment in Peru and since May 2018, she works at the EU Science Hub, also known as the Joint Research Center from the European Commission’s science and knowledge service where she provides scientific advice and support to EU policy. Also, as a member of the Global Young Academy, she works on initiatives related to science outreach, women empowerment and science advise.

Learn more about Clarissa's work:
http://www.ekpapalek.com
Connect with Clarissa:
facebook.com/cla.risa.54 twitter.com/Clarissajaz linkedin.com/clarissariosrojas instagram/being_a_scientist_is_cool
Empowering Latinos and filling the gap between science and society

What is the social purpose of science today? How are ethics and research linked in the modern world? What are the policies that keep scientific and social paths going in the same direction? Clarissa Rios answers these questions from her position as a molecular Biologist and policy maker at the European Commission, deriving from her experience in both the social and scientific aspects of research the core values of the purpose of science in favor of the smaller communities.

Founder of Ekpa’palek, an organization destined to offer academic help to Latin American students who want to broaden their horizons and stock up on the experience and advice from other professionals before entering their own fields, Clarissa expands on the need for science to hold a truly useful track of investment to help indigenous communities and developing countries through scientific research and the encouragement of young professionals to assist in these projects. The values of growth and development through inclusion and action make Ekpa’palek a unique vision for the young professionals who will contribute to wholesome communities, richer societies and a brighter future.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Clarissa Rios Rojas's Video here ◂

Nerina: Thank you, Clarissa, for joining me. Could you please introduce yourself?

Clarissa Rios: I am Clarissa Ríos Rojas, form Peru. I am a molecular biologist, and now I’m working in the interface of science and policy making, the European Commission in Italy and also, I’m the founder and director of Ekpa’palek, which is an organization that empowers Latin-American professionals.

Nerina: Could you tell us a little bit more about your position and your work right now?

Clarissa Rios: My project right now at the European Commission is to write recommendations for citizen engagement initiatives in the topic of social and ethical aspects of emerging technology, in this case, genomics and gene editing, and so on. So, for what I have found on my research so far, is that technology goes faster than policies, and sometimes it’s really hard to keep track of everything that is happening, and to implement the laws and the policies that need to be implemented in order to regulate science, as well.

So science, as we now, is research and innovation, but sometimes it goes to the next steps and becomes a start-up or a company that offers services that can be used for different reasons and by different types of people. I have seen right now that there are, for example, genetic testing companies offering a lot of ancestry testing and health testing, so it would be good to know who’s regulating these companies; are really experts the ones who are providing the information about your genes? What happens with your DNA once it is stored in their company? Is it in store forever or is it sold to another company? Can they trace it was your DNA?

These are things that are happening right now, and people don’t really know much about it. For example, genomics is also working at the interface with blockchain, so now we are having cryptocurrecy that is based on selling your DNA data, so what does that represent for business and society? Again, we have those ethical questions, but does it really help big companies to have more genetic data to have a better analysis of which diseases can come from different types of genes? There are many things that have to be evaluated, but it’s important to citizens to know what is happening, where it’s happening, and what is going to happen in their society if they accept it, or if they are consumers or become users of it.

Nerina: Why did you decide to take this new challenge?

Clarissa: I think that the in the European Commission, the Joined Research Center is the best place to learn about how scientists can contribute to society in terms of policy making, so I thought that this would be the best place to work and learn and contribute to, and I hope that this will be one of the first steps into a career and to a lot of work; I hope to use science-based evidence to create policies and help policy makers to better understand not only the citizens, but also the science behind every decision.

Nerina: Why is this relevant?

Clarissa: I think that the biggest problem that I see right now is that scientists are doing science just because; just because of curiosity and I now that’s a main drive that many of us had to become scientists, but I think we need to build places or spaces where we as scientists can speak with citizens. We can understand what are their needs, because I have seen during my time as a scientist that there are many projects that really don’t have any implications in solving anything at the moment; it’s just knowledge that is being generated with the hope that in the future is going to be used.

We can relocate not only the money, but the human capital, the PhD students that are being put into these projects, into something that society really needs. I think that we should have a priority table and see what the problems to see how we can fix the first hundred, instead of having fifty thousand projects and giving money to all of them and keep going.

I think that basic research is important, but I also think that basic research should be always tailored into fixing something, or producing some kind of technology. Without that, I think trust in science will never be achievable because citizens see this, citizens see their taxes are being used in projects that may never be published, that cannot be replicated, or that are not helping anything in their communities and local problems, and that just one side.

I also see that there is a problem with citizens not learning or trying to have some curiosity about science. I think they could interact more with scientists, see what they are doing, visit open days at universities, see where taxes are being used and have an opinion about it and learn from scientists, what they are producing, how they’re doing and use this scientific knowledge in order to make better decisions on the government they’re going to choose, about the political party they are going to vote for, what is this political party focusing on. Is it correct? Is it based on science, which is the most trustful thing that se have at the moment? Of course, it has its pitfalls, but it’s the best thing that we can work with.

The citizens should also think on how to improve science. If they don’t have faith in science, then tell us how we can improve it, how can science and society and citizens work together in order to make science better , achievable for everyone, and open in a way that everyone can understand it, and use it for the best of society and the environment, because sometimes we are just super anthropocentric and thinking about humans, but we are responsible, whether we want it or not, for all the species that are around us, and the ecosystems and the habitats we have, so I think that we should take our citizens’ role a little bit more responsibly.

Nerina: What would you suggest?

Clarissa: I think that’s why I was mentioning before that we should have these spaces where scientists can talk to other scientists, for example, about social science, as I talk about the ethics. I know that during university we have courses on ethics – animal ethics and human ethics -, but I think that we should have also courses with politics in science. Have courses where we bring politicians and scientist to understand how we’re both working together and making things better.

Other courses could be about scientists and citizens, and scientists and society, and create debate between them, answering questions form both sides, and trying to think how we can work together, because as you said, the theory of science in great, but who is doing the science? Us humans, with our imperfections, with our sometimes poor equipment, and with the limited knowledge that we have. I think it’s very important for scientists and citizens to acknowledge that scientists are not perfect; they are humans and make mistakes, and also the equipment and machines that they use make mistakes from time to time, but then having that as a premise to figure what we can do based on that, and then is when all these interactions with all the different groups take place, and then all three groups together can think about how science can be better, how can it have less errors and less mistakes, and how to bring all the traditional knowledge into it, as well as the ethics and the social aspects.

Sometimes we think that the problem has to be fixed by only one expert. That, for example, climate change has to be fixed by an environmentalist or a biologist, when in reality, problems are fixed by everyone. By economists, lawyers, citizens, biologists; it has to be fixed by everyone, because otherwise we are not creating a solution, we are just fixing a little patch, not the whole picture.

Nerina: You just mentioned traditional knowledge, and this is something that very often comes up when speaking with you. Why this interest in aboriginal culture?

Clarissa: Yes, well, my dad is from the jungle. Of course, he is part of an aboriginal community, but I guess that was my first encounter with aboriginal tribes and with people who are part that whole society. Also, when I was working with one of the agencies in the Ministry of Environment in Peru, one part of my job was to try to understand the narratives and how to bring the projects that the government had for these communities, how to make them learn, and how to learn from them what were their needs and priorities, and I think that all these encounters made me realize that they are not heard enough, their voices are not shared enough, their needs and their priorities are not communicated, and sometimes, with friends, I’ve heard them say things like “No, they should evolve like us, like the city people”, and I’ve been hurt by those comments, because I feel like our opinions are too superficial always, not just in these topic, but in many. It’s just something that has not has been thought through, you have not had an encounter with them, so how come you have a conscious and educated opinion about that?

For example, Ekpa’palek is a way to promote indigenous languages. Ekpa’palek comes from the Shiwilu language, form the Amazon in Peru, and it means to teach a little kid to take his first steps. Trying to translate everything in our programs on indigenous communities is a way to make it more accessible.

Nerina: You are the founder of Ekpa’palek. Can you tell us more about this organization?

Clarissa: We are an organization of around 45 to 50 people, and what we do is to offer programs for free to any Latinamerican students that want it. One of them is the professional mentorship, so we connect the students with professionals that are a little bit advanced in their careers so they can guide them, they can talk, they can tell them how to gain certain scholarships, but also about what’s out there. If I am a psychologist, if I am an economist, I want to know what’s happening in Australia, what’s happening in China, so that person can get inside information, so students in Latinamerica can shape their minds thinking about what’s next, and they should be studying now, or working on, or doing an internship with.

The second program is women empowerment. The first year, we were bringing new women from all over to schools; we had five professional women bringing their stories, bringing their pitfalls, the experiences they had been through and how they got where they are now. That worked for one year and then we had to stop it, so now we are focusing more on campaigns on line; we are doing the same, showing new women role models but in a visual way. We have engineers, economists, from different parts of the world that are Latinamerican women, and then they send a three minute video telling how they are there and why they decided on that career.

The third program will be the empowerment of indigenous languages, so basically we want our programs to reach everyone. We have started translating the articles on our blog into Quechua, which is a language that is spoken in Peru and Bolivia, and it’s a official language in Peru as well. Also, we have tree videos in Quechua, as well; we had one of our mentors make theses videos, telling how he went from a little town in the highlands of Peru to do his Master in France, and to study in Lima, Peru, as well. We are trying to promote translating everything that we are producing into different languages, not only Quechua.

Nerina: What motivated you to start this organization?

Clarissa: Well, because when I started my professional path, I was a bachelor student that really wanted to learn and to go more from theory to practice, and that was something that was not happening in Peru in terms of molecular biology. I think my motivation was to learn more, and I could do it with scholarships and people helping me take the next steps, as you mentioned, and then after ten years of doing my master and my PhD I realized that I was not the only one, and that the case that I had ten years ago where I didn’t have money to pursue studies, I didn’t have connections to create opportunities in professional development were still existing in Latin America, and we were at a disadvantage with the rest of the world.

So I thought about what I could do with this tools that I had gathered over the years, and one of them was my network. So I think it was really personal, because it was not that I was trying to fix something that happens somewhere else to some other people, but I was trying to help someone like me at this moment, someone who didn’t have opportunities, didn’t have the network, didn’t have ideas, or someone from outside to talk to and just get inspired.

Nerina: How did you become what you are now?

Clarissa: I studied Biology and Genetics in Peru; I was very interested and curious about science. Then I went to Finland for exchange studies, and I did a Master in Biomedicine and Neuroscience, which I was also completely in love with, specifying different types of neurons in the brain, and then I decided to move to Australia to do my PhD in sex development; how the sperm cells and the egg cells develop.

When I was finishing my PhD was when I decided to create Ekpa’palek, this organization that empowers Latinamerican professionals. And then, looking at the results and the people that we were helping, I started to realize that a nes passion was growing inside myself, and then I decided to leave the lab where I was doing experiments and start to communicate with citizens and policy makers and start to find a way where I could use my scientific background and I could help society in a different way, and that way is creating better policies for everyone. Now it’s in the European Union, but later I hope it will be in Latinamerica and in Peru.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that you have learned?

Clarissa: I started this project thinking that I would help many people, but I’m being helped as well. I’m learning so much, I’m meeting so many people, we are doing so many nice projects outside Ekpa’palek as well. This has also motivated me to change my career; as I said, I was working in the lab as a scientist, and the Ekpa’palek happened, and then I started to pursue new paths within myself that make me happy, so what I would recommend to anyone is that if you always think that there is a problem and you want to fix it, try to do it with one friend, and it may grow and it may not, but you have the satisfaction to learn from it.

Nerina: What is your vision for Ekpa’palek?

Clarissa: When I created Ekpa’palek, it was only for Latinamericans, but in my wild dreams we have Ekpa’palek Asia and Ekpa’palek Africa interacting with each other. But that is also based on the idea of the «brain drain» – I think that’s what they call it in English -, when professionals and all the talent goes from the south to the north and then never go back, or just a few of them. So I thought it would be very interesting to have a blog of developing countries in the south, exchanging professionals, exchanging knowledge, exchanging what we already know how to do best, and empower each other, because the south also need to keep growing, to keep learning, and it would be really good to create these alliances between universities, student associations, and governments, and think about what are the good things and benefits that can come from it.

Of course, going to the north and having the technology to learn is really good, but I think the next step on that path could be to start doing these collaborations.

Nerina: Is there something you believe we should think more about?

Clarissa: I would just like to point out that we are creating so much technology, and these technologies are mostly created in developed countries, and are mostly created to fix and find solutions for local problems, so that means that the problem that, for example, indigenous communities have will never be solved by the technology that we are creating now, and I think they would benefit so much from that.

Sometimes we are talking about gene editing and blockchain, and how does that benefit indigenous communities? They are people who also have struggles and many local problems that they would like to solve; how good would it be if used these technologies to find solutions for those problems as well? So that would be my contribution, to make people think about technology is being biased towards certain problems, certain “local” problems, and not really towards developing countries and indigenous communities.

Nerina: And what is the relation between science and traditional knowledge, in your opinion?

Clarissa: It has always been known about, this traditional knowledge. Sometimes it is treated with respect, and sometimes it’s treated like it’s not science. It’s very curious that you ask me this, because in my group, one of the projects is about mapping arctic communities, so they are mapping every community that is Finland, Norway, Iceland, U.S, Canada, and besides doing the mapping, they are gathering the information that they have in the terms of climate change. They’re voices about climate change and how that’s impacting them in the first place because they are close to the first places where the impact is being observed, and what they have to say about.

I think that nowadays it is taken more seriously, and I’m glad to see that the European Commission, for example, is also taking them seriously and writing reports about it, having their voices heard and their opinions shared with policy makers and with people in the European Union.

I’ve seen this happening in Europe, but I have not seen it in Latinamerica. However, when I was working at the agency of the Ministry of Environment, I could see that the interaction between the experts, the biologists, the chemists was really open when they were informing them about what was happening, I think the efforts are becoming more and more important, and in order to listen from them as well, not just coming and giving a lecture about what is going to happen and what they need to know, but also empowering them in teaching them how to use equipment to measure pollution, how to analyze data so they can have their own data analyzed. Also, I heard that in Bolivia, if you want to be part of the government, you have to speak one of the indigenous languages, and I think that’s important, because, for example, for these types of jobs you can speak in Spanish and then you have a translator, but how would it be if you could speak to them in Quechua, in Aymara, and hear them, so they also feel more comfortable in sharing their ideas in their own language.

I think languages are a very powerful thing. I am going to learn more about different types of languages because I think that is the way to really go into a deeper connection with someone, especially if you’re working in this field, and understand what they want to see in their environment, what they want to contribute to the government, for example, in terms of analyzing the data, letting them know when they see a case of contamination, on the river, on the cause, etc.

Nerina: Do you have a wish or a dream?

Clarissa: Yes. I really dream sometimes that there is a society that is respectful of everyone, but more than anything, they have empathy. Everyone in this society has empathy that makes them really feel how the other person would feel in every situation, not only in how we interact as friends, but in different geographical parts. How these people may feel in different social classes; how these people must feel, what can I do to help this person. I think empathy should be the key factor in this society that I envision.

I think the society that I dream of in one where there is the feeling of connection and belonging with every single part of this habitat; not only humans, but plants, insects, birds, the rivers – I mean, the water we drink comes from the river -, so I think that connection is missing sometimes. We don’t feel like we belong or that we are part of something bigger that needs us to take care of it and to contribute to keep it going in a healthy way, so I think if that could be spread into all citizens and make them feel responsible for each other, for other species, for the soil, for the river, for the climate, it would be my second wish. That feeling of belonging and connection.

Nerina: What was the most beautiful day, and what was the mist awful one?

Clarissa: I think the most beautiful day for me is just being with my family having lunch together. It is something that I haven’t had for many years as a daily thing. I did a little bit when I finished my PhD; I could go back and leave again for six months back in Peru with my family, so I think my most warm and beautiful feeling is to have just that: my mom, my dad, my brother, now my partner as well. Laughing, talking about what happened during the day, maybe complaining about something that happened at university or at our jobs, just sharing and being together in a peaceful, quiet place.

Maybe the most horrible moment has been when sometimes I feel that I’m in a place where there is just too much horror, too much darkness, that all the good things really don’t compensate for the bad things, and that it’s not a nice world. Sometimes I feel like this world is the hell of someone else, or is the imagination of how hell should be, because I see so many awful things, so much suffering, even though I’m not experiencing it myself. I’m not a someone that has been a sex slave, or someone that has been raped, or someone who wakes up with bombs ten meters from them, but I still feel like it could be me, I feel people don’t deserve to grow in an environment like that; they didn’t ask to be born in this world.

I think those have been the hardest moments in my life; just to be overwhelmed by sorrow, by sadness, and to think that there is really nothing that we can do to change it, I’ve had those times as well. I think activists are always in that twilight, where you think that everything can get better if you do something, but you’re also on the other side where you think that everything is horrible and terrible and too much to take in.

Nerina: And what brings you up?

Clarissa: What brings me up is to see people doing amazing things. Because I’m doing Ekpa’palek, for example, I’m in touch with different organizations and meet people that are always doing something, and I see them and I think that there is hope.

There are a lot of amazing people doing things for animals, for the environment, for other humans, and I thin, Yes, things can change. At some point.

Nerina: What is life about, Clarissa?

Clarissa: I think life is about learning, experiencing all the feelings; sadness is part of and part of what we are as humans. I think we should be grateful that we can experience it, although it’s not a nice thing, but sometimes good things come out of it. Sometimes, not always.

It’s about meeting other people; trying to be, as Maya Angelou said, a rainbow in someone else’s cloud, and just to try and make other people happy, because sometimes you’re sad and the other can make you happy. Sometime the other person is sad and you can make them happy.

It’s just about trying to enjoy what we have. Talking as a biologist, we have theses fabulous senses of touch, smelling, seeing. It’s enjoying theses things that we can give ourselves. About learning more about what’s happening in all parts of the world, to see documentaries about the life of animals and how they interact; it’s absolutely beautiful.

I think those are pleasures that even if you cannot travel, you can see it and sort of experience it from afar, and I those are the things that bring me happiness and joy, besides being with my family and friends, and also things like reading books and entering the mind of someone else that you never met but they wrote a book and let you go inside their minds for a little bit and have a taste of it. Like music; humans make music and it’s beautiful, so I think that if we focus on those things, that is what life is, or what life should be.

Nerina: Thank you so much, Clarissa, for this conversation.

Clarissa: Thank you, Nerina.

Nerina: And thank you for listening, thank you for watching and thank you for sharing. Keep wondering and see you next time again. Goodbye and ciao.

Biography:

Scientist who after finishing her bachelor in Biology in Peru (UNMSM) decided to look for new avenues of professional development. She did exchange studies in Finland at the University of Turku, got her master in Biomedicine at Karolinska Institutet University in Sweden, worked in a pharmaceutical company in Germany and later got a PhD in Molecular Biology in Australia at the University of Queensland.

While finishing the PhD, she started to feel the urge to contribute to the world with something else than only her scientific work at the laboratory. This feeling pushed her to create an organization called Ekpa’palek that empowers Latin-American young professionals through different free mentorship programs that align with the Sustainable Development Goals of reduction of inequalities, gender equality and education.

Encouraged by the impact these programs had on young professionals, she discovered the need for creating new local, regional, and international policies that could help to tackle global issues. Motivated by this, she applied and was selected to participate in numerous events (international conferences, forums, and workshops) in science policy, citizen engagement in policy relevant to science & innovation, science diplomacy, open science & education, science outreach and global governance in different countries (Argentina, Jordan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, India, Chile, Germany, Thailand and Morocco).

In 2017, she worked at the Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA) from the Ministry of Environment in Peru and since May 2018, she works at the EU Science Hub, also known as the Joint Research Center from the European Commission’s science and knowledge service where she provides scientific advice and support to EU policy. Also, as a member of the Global Young Academy, she works on initiatives related to science outreach, women empowerment and science advise.

Learn more about Clarissa's work:
http://www.ekpapalek.com
Connect with Clarissa:
facebook.com/cla.risa.54 twitter.com/Clarissajaz linkedin.com/clarissariosrojas instagram/being_a_scientist_is_cool

Elena Gerebizza

Elena Gerebizza
Researcher and Campaigner
Biography:

Energy and climate campaigner for Re:Common, a non-profit, public campaign membership-based organization based in Rome, Italy.

Learn more about Elena's work:
https://www.recommon.org
Connect with Elena:
https://twitter.com/elegere
The Trans Adriatic Pipeline: between myth and reality

What are the most environmentally impacting structures in the world right now? Who runs them? What can you do to stop them?
Elena Gerebizza, from Italian organization Re:Common, tells us about the activist movements organized around stopping some of the most environmentally damaging structures taking place at this very moment, and how power and financial monopolies can end up destroying the fragile ecosystems of small town communities across Europe.

With a focus on the social consequences of big companies taking their toll on local European economy, Elena remarks on the importance of sticking together through strategic organization in order to help and improve the lives of many others affected by the finance oriented, and often corrupted, decision making that we see in our countries, our governments, and our everyday life.

Individuals reaching out to one another to secure a sustainable future is the way forward to a society in which everyone’s interests are safe, and Elena tells us how we can achieve that through awareness and collaboration.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Elena Gerebizza's Video here ◂

Elena Gerebizza: My name is Elena Gerebizza. I work for an Italian organization called Re:Common. I’m a researcher and campaigner.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you, Elena, for joining me. Could you tell me a little bit about Re:Common?

Elena: Re:Common is a collective based in Rome, in Italy, and we do public campaigning and investigation on megaprojects, in particular, mega infrastructures that receive public financing in different forms, from loans, from public financial institutions to guarantees, and we look into dodgy aspects related to mega infrastructure, including corruption and misuse of public funding in every different form, and we do it in solidarity with the communities who are on the frontline opposing megaprojects.

Nerina Finetto: One of the biggest projects you are involved in is the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline. Could you tell me more about it?

Elena: We’ve been working on it since 2012, 2013, so from the very early days. The Trans Adriatic Pipeline is a gas pipeline which Europe included in the list of so-called Projects of Common Interest, for the European Commission. Since then, the project received a massive support from the European Institutions, as well as from the Italian Government; this is the main reason why we started to look at it. The Trans Adriatic Pipeline is a section of a longer gas corridor, which is called the Southern Gas Corridor; it is a pipeline which starts in Azerbaijan and goes across six different countries, so Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Albania and finally, Italy. It is about 3500km long, and as we see, it’s basically crossing the life of hundreds of communities with massive environmental and human rights implications.

Nerina Finetto: One of the aspects you have been researching on is the political one, right?

Elena: The Trans Adriatic Pipeline was portrayed from the very early days as a project that should help Europe to build an independence from Russia. So really, a project that should help the energy security of Europe; this is how the Commission was talking about it, and it should help diversification. In fact, we realized from the very beginning that the very strong political connotation that the project was given, in fact was probably the lead motivation for it, because we couldn’t find any economic and financial sustainably in the project, and we couldn’t also see how this energy diversification and energy security would actually materialize. In fact, through the different years of campaigning, we realized this is not coming only from Civic Societies organizations, but it’s coming from economic and financial analysts and experts in energy matters. We realized that the resources of Azerbaijan are much smaller than what the country declared, and finally last year, it came out that a part of the supply gas that would transit through the Southern Gas Corridor will actually come from Russia, so the point of spending about 45billion euros to build this massive infrastructure, portraying it as something that will help Europe to diversify, is a scam for European tax payers, at the end, and it’s also providing a massive political support to governments like Azerbaijan and Turkey, which, today, it’s clear that are authoritarian regimes.

So, we seek the incredibly problematic, from the political to those from an economic and financial point of view. Part of our campaigning was about exposing how much public resources were drained by such a project, which instead could have been used in many other different ways, even more now after the Paris agreement was signed and so the project is just nonsense from the climate point of view, and it’s really not matching with the commitments that Europe and the different governments involved in the construction have taken in Paris. We really don’t see how and why Europe is still so much supportive of this project.

Nerina Finetto: What are the stakeholders here? Who is building the pipeline and who is paying for it?

Elena: So, the main proponents of the gas pipeline are SOCAR, the National Oil and Gas Company of Azerbaijan, together with BP, British Petroleum, one of the main oil corporations. Then, there are smaller shareholders, or let’s say other shareholders, that came in a later stage, including Snam, the Italian gas distribution company, Enagas, Fluxys, and the Swiss company Axpo, who had a key role in the very early days of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, because it was actually the company that designed the project before it was then connected to the rest of the Southern Gas Corridor.

Who’s going to pay for it? The project is being portrayed as a private sector project. However we have seen that, for instance, Albania, Greece and also Turkey had to sign host government agreements with the consortium that is building the pipeline – TANAP in Turkey and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline AG in Italy, Albania and Greece -, and in the host government agreement it clearly said that the governments are ready to give a public guarantee for the financing of the project. So that means that if the consortium is, for instance, getting some loans from private banks and from public financial institutions the hosting governments the hosting government will provide a public guarantee, and that is a mechanism that translates a debt from a private to private into a public one, so it means that if anything goes wrong, it’s going to be the citizens of Albania, Greece and Turkey who are going to pay.

The other element is that it was declared in a number of public occasions that the consortium is aiming to get about one third of the funding from public financial institutions; that means the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, but also the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Investment Bank, all the variety of public financial intuitions. So one third of 45 billion is a huge lot of money and again, even the public part of the funding should come with a public guarantee from the government or from the commission. The rest of the money may come from equity or from loans from private banks, but again, also the private banks are looking for a coverage of risk, so at the end of the day, the majority of it will be covered by public money in different forms.

Nerina Finetto: And the consortium also received huge loans from the European Investment Bank, right?

Elena: Yeah, actually, the European Investment Bank provided the biggest loan ever in the history of the bank, so since it was set up as the financial institution of Europe, and also quite extraordinary is that it was given to a company registered in Switzerland, so outside the European Union, formally, which of course is interesting form the tax angle of the story. Why the consortium is registered in Switzerland? Also from the transparency point of view, because as we know, Switzerland is not in the black list of tax havens, formally, but it’s still a country where access to information concerning companies registered in Switzerland is quite limited. So, actually a 1.5billion loan was given to the Trans Adriatic Pipeline and now the loan by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development is being discussed. The loan is 500million, but it will be combined with another 700million coming from several private banks, which, again, are matching with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in order to get the coverage of the risk connected to the loans.

It’s a massive amount of public money and the question mark is on how these banks will be actually able to the do the due diligence and to make so that the consortium will respect the environmental and social standards, but also the transparency and, eventually, the corruption angle is quite relevant considering, for instance, the massive scandal that was everywhere on the media last year, called the Azerbaijani Laundromat, so we know that the players involved are players of this kind, and we are really questioning if the European institutions are actually able to monitor how the money will be spent to avoid the human rights violations and environmental violations.

Nerina Finetto: Elena, could you please summarize shortly what this scandal is about?

Elena: So the Azerbaijani Laundromat was out on the media around October 2017. It was a leak, eventually, from one of the banks involved in a massive money laundering scheme where you had three different companies, or maybe even more, from Azerbaijan, who actually channeled across Europe about 2billion euros between 2012 and 2014; money which was then tracked by the authorities. There is an investigation, an internal investigation to Danske Bank, who was actually the bank involved in the money laundering factor; there is another investigation at the Council of Europe, and maybe the most important one is an anti-corruption and money laundering investigation by the public authorities in Italy. So the scheme was involving a number of politician, but also journalists and entrepreneurs in Europe who received huge amounts of money, mainly from Azerbaijan, and according to the public prosecutor in Italy, one of the beneficiaries was a former member of Parliament, Luca Volonté, who is still under trial in Milan, and the accusation for him is for international corruption and money laundering. Now the trial is still ongoing, the corruption accusation was appealed; we don’t know how it will conclude, but the key element is if people are asking themselves why this money was given.

Actually between 2012 and 2014, Azerbaijan was moving a massive political and communicational machine inside Europe to get recognition as a democratic country, which could become a key economic partner of Europe, mainly in the sector of energy. So there was a report on human rights violations in Azerbaijan, who was discussed at the Council of Europe, and Luca Volonté was the head of the European People’s Party at the time, so the accusation is that he was actually receiving the money in order to convince the entire political patty across Europe to vote against the report, and this is what actually happened. The report didn’t pass through the Council of Europe, and Azerbaijan was recognized as a democracy a couple of months after the Southern Gas Corridor became project of common interest for Europe. So, we think that there is a lo that should be looked at about how the decision was taken by European institutions, and we also think that it’s quite tricky for Europe actually choose a new authoritarian regime as a key energy partner after we have seen how the situation became very complex with Russia, so we don’t see a lot of a difference between Azerbaijan and Russia in this specific context.

Nerina Finetto: And it is also pretty interesting that Germany gave money to Turkey to build the pipeline in Turkey. How do you see it?

Elena: All of this was, of course, taking place at the same time as the war in Syria escalated. All the dynamic between Turkey and Russia and the EU, the refugee issue in Turkey, everything was happening at the same time and within that, the energy agreements and the Southern Gas Corridor as the biggest energy infrastructure that Europe is building at this moment, are overlapping with the other discussions, which is making it even more serious as a matter for European citizens, because we are actually bargaining human rights on one side, refugees and the new gas contracts, all on the same table.

Nerina Finetto: And from an energy point of view, does this pipeline make sense?

Elena: No, not in my opinion, and not in the opinion of many economic, financial and energy specialists. If you compare the cost of the pipeline and the quantity of gas that they’re claiming to transport, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s really too expensive. But at the end of the day, the real question is, do we need this gas? So the pipeline is expensive, it’s supporting authoritarian regimes, do we actually need the gas? The answer in ‘no, we don’t need ot’. We don’t need it because Europe has enough infrastructure in Europe already existing; we don’t need because the gas at the end of the day will very likely come from Russia, and we already have pipelines connecting Europe to Russia, and the energy path that Europe should follow for the future is rather a path where the consumption of gas should decrease. It has been decreasing in the last year, so if we really want to build an independence from controversial partners around Europe, then we should look into renewable sources and a completely different system where, eventually, communities may also be taking responsibility and control of the energy produced on their territories. So, it’s a completely different model what we should look at for the future if sustainability is the horizon that we are looking at, and also is the horizon is an horizon of democracy and participation of communities in the decision making. We don’t agree with those that portray gas as a bridge fuel for the future, simply because the time that we have to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels is quite limited. I mean, all the scientific studies are saying we are already consuming too much fossil fuels and we should rather reduce it and not build a new infrastructure.

If the Southern Gas Corridor is completed and is running at full capacity, we will all be consuming that gas for the next fifty years, and this is just completely unsustainable from a climate point of view, but also our main concern is rather on the democracy implications that this will have, as it will be basically supporting existing authoritarian regimes for the next fifty years, and this is, of course, very problematic, and if the pipeline starts to generate revenues, where will the money go at the end of the day? Will it go to the public coffers and will it be used also for the benefit of the people of Turkey, of Azerbaijan, and of the different countries involved, or will it go into the private pockets of the existing regimes and their entourage? This is a question that is not being addressed, and we think that the way that Europe is approaching it is not solid enough.

Nerina Finetto: And how about the environmental impact of the pipeline?

Elena: The pipeline you should imagine as not only a gas pipe underground, but you should imagine it as a corridor. So in Turkey, this is kilometers wide, and that means that not only a pipeline will be built, but we’re talking about 2,000km for something like 6 to 8km wide. It’s a huge section of the territory, so everyone who is living on that territory, its own interests and its own rights, are being put on a secondary level compared to the investment agreement that the government of Turkey signed. It’s very difficult, of course, to engage with communities who are opposing the pipeline in Turkey, and it’s very dangerous in Turkey today and in the last few years to be publicly against such a project, because the project is portrayed as a project of national interest, so it means being against the government.

The same thing is happening in Greece and in Albania; in Greece the pipeline is going across the most fertile area of northern Greece; farmers are on the frontline, in the region of Kavala and they are seeing the frontline today. So, since the construction started, they have been seen abuses and violations of their property by the companies, so they literally blocked the construction. There hasn’t been a proper assessment of their demands, neither from the government of Greece or from the European financial institutions involved, and we think that this really critical and, somehow, it’s a challenge to the European legislation on public participation and the environment, so the Orus Convention and every European law that should guarantee public participation are really at stake in this moment.

In Albania, the internal political situation is also very difficult. We talk about communities in the northernmost parts of the country which basically are about to lose everything. It’s farmers communities who live off farming and they may have some fruit trees and olive growths, and this is not for big business, it’s small land for basic sustainability of the family, so when this people are losing their land, you can compensate them for the actual value of the land, but the point is, what will those families survive from in the coming years? And this is not being addressed properly, we think.

If we arrive in Italy, the resistance is very strong. Since 2012, we have seen a popular opposition movement, really made of families, of mothers, of grandmothers, of youth and elderly, everyone together opposing the pipeline. The first thing is because of the environmental impacts, of course; we talk about an area of Italy which is having the most pristine beaches, and the sea is the main resource they have. All the economy is rooted on small scale tourism; it’s a community of farmers, they have olive growths and just basic agriculture, and for these communities, the pipeline is also representing an economic and industrial model, which is completely clashing from the economy they are living from today, and also from their idea of future, so it is really about the future, the future generations, and also protecting a healthy environment for them.

Beside the pipeline in Melendugno and actually in the middle of four different communities, the project is also about building gas pressurizing stations, which is like – you can imagine like a turbo gas power plant right in the middle of communities. It’s going to be polluting; the company can say whatever they want, but it’s really about burning gas right there, but also it will have a potential risk of explosion. We have seen, not long ago, a similar plant exploding in Austria. That one was in the middle of nowhere, luckily, so there were no humans hurt and no communities live next to it, but in Melendugno, the first houses are at less than 500m from the actual plant, so people are really afraid of their security on top of everything else, and this is just to give you the sense of why people are opposing the pipeline so fiercely. They are really putting themselves between the so called ‘construction site’, which is basically the land where they live, and the machines form the company.

So last year, we have seen a very strong resistance form the people, but also very strong repression the state, who sent hundreds of policemen and army on the spot to defend the interest of the company, and we have seen a massive democracy issue there, with local authorities taking the sides of the communities, and the state with the police taking the side of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline consortium.

Nerina Finetto: And the pipeline is going to be also underwater. Is this an issue?

Elena: The community of Melendugno, from the very early days, has set up a commission of experts, so they have screened rhe project from page one to page two thousand, and the way that the company’s portraying this undersea pipeline, from their point of view, is just impossible to do. They claim that there will be no damage on the beach, and that there will be no damage on the sea. They’re trying to do something really challenging in an area where the soil is very fragile; the coast is not made of hard rocks, it’s sand and a very fragile type of rock which is continually being eroded by the sea, so it’s a very peculiar area.

By the way, it’s also a protective area; there are several protective areas on land and in the sea. People simply don’t believe that there will be no damage and that they can continue to go on the beach just on top of the gas pipeline, which is what the company is saying. The community really informed itself through the years; there have been so many meetings with experts and with people really explaining the project to the residents, and now people feel empowered and they know simply that what the company is claiming they will do is just not going to help them, and so they are simply afraid that once the project starts, then they will have to live with a completely destroyed environment and with damages that will be irreversible forever, so it is really about the future of the community and protecting the environment as it is, but also deciding about the future. I mean, do we think that the community should have the right to decide about their future? They think they want to help that right, so they are reclaiming the right to decide about what should be done or what shouldn’t be done in their community. I think it’s really a strong cash of the democratic institutions of the state with the local authorities claiming the right to decide, and the central government basically giving everything in the hands of the company.

Nerina Finetto: And now we have also a new political situation in Italy, because the newly elected environmental minister is taking a new approach to the pipeline. Is it correct?

Elena: In Italy, we had elections in March. Finally. a new government is taking shape, and the first declaration of the environment minister is that the Trans Adriatic Pipeline is a pointless project, so it doesn’t make any sense for Italy. He’s looking into the environmental import assessment, and he claimed that they may reopen the process. So basically, the minister declared that something may have been wrong with the authorization of the pipeline; we, of course, now want to see the minister taking steps, so we want to see if the project is pointless, will the new government continue to support it or not? And this is a very strong political issue, so the communities and the popular movement have their demands, they are very clear, so we will see now in the coming weeks is the government will be consistent with the first declarations.

Nerina Finetto: What is your call to action?

Elena: We think that the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, and also the Southern Gas Corridor, is a project that everyone in Europe should be concerned about. It has to do with the future of Europe. We think that the communities in Italy, but also the communities in Turkey, or in Albania, in Greece, which have probably a political context that make it more difficult for them to respond, we’d like a popular resistance. These communities are in the frontline, but what they are defending is also our future, and I think that the support should be shown in a variety of ways. Support and solidarity from everyone across Europe. So one point is to understand who are all the different actors that are taking direct benefit form the construction of the pipeline, and to understand that what is being portrayed as our general interest, like energy security or independence from Russia, actually is just false. I mean, it’s really only political talks, but it is nothing to do with the reality that is behind this project.

I think if we all agree that we don’t need this gas, and if we all agree that the construction of the pipeline is hiding economic and financial interest that are rather personal and have nothing to do with the collective benefit of Europe, then we should just take a stand and decide on which side do we want to be.

Nerina Finetto: Where do you get you motivation from?

Elena: My motivation is really the motivation of someone who has the opportunity to be on the ground with the people who are on the frontline, so I do my investigation, but also I meet the people, I see the action impacts, I see the environmental and the social impacts, but also I talk with the people and I realize that what they want and the legislative framework that should protect them is actually somehow not working, like all the words about democracy and human rights, they just don’t match with what actually happenes on the ground.

When the interest is so high, the more we talk about projects of strategic interest for Europe, the more we realize that the voices or those on the ground are not being heard, and there is really a vacancy of democracy in Europe that has to do with that. So when the space is being restricted, when violence is being used, when the state is repressive towards the community and is not listening anymore, we think thet there is a problem, and when all of this is happening in the name of private interest, we realize that more and more it has to do with something that really is beyond what is the democratic structure of our country, and we think it should be exposed. So my motivation comes, I think, from the need of justice, and of seeing justice really being addressed, somehow.

I think we have to force the so called democratic institutions to take the stand of those that stand below, the normal people living everyday’s life, and I think also about questioning these new public-private combo that we see, where the public and private are basically all together, and so we see the State defending multinationals or big industrial and financial interests, but not in the name of the people. So, I think there is really the need to make clarity, and to take more and more concrete examples out there so that everyone can also have an informed opinion about what is going on, and whether this is really the place where we want to be. Are these are the rules that we think are the right rules, and is the State is still representing the interest of the communities when such things happen.

Nerina Finetto: What needs to be done?

Elena: I think that we need to be more and more responsible of our lives, and we need to take the responsibility of taking care of the place where we live and the people we live with. More and more we need to feel that we are part of a community, and that as a community we may be able to define what we want for our future. So it’s not the individual human being that decides, but it should be more and more the space of our community who decides and who is also able to take care of itself as the State is jut not able to do anymore. So in the places where people feel like they are forgotten by the state, I think that the challenge is to reorganize somehow and start to take the responsibility of taking care of each other, which includes the people, but also the environment, It includes also the type of economic activities that we think should take place in the place where we live if we want it to be sustainable in the longer future.

Nerina Finetto: What kind of society do you dream of?

Elena: I think this is the society that I dream of. It’s a society where people are able to take care of themselves and of each other, and where they feel that collaborating with each other is probably the best way to foresee a future. So I imagine a future where imagines are real communities of individuals that feel close one to the other and are able together to decide what they need and how to achieve it. I imagine that if we are able to be open and collaborative, we should be able to also redefine our future in a way that is sustainable for the planet and for ourselves.

Nerina Finetto: Do you have a dream, Elena?

Elena: A personal-? I think this is my dream, at the end. I mean, it’s a dream that I see. It’s not a fantasy, because I know people and I’m probably part of communities that are in the making, and I think that a lot of the resistance I’ve seen is also containing in themselves the seeds of the new ‘Other Worlds’, like the Latin-Americans like to call them. But our communities, by questioning an economic model, they also start to question how a society functions, and they are rediscovering a collective way of doing things, which is like aware of power as a big issue, and so they try to address it on one side, but they are also aware that being collaborative and able to do things together, including talking together to discuss and have different opinions, is a resource and not a problem. I think this is the way forward.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you so much for this conversation, Elena.

Elena: Thank you!

Nerina Finetto: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and thank you for sharing. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any suggestion. Keep wondering, and see you next time again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Energy and climate campaigner for Re:Common, a non-profit, public campaign membership-based organization based in Rome, Italy.

Learn more about Elena's work:
https://www.recommon.org
Connect with Elena:
https://twitter.com/elegere

Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Philosopher
Biography:

Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he took his Ph.D (Doctorat d’État) in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). His field of research includes Boolean algebra of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.

He is the author of Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989) (a book on Boolean algebra), Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar, Codesria, 2011), African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011), The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Dakar, Codesria, 2016), Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018).

His book, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011) is forthcoming in an English version to be published by Fordham University Press. That book was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year professor, Diagne received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work.

Professor Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy, and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth-century French philosophy.

Learn more about Souleymane's work:
http://cloudconversations.com
Connect with Souleymane:
facebook.com/souleymane.diagne
A passion for philosophy, science and society

What does it mean to be a philosopher in the modern day? Does philosophy still offer answers to todays’ most pressing issues, or does it belong to the questions of the past? What can philosophy teach us that we don’t already know?

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Senegalese modern-day philosopher that is here to answer these questions and more. With an extensive academic career that encompasses African literature, History of Philosophy and Francophone Studies across three continents, Souleyman offers a unique point of view on the history of Philosophy in today’s beliefs, actions and ideas, its influence across different cultures, and the decolonization of philosophical concepts.

A strong supporter of doing good in your own sphere before taking on the world, Souleymane believes that human progress goes beyond individual convictions, instead residing in the common forces that move us towards the greater, brighter goal of a shared human experience that pays no mind to religious, national or ethnic fragmentations.
Watch our interview to better understand today’s relationship between philosophy and religion, the importance of both in creating a better world for younger people, and how the ideas of the past have been revolutionized to provide a clearer reflection of today’s philosophical and spiritual needs.

Watch the trailer:
Watch the video:
Listen to the Audiofile here:
Read the transcript of Souleymane Bachir Diagne's Video here ◂

Souleymane: My name is Souleymane. Souleymane Bachir Diagne. I’m a Senegalese philosopher. I’ve taught twenty years in Senegal, after finishing my higher education in France, and in 2002, I crossed the Atlantic again and went to the United States, where I taught Philosophy, first at Northwestern University in the suburbs of Chicago, and then now, I live in New York, where I teach Philosophy and Francophone studies at Columbia University.

Nerina: Thank you for your time and great to speak with you. How did you get into philosophy?

Souleymane: That’s a really good question, because there is some chance, always, in the choices we make. When I finished high school and when I first traveled out of Dakar, in my country Senegal, and went to France to study, I was hesitating between two different paths; one of them would have made me an engineer by now, because I was admitted in a school of Engineering named INSA – Intitut National des Sciences Apliquées -, which was in Lyon, and I also was admitted to go to what is known in the French system as classe préparatoire, these elite paths where students prepare for entrance into école normale supérieure, the system of Grandes Écoles, as it is known in France. The first choice would have meant becoming an engineer, the second choice would have meant becoming a philosopher, and I decided for Philosophy after a while. It took me a while to make that decision, and now I’m very happy I made that decision; that was really what my life was about, being passionate, having feeling this passion for Philosophy, reading texts that I loved, explaining them and writing somehow from them in doing research in the field I had chosen.

Nerina: You had to choose between two completely different paths. What is the relationship between science and philosophy, in your opinion?

Souleymane: What I do is, in fact, not separate them, so the reason why I do not ask myself what is the difference between the two is that I do not separate them in the first place.

Let me give you an example, a precise example of my own work. As I said, I started working in the field of logic, history of logic and mathematical logic, and the author I worked on, George Boole, the British logician and mathematician, who actually invented our binary system, the 0 and 1 that we use in the language of our computers, was an invention of Boole. Something that people do not know is that his project was philosophical in the first place; he wanted to make Aristotelian logic more efficient by using the language of Algebra, and in so doing, he created the scientific object that would be called the Algebra of Boole and that we are using in our computers. So this interpenetration, I would call it, this interaction between science and philosophy is very important, so this is why I believe that the Humanities and the so called ‘Exact Sciences’ should never be separated. After all, it is one human mind which needs, at once, scientific procedures and artistic and humanistic values, and these should be together.

Nerina: What does it mean, being a philosopher in the 21st century?

Souleymane: It’s complicated, what does it mean to be a philosopher? Well, let me answer that question by letting you know what my experience was, and I said I was always between science and philosophy, mathematics and philosophy. The way in which I reconcile those two passions that I had, was when I finished, when I was going to choose a topic for my dissertation in Philosophy to work in the field of Algebra, of Logic, so I wrote a dissertation and my first two books, the first two books that I published, were both in the field of algebra, of logic, so that’s one way of answering your question, to be a philosopher may mean to be a philosopher of science, a historian of science, which was what a did.

And then I went back home, I went back to Senegal, and of course I was going to teach philosophy. My goal, going back home, was to create in the Department of Philosophy in Dakar, a strong curriculum in History, Philosophy of Science, Sociology of Science, because that was my fundamental training, and I did that, I created that curriculum back home. But then, at the same time, you had all the debates going on, and that is what it means to be a philosopher; you cannot be a philosopher in the same way you are a natural scientist or a physicist, etc, etc; which means that you pay attention to what is going on. Your thinking is also one way of intervening; you intervene in the public square, in some respects, or at least something of the debates going on around you find an echo in your thinking. So I could not just decide that ‘Ok, I’m a specialist in philosophy of science, this is what I’m going to do’. I had to be part of the debates that were taking place at that time.
And so one aspect was the question of philosophy in Africa, what does it mean to philosophize in the African continent, to philosophize (indiscernible, 7:02) the problems in Africa. To give you an example, what does it mean to look at African art in its difference from European art, for example. So, those were the debates going on, and I started taking part. The 90’s had been years of transition towards democracy, and so the thinking was about African democracies, what does it mean to make these countries democratic, what kind of institutions were to be designed, so this was a very exciting time for someone to think philosophically about the problems facing Africa.

Another aspect was also the question of religion. I went back home in the early 1980’s, and this was the aftermath of the Iranian revolution, and political Islam as we know it now was very much on the scene, was very much on our screens and our newspapers and so and so forth, and Senegal is a Muslim country, so that was an aspect of the debate as well, what connection should we have now, where’s the intellectual and spiritual tradition of Islam, which is not known and of which philosophy is an important part. So I decided, also, in addition to my more technical teaching in philosophy of mathematics, to teach the history of philosophy in the Islam world, and to intervene in some respect on the debate surrounding Islam today. So, this is a very long answer, but that is for me what it means to be a philosopher. Again, not just chose a path, a specialty and work in that specialty narrowly defined, but being ready to go different ways, to change and to adapt, also, to the discussion about what is going on around you.

Nerina: Religion and philosophy. They are considered by many people be opposite ways to see life. How do you see it? Is there a contradiction?

Souleymane: Well, sure, one could say, defining things in these broad brushes, that on the one hand religion is really about faith, and even blind faith; you have to believe in something, you have to believe without evidence, you have to believe in things that you cannot see, that you cannot touch, that are not for your sensible grasping or even for your human understanding, on the one hand. And then you have philosophy, which is based on reason, rationalism, and proof and evidence. So it would be simple to just oppose the two and say that religion is one thing and philosophy is a very different thing, but now if you look at the history of religions themselves, you can see how, from within religion, there is a need to philosophize; that was the birth of Islamic philosophy, for example.

You cannot just decide that everything has been said once and for all by a revealed text; even the text you have to read it. So you can never be in the situation where you say ‘This ends philosophical questioning and I have the answers now’; you have to build your answers, you have to keep them open, you have to understand how open they are and how open they remain, because it is really, truly, your own human duty to examine. One important Muslim philosopher (indiscernible name, 11:28) has said ‘He who does not doubt, does not examine, and he who does not examine, doesn’t believe’, and this is probably the best single sentence to explain why philosophy is necessary to religion itself and how the connection between the two is really an internal relationship and not an external relationship between two very different things.

Nerina: You mentioned that, as a philosopher, you have to take part in the discussions that take place in the public sphere. Right now, it is religion in focus, and not always in a positive way. How do your books participate in the general discussion?

Souleymane: We live in times where, paradoxically, religion is so present in our lives. I mean, if we open our television sets, we see religion everywhere, and many terrible, violent, unbelievable things being done in the name of religion, and at the same time, we are so ignorant about religions in general, because years and years of so called secularism has made religion something that is not known anymore.
You know, even independently form the political situation that we are living in, and the security questions that religions and fanaticism, rather that religion, by the way, are posing, there’s an ignorance of religion. I mean, younger people are even incapable of reading works of art because they just don’t know who the people represented in art are, and most of the time these are religious characters, biblical characters that you find in paintings and so and so forth. But what it means, also, in particular for Islam, which is probably the religion nowadays associated with violence and everything. It is a terrible thing, and people need to be reminded that this religion was not born yesterday, and it is the religion of one billion and a half people, and it is a spiritual and an intellectual tradition.
So there is a need to make that tradition known, primarily for younger Muslims, for Muslims themselves, and this is what led me to the decision to teach also the tradition of philosophy in Islam, and this is the decision that led me from there to use my teaching for many years and make it a book, and I believe that that book, by precisely reminding people of what this intellectual and spiritual tradition that we call Islam, that we should be knowing as Islam is, this becomes de facto, a kind of intervention in the public square to, again, make Islam known and, primarily, known to Muslims themselves.

Nerina: And your books somehow change the narrative about the history of philosophy, right?

Souleymane: Absolutely. It is important for philosophy, for the discipline of philosophy in general, to sort of decolonize itself, as I would call it, because philosophy has been constructed as a uniquely European phenomenon, and this has happened very recently, actually. Traditionally, historically, philosophers in Greece or in Europe before the contemporary modern times never really thought of themselves as being the unique philosophers that humanity has ever seen; this is something that happened almost around the beginning of colonialism, that Europe defined itself has the heir of Greek philosophy and the continent of philosophy par excellence, and decided that philosophy was really the defining feature of Europe, so African philosophy could not exist; philosophy could not exist anywhere else outside Europe.
So this changed, because the history of philosophy is just not supporting such an idea if you look at who is the heir of Greeks. Many people have been the heir of the Greeks; Greek philosophy was appropriated by the Islamic world, so you have a tradition of philosophy in Islam that we do not know; this is something that I decided to teach, to let my own students know, because we were a department of philosophy in a Muslim country and we needed to know about that tradition as well, and I mean, human beings are naturally inclined towards philosophy, because human beings, by definition, know that they are mortal, they bury their dead, they look up to the sky, and they ask themselves about the destination of humanity, what it means to be human, what it is be born, what it means to die, and so and so forth. So philosophical thinking and philosophical wisdom exist everywhere, so we have to think about that and reconstruct the history of philosophy in such a way that it ceases to be this uniquely Western history of thought, and that is a very important aspect of my work as well.

Nerina: What is the most important lesson that your students have to learn?

Souleymane: You know, to just give you my experience, among the class that I teach in my university, Columbia, I have one class on history of philosophy in the Islamic world, where I introduce my students to classical Islamic philosophy, form 9th century to 13th century, and then also modern questions and so on. I also teach a class that I call African Literature in Philosophy, where I look at what is being written in Africa and what are the problems being debated by African intellectuals and philosophers, and I also teach, of course, general history of philosophy and philosophy of logic, as I’ve always done. And when my students have the feeling that they are more of what Islam is, or that they are more aware of Africa in terms of the intellectual production of the continent – Africa not just being a subject of conversation associated with diseases, problems, epidemics and so on so forth, but what are Africans thinking and writing now, what have they been thinking and also writing – it is not known that, for example, you have a long tradition of written edition in Africa; Africa is generally associated with orality, and people are now discovering all the manuscripts in Timbuktu, for example, that this is not true. And when they become aware of that, when they change their mind about what they thought, or what they thought they knew about the topics that I’m teaching, I think that I have done my job as an educator.

Nerina: What kind of society do you dream of?

Souleymane: Well, I dream of a society that would not be fragmented into what I call ethno-nationalisms, which is unfortunately what we have today. It is not just that there is a kind of stiffening of identities where people are fighting in the name of their religious identities or their national identities and so and so forth. It’s not just religion, but even in the field of politics we can see that. What I call ethno-nationalism is, as well, all these movements, extreme right movements, that we are calling populism. We should call them tribalism, because that is what it is, and my dream is the reconstruction of the philosophical and ethical idea of one humanity, which means hospitality.
Let’s look at the crisis of migrants that we have nowadays, refugees and migrants. They are met with what the Pope has called the globalization of indifference. The Pope is appalled and is always reacting against what he sees as indifference to human suffering, because we are so fragmented and thinking about ourselves and people who look like us, have the same religion, have the same skin color, and so and so forth. We are losing sight of the ethical general idea of humanity, in general. And that is the foundation for common life, that is the foundation for building together our Earth, that is the foundation of having the sense that we are one, our Earth is one, and the we should come together and take care of it.
This was, for example, something we saw during the Paris agreement on our environment. This was a wonderful metaphor for the idea of humanity being one, and looking in the same direction and taking care of our common home, which is our Earth. Unfortunately, we have seen the forces of fragmentation come again, when the United States, for example, just decided that they are going to, you know, come out of this common agreement and so and so forth. So that is, somehow, what I think is important, and will be the ultimate goal of all the different aspects of my work, working really to what’s, you know, this general idea, this universal idea of one humanity.

Nerina: How can we reconstruct our notion of humanity?

Souleymane: This is long-term thinking. In the short term, it has to be played on the political ground; we have to resist this type of populism. I believe that we have to fight for that ideal of a world of social justice, where you do not just have a global capitalism indifferent to human suffering and to that kind of fragmentation that I have described.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Souleymane: Well, I’ve had for a long time the dream of, you know, all young people have that dream, of changing the world, and I was thinking of doing science, I was thinking of having the discovery that would change things on Earth and things like that. Growing up, you learn to be much more humble than that, and you just ask yourself ‘Ok, am I, right now, touching the lives of people and changing things in my own sphere of influence?’, because, if you are in my position, obviously you have some influence on certain number of people. So my dream is to be able at one point to ask myself honestly that question and be able to answer that yes, I did that, and I realized that wish of making difference in the lives of a certain number of younger people.

Nerina: What is life about?

Souleymane: For me, life is about love; in other words, the force of life. I believe in the force of life. If I have to define myself in terms of my philosophy, I would say that I am very much a vitalist, in the sense that I believe in the force of life, and I think that the force of life is the same as the force of love. That this world has been created out of love as an open ended, always emerging cosmology; that this world is something that human beings have to invent an reinvent all the time, and that the energy they use, the force they use for that, which is the force of life, is the same as the force of love. So, for me, that is the sort of cosmic significance of love, it is also the personal significance of love. It is because the world itself is a creation of love, and that its movement forward is the movement of love, that our individual lives are always about love.

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for watching, thank you for listening and thank you for sharing. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any suggestion. Keep wondering, and see you next time again. Bye and ciao.

Biography:

Souleymane Bachir Diagne received his academic training in France. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he took his Ph.D (Doctorat d’État) in philosophy at the Sorbonne (1988) where he also took his BA (1977). His field of research includes Boolean algebra of logic, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy, African philosophy and literature.

He is the author of Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Paris: Belin, 1989) (a book on Boolean algebra), Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar, Codesria, 2011), African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull Books, 2011), The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Dakar, Codesria, 2016), Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018).

His book, Bergson postcolonial: L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 2011) is forthcoming in an English version to be published by Fordham University Press. That book was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011 and on that same year professor, Diagne received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work.

Professor Diagne’s current teaching interests include history of early modern philosophy, philosophy, and Sufism in the Islamic world, African philosophy and literature, twentieth-century French philosophy.

Learn more about Souleymane's work:
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Sandra Goulart Almeida

Sandra Goulart Almeida
Professor of Literary Studies
Biography:

Rector of UFMG, placed in the southeast of Brazil, the most industrialized region of the country. UFMG is a free-of-charge public educational institution, in the oldest university in the state of Minas Gerais.

Women. Readers. Writers. Translators.

“To be a feminist means to have a position in which you believe that you are able to do whatever you want to do without having to tell people that you have the right to”. So speaks Sandra Goulart Almeida, Brazilian professor and president of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, who devotes her work to the research of feminist literature, its history and its parallels in today’s world.

Literature has always been a reflection of our society, so it’s only appropriate that female writers get a long denied focus by intellectuals such as Sandra to better understand matters of cultural identity regarding the role of the woman all over the world, while also zeroing in on the ways that language builds us as members of one great community.

Listen to Sandra shed light on female authors who discuss the identity of women throughout different cultures, as well as how these identities and cultures must be approached and respected through external mediums to preserve and expose its ways of life and thought.

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Read the transcript of Sandra Goulart Almeida's Video here ◂

Sandra: I’m Sandra Goulart Almeida, I’m a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. I’m also currently the president of the university.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you, Sandra, for joining me. What are the topics you are interested in?

Sandra: I like to work with comparative literature. I like to see what women are writing about; so mostly I work with contemporary women writers, and I like to see what they are writing from different parts of the world. So that’s what I’m passionate about. So for that reason, I’m also interested in feminist criticism, and also in the notion of cultural translation, since I work with literatures in English, and literatures in Portuguese. I think these are fields that are very exciting for us today; it’s a good time for us to be discussing those issues. There are, I think, in the history of literary studies, it has never been so many women writing.

Sandra: So I’m interested in researching about what women are writing at the moment, what are they interested in.

Nerina Finetto: What are women writing about?

Sandra: That’s an interesting focus. They’re writing about just everything right now. There was a moment in which we could just say that women were writing about their experience as women, you know? They’re writing about taking care of children, about other relations with women, what it is like to live in the private sphere. But now it’s a good, a very interesting time for us, because they’re writing about everything. What I’m mostly interested in, since I work with comparative literature, is how they talk about the notion of space. Especially because I work with women who write in English, but they live, for example, in other countries. So they are part of what is known as contemporary diasporas. So I am interested in that as well, what these women are writing about.

Nerina Finetto: And what are these women writing about?

Sandra: I just published a book on space, women writers and space, the notion of space, diaspora, migration. So I’m doing some research, also, on two aspects of what women writers are talking about. First one is the notion of affect, that a lot of women writers are choosing some affects of emotions to talk about the present moment. But most of them are angered, we have a lot of notion of anger, fear, you have that as well, so I’ve been working with that. And now I’m starting a research on the notion of post-human feminism, that is, women writers, how they’re also writing from others’ perspective. In the effect that believing there’s not a centrality of the human anymore. That are other things that we have to concede when we are discussing our contemporary world.

Nerina Finetto: What kind of things?

Sandra: Some women, I can give an example, Margaret Atwood was a Canadian writer, who’d been writing a lot about that, about how the future is going to be a society in which humans are going to share either physical or psychological, or even the space without animals, but also with machines as well. So the fact of that, we live in a nature that there is no way that we can have the centrality of men, as we understood that, for example in the 19th century or in the previous century, some questioning, showing how women are writing about those topics as well.

Nerina Finetto: Do women write in a different way than men?

Sandra: You could say that, especially in the past we could say that the women, they tend to have a different way of writing, but I think this question doesn’t take us anywhere. The question of sexual difference, I believe that it does more harm than good, because then we start establishing “rules” for how women should write and how men should write. And I think that’s not what I am interested in. I think women are writing regardless of what we say they are writing about. There are a lot of women who are writing about the experience of migrants, as refugees or people who live in transit. It’s something that’s more recent for women to write about; it’s nothing about the private sphere, they’re writing about what it is like to be out there, so I am interested in that. I think asking whether they like different from men, limits the scope of what they can do.

Nerina Finetto: This means that actually we do not need these categories, ‘men’ and ‘women’ writers.

Sandra: No. Yeah.

Nerina Finetto: But at the same time, you tell me that you are interested in female literature. You do not say “I am interested in literature”. Why?

Sandra: For historical reasons. Traditionally, there are more men writers, it has always been easier for men to publish. Being a writer was something that men were, not women in the 18th century. Women started really publishing extensively in the 19th century, over all. So the area of literature, of writing, is traditionally dominated by men, so I think there are two different things here; one, it’s the historical conditioning of women as writers. Either they were silenced for many years, or they were published and nobody knew about them, or because they were not writing because the social and political and economic conditions were not favorable for them. And now we are in a very good time in history, and we could say that the conditions are better for women to write, and they are writing. So I am interested in what they have to say, there is still some kind of prejudice against women as writers, or in all professions in general, so I think it’s a political position, you know, giving visibility to what they write, how they write, what they discuss. Many of them talk about their conditions as women, many of them discuss issues related to the body, you know. So there are some things each day they talk about, and that you don’t usually find in writings by men.

Sandra: But again, it does not mean that they have to write about this. My position as a literary critic is not to set up the standards for them to write according to those standards, but rather to see what they are doing, to examine what is behind the kind of narrative that they are constructing.

Nerina Finetto: Is there a writer who you admire and would like people to know more about? And why?

Sandra: There are many writers I am interested in, as I said I work with literatures in English, and also in the context of Brazil and literature. There is a Nigerian writer who’s been very well-known, and I like her work because of the political position that she stands for. Her name is Chimamanda Adichie. Not only does she write novels, short stories, but also she gives lectures and then they turn into essays. You can find them in the internet. For example, she has a very interesting lecture that she gave about the danger of a single story, so this is available for whoever wants to listen to in the internet. And she also gave another lecture about We Should All be Feminists, that’s the title. And that was turned into a booklet about showing her belief that men and women should all be feminists, so there is a position that we have to take in relation to society. And recently she has published another one about how to raise a daughter as a feminist. So I like the fact that she is a writer; she writes fiction, very very interesting fiction, she talks about several important issues for women, but also for humankind in general. But she also has a theoretical thinking about her position as a writer. And I like that. I think it’s inspiring, the kind of work that she’s doing.
Chimamanda: So that to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There’s a word, an [inaudible 00:08:45] word, that I think about whenever I think about the past structures of the world. And it is “nkali”; it’s a noun that loosely translates to ‘to be greater than another’. Like economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability, not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

Nerina Finetto: I really like The Danger of a Single Story and I really like her message and theoretical position. And probably the richness that we can have through different narratives is also one of your main topics, right?

Sandra: So there’s something that I am interested in, these women writers are telling a different story. A story that we have never heard before. There is also a Brazilian writer whom I like very much, who’s called Conceição Evaristo. She’s a black writer, and she talks about her experience, you know. She comes from a very poor family, in a country that has a tradition of racism, so she talks about her experience as a black woman in Brazil, and she talks about several other narratives that we usually do not encounter on an everyday basis on the literatures of the country. You come across that occasionally, but not that often. So I think this is a very important issue, to have these writers tell stories that we’re usually not familiar with, that we have not heard before. For example, Adichie, she tells this story of the Biafran War, which was a tragedy in terms of history. She tells that from her perspective, from the perspective of women, from the perspective of a poor boy, in the story. So she gives us the possibility of looking through literature, looking at histories. She and Evaristo also do that.

Sandra: I remember that story from when I was a child, I remember the pictures of the children in Biafra dying because of hunger, but I didn’t know the context. So I just read her novel, and it’s very good. I do recommend Half of a Yellow Sun.

Nerina Finetto: I mentioned you are not only writing and teaching about women’s literature, but you are also a role model for young women because of your position at the university. How do you see it?

Sandra: I think more than being a woman in the university, I think there’s still many women who teach at my university, but they’re not as many women who address the issue of women writers, of gender studies, or feminist criticism, they’re not as many. So, of course, I’ve been doing that for the past 20 years. And I usually say that my role is to teach the younger generation, you know? And I’ve noticed a change. I think the women nowadays are more interested in the subjects. Whenever I teach a course, I have many people wanting to take a course with me because they are interested in what I have to say regarding gender studies, about literature written by women, about feminist literary criticism. So I think it’s my role; my position as a professor, as a teacher, it’s really to teach the younger generation, who in turn will teach younger generations too. So I usually tell them “we have a task, a role to play in teaching them, even in the most basic level.” For example, to watch a film, and be able to criticize the way that women are portrayed in the films, to see an advertisement and see how sexist or how racist that advertisement is, beyond the study of literature. I think it’s an everyday practice.

Nerina Finetto: What is the lesson that your students have to learn, if there is such a thing as one lesson?

Sandra: To be critical. They have to be critical. They should never take anything for granted, no discourse for granted, no news for granted, no narrative for granted. They do have to be critical about what they are reading; to be able to stand and say “What is behind this? What is discussed here?”. So I usually try to tell them that they do have to be critical, they have to have a critical position regarding either the object of study, or anything that they’re reading or they’re watching.

Nerina Finetto: And what is the most important lesson that you have learned from your research?

Sandra: Maybe that’s exactly the same lesson that I have learned. That there are many stories being told, that we have to know those stories to start with, we have to know about what other women are writing about, and we do have to be critical about what we read in general. Not only about what women are writing, but what we read on an everyday basis.

Nerina Finetto: Was there a turning point in your life that determined who you are now?

Sandra: I think I’ve always been like that, I think I’ve always been interested in the topic, maybe because of the way that I was raised. I had a very interesting grandmother. I am of Lebanese descend, so she had a very difficult life in the sense that she was not allowed to study, she was not allowed to do what she wanted to do as a woman. She was a musician, but she wasn’t at the time, she had to get married, to have children, so she didn’t… so she gave me a lot of support, because I always was very much interested in doing research. I was always a feminist at heart.

Nerina Finetto: What does it mean to be a feminist?

Sandra: It means to have a position in which you believe that you are able to do whatever you want to do without having to tell people that you have the right to. You just do it, you can do whatever or as much as men do, so there should be no limitations. I do believe in equal rights for men and women.

Nerina Finetto: What does it mean to you, being a professor?

Sandra: This is what I like best about the kind of work that I do. As I said I am an administrator, but I like to be a professor, I like to publish, I like to think. I like to be able to teach my students a lot of the things that I research on. I think it’s a way for you to pass on not only your knowledge, but it’s a way for you to contribute to a better society. I do believe in that.

Sandra: As I said, if my students leave my classroom and they learn to be better readers, more critical about what happens in the world, I’m happy with what I did with my job. That’s what I like best.

Nerina Finetto: What is the role of the humanities, in your opinion?

Sandra: I think all over the world, there is being the evaluation of the humanities. I think we can’t deny that. I think the way that the world has evolved, what has been valued, is usually the exact science, administration, not very much the humanities, which of course I think it’s a mistake. I think the humanities are essential for our world as it is nowadays. Not only because it provides us with the tools to be more critical about what goes on in all other disciplines, but also because it adds to whatever you are doing in the other fields. So I’m very much a believer in the power of interdisciplinary, to your transdisciplinary, that’s what people have been talking about. A world that is not limited to a discipline specifically.

Sandra: So because we have moved towards a society that wants results more than anything else, the humanities have been devalued as a profession. Which I think is horrible for the world, and I think, on the contrary, what has to be done, is to have more dialogue among the disciplines, so that the humanities are able to do what it does best, which is to open the grounds for other ways of thinking, to be critical, I think it teaches us how to be critical, it teaches us how to deal with the other. That’s what we have to do all the time, especially in the world we live in.

Nerina Finetto: To deal with others and to listen to others. One of your main interests is also translation, right?

Sandra: The ideal situation would be for us to know other languages, but since we do not know other languages, the means for us to listen to the other that we would not otherwise listen to, is by means of translation. But that means that the translator has a very important role, the role of mediator. So the translator has to mediate not only the context, but also he or she has to have an ethical responsibility towards the subject whose language this person is translating. So it has to do with cultural diversity. I think in terms of culture, it’s not only translation from language to language. It’s a political positioning as well. Since we cannot learn all the languages of the world, we do need translation so that others can speak through us, and also translators. So I’m interested in that. So I’m working with the Swiss theory of translation as a means to listen to the other.

Nerina Finetto: What connection does language have with identity?

Sandra: It has everything to do. You are built, you’re constructed through language. The way that you think has to do with the language that you speak. What I’m trying to discuss here is that especially those so-called minority languages, if they’re not preserved, if they’re not translated, if there’s no dialogue with the other language, they’re going to end up simply disappearing, you know? So that’s what I’m talking … the important role of the translator as a mediator. Translators are kind of mediators between two worlds. But this translator is a translator who, especially when you translate from, for example, an indigenous language in Brazil, they need to be preserved, but they also need to be translated, if there’s going to be some kind of understanding between the peoples.

Sandra: But for you translate, you have to show respect for that language. Because that language is part of that, an identity of a subject, but it’s also a cultural identity of a people. So it’s important for you to show respect, to show understanding, towards that people.

Nerina Finetto: What kind of society do you dream of?

Sandra: An equal society. We live, especially in Brazil, it’s a very unequal society. Few people have a lot of money, and a lot of people don’t have enough. And I dream of living in a society that is more just, more equal in all aspects, [inaudible 00:20:16] gender equality is very important that people … I dream of a society in which people have access to education and to health. And I try to work towards that aim, because I do believe, and I think education has a major role, and I think universities play a major role in countries like Brazil, in which not many young adults are able to get into the universities, so our contribution is to try and put as many students as possible into the university, so that it reaches a way of social mobility as well. It’s a means of inclusion; it’s a way to give them access to things that otherwise they would not have access to. So I think it’s a long battle. It’s not easy, but that’s what I dream of. When we’re a just, equal, fair, inclusive society.

Nerina Finetto: With all the challenges that we are facing, do you think that we should keep speaking about feminism?

Sandra: It is essential to continue speaking about feminism. It’s essential to do that. I think it’s the way. Feminism has come a long way. It fought many battles, and I think it’s always going to be essential to talk about that. When you still have a lot of violence against women, when women are not allowed to have the same jobs that men do, or the same salary as men do, when women are forced to follow some kind of dress code, because of impositions of a patriarchal society; when all of these are still happening, it becomes even more relevant to talk about feminism. Because it’s about equal rights, about women doing whatever they want to do, having no limitations in terms of what society tells them what they have to do, what they don’t have to do.

Nerina Finetto: It is still pretty complicated for women to combine children, a family, with a career, even your research. How do you see it?

Sandra: If they want to be mothers, they should be mothers. If they want to have kids, they should have kids. They should do whatever they want to do. We don’t tell men what they should do and what they should not do. Nobody ever told them. Maybe they say “we should not cry, because men don’t cry”, maybe like that, but they’re not … if they want to do something, they should be able to do that as well. So I think women can be whatever they want to do. If they want to be mothers, they should be that, if they don’t want to be, they shouldn’t be forced to be mothers, either.

Sandra: I’m not a mother. I don’t have children, but my whole life people ask me “aren’t you going to have children?” What is behind the question is “oh, poor thing, she’s not a mother, oh poor thing”. I don’t feel like that, so it’s nobody’s business. It’s up to me. Because I’m a woman, it doesn’t mean that I have to have children, okay? But if somebody wants to have children, I think they should have. But of course, having children is, the way our society’s structured, is a burden for women most of the time. Not always but most of the time. Why? Because once you have children, it’s difficult for you to have work, to go out and get a good job, you’re responsible for the house. Some women like it, but most of them don’t like it, they want to go out and to do other things, they don’t want to stay home taking care of kids and taking care of the house, but if they do want, and they are happy with that, I have nothing against it. They are not “less” women because of that.

Sandra: So then that’s why politics, based on women rights, is also important. We have to give the women the economic conditions to do that if they want to be mothers. Then we have, what, day care for women, they should have maternity leave so that they can take care of their children then come back to work, they have to be protected by law, because if it’s up to society, they’re not going to be protected.

Nerina Finetto: What was the most difficult day, and what was the most beautiful one?

Sandra: The most difficult day? Possibly one day when I had to face sexism. When I was disregarded for being a woman, when my ideas were not considered, not because somebody doesn’t like my ideas, but because I am a woman, and because of that, my ideas are not valued as a man’s idea. This was a sad moment.

Sandra: And a happy moment was recently, actually, when a student of mine took a course with me, and sent me a message. I think those moments, I think sometimes it happens … it doesn’t happen every day, but it happens once a year, somebody sends you a message saying that you made a difference in her life or in his life; I think this is a very good day. That your teaching, the way that you work, what you did in your job, was important enough for somebody to feel that “oh, my life is changed. It changed the path that I was going towards”.

Nerina Finetto: Thank you, Sandra, for this conversation.

Sandra: Thank you. Thank you, it’s a pleasure.

Nerina Finetto: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. And feel free to reach out to me if you have any suggestions. Keep wondering, and see you soon again. Bye and Ciao.

Biography:

Rector of UFMG, placed in the southeast of Brazil, the most industrialized region of the country. UFMG is a free-of-charge public educational institution, in the oldest university in the state of Minas Gerais.

Michel DeGraff

Michel DeGraff
Professor of Linguistics
Biography:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. Founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. Fields of scholarship: inguistic theory, Creole studies and the relationship among linguistics, ideology, education, human rights and development.

Learn more about Michel's work:
en.wikipedia.org/Michel_DeGraff More about: MIT-Haiti Initiative
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The language we speak. Education, innovation and the future of Haiti

How does language use and suppression mirror societal power? What impact has colonialism had on the Haitian Creole language and its role in Haiti’s development? And how can linguists succeed in promoting the use of Creole languages, and elevating their prestige in the eyes of native speakers and their governments?

Michel DeGraff, a Haitian linguist and tenured professor at MIT, is interested in these questions and more, using his work to try and understand how languages like Haitian Creole come into being, and how new varieties emerge due to the contact of diverse populations throughout history.
Through his studies, and his own life growing up in Haiti and being forced to use French during his education, Michel believes that educating young people in their home language is essential for their freedom, well-being, and development.

In this video, he tells us why he set up the MIT-Haiti Initiative after the country’s devastating earthquake and discusses the challenges and successes in his research and teaching about the development and structure of Haitian Creole and other Creole languages, and his bringing Haitian Creole, alongside modern pedagogy and educational technology, into Haiti’s school system.

Michel DeGraff is a professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. He is also a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His fields of scholarship are linguistic theory, Creole studies and the relationship among linguistics, ideology, education, human rights, and development.

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Read the transcript of Michel DeGraff's Video here ◂

Michel: Hello, my name is Michel DeGraff. I was born in Haiti. I’m a professor of linguistics at MIT, which is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And I’m also the founder and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative.

Nerina: Thank you for joining me, Michel. What are your main research interests?

Michel: My main research topic in linguistics has been to try to understand the way that new languages come into being, and how new varieties of languages also emerge. My focus is on the interaction between the contact of populations and the creation of new varieties of language. In a way, my laboratory case is my own native language, Haitian Creole, which emerged in the Caribbean, in Haiti, back in the 17-18th century, out of the contact between varieties of French and various West-African and other African languages. And out this contact, this new variety emerged, which we now call Haitian Creole, or Kreyòl in Haiti.

I also work on the relationship between linguistics and education, especially in the context of my native country, Haiti. I think what we’re doing there can also be used as a model for other countries that speak a local language that, because of historical reasons, has been stigmatised, and excluded from the schools, courts and government, and other domains where knowledge and power are created and transmitted. So, I’m hoping that the work we are doing in linguistics can have a positive impact on education and development in countries like Haiti, but also other countries in the Global South.

Nerina: What makes your first language, Kreyòl, so unique in your opinion?

Michel: From my perspective, what makes Haitian Creole and other Creole languages special is the fact that both their own history and development and the way they have been studied by scholars reflect colonial history. At the same time, because of their very origins in situations of really drastic power inequality, I mean slavery, colonization. now those languages offer a path out of domination and stigmatization, a path into liberation. For me, that is what makes these languages very special: the fact that they come out of a history of colonial struggles. In a way, there are still the theater of struggles. But if you better understand how they emerged, how they are created, but also if you understand their capacity for education, literature and liberation, then they can be used for development in a way that hasn’t happened yet in the case of many Caribbean communities but also other communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, where you have either Creole languages or what we think of as “indigenous” or “local” languages being spoken.

Nerina: The point is that French is the official language of Haiti, but Kreyòl in Haiti is not the language of a minority but it is the language of a majority, right?

Michel: Absolutely. What you’ve just said, Nerina, is absolutely right. In Haiti, Kreyòl is the language… I wouldn’t even say of the majority… but I’d say it’s the language of the totality. In Haiti, everyone speaks Kreyòl. In fact, you can hardly function there in French, except if you were to stay at a hotel or in the capital or in fancy neighbourhoods. Once you go out in the outside country, on the streets, into the busy vibrant neighbourhoods where people are living their lives, you have to use Kreyòl. So, everyone speaks it, even those who are forbidden to speak it! I remember very well when I was in school, I went to a school run by French Catholic brothers, I was forbidden to speak Kreyòl, but yet I learnt it, I speak it. In fact, it’s my soul language, my first language. Although my own parents were very concerned that I should speak French first, but in fact, Kreyòl is my native first language. And it’s the first language for most Haitians.

Nerina: How does this situation that you are not allowed to speak in your native language and that somehow your native language may be seen as not important or not even a real language, how does this affect you?

Michel: I often ask this very question, how does this stigmatization and oppression of a native language, how does it act on a child? I’ve done research on that. So I have many videos of children in classrooms and how their languages are being suppressed. Often when they are being taught to speak French, and if they have a Kreyòl accent or they pronounce the vowels in a Kreyòl way, the teachers look down on them and make fun of them. Then those children come to believe that what they speak at home, what their family speaks is a broken language, is broken French.

So, what it does to them, I think, is to make them believe that they are broken people. It makes them believe that they are inferior, that for them to be fully human they have to speak French. To me, the effect of that entire system, of what I would say is MIS-education, is undermining the entire foundations of our nation. In the school, the children are being taught from day one to mimic. In fact, they learn how to read not as they learn how to think. They learn to parrot, to mimic, because they read sentences by sounding out words without understanding what the words mean.

So, what it does to them? It teaches them that you go to school not to learn, but to become a parrot, to pronounce or mimic French words without understanding them. So, it becomes normal for them that learning means parroting French text without understanding it. I can imagine what in the long term it does to the nation because you have cohorts upon cohorts of children who come out of school without really knowing how to read a text, without any capacity for critical thinking. Even teachers teach by repeating without questioning what they repeat.

Nerina: What is the relationship between language and power?

Michel: Well, I think of the situation of a country where everyone speaks Kreyòl and a small group speaks French and yet French is the language used for power. I think it’s a good example of what psychologists and philosophers and sociologists have studied as the power of ideology, the power of prejudices to even affect those who are being oppressed. What you find is that it has been so long, since the 17th-18th century, that French has been presented as the real language, the superior language. Then, linguists and creolists have also played a role in that, in ranking Creole languages as if they were the world’s simplest languages, as if they were languages that were below in terms of capacity of expression, below languages like French for example.

So, what you find is that even those who speak only Kreyòl are also convinced that in order for them to achieve citizenship, to be real and fully human, they have to speak French. So, Steven Biko said something that is very important: he said that the most powerful tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. The idea here is something that Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Frantz Fanon understood very well: that hegemony works because those people who are being excluded, those people who are being oppressed, they’ve been convinced to believe in their own inferiority, in the validity of why they’re oppressed.

And that’s why the situation in Haiti still holds, because you have parents who are so poor they give all this money to schools, and they don’t care whether the school teaches the kids math or science or literature, all they care about is whether the kids learn French, as if French is the key to knowledge and to humanity. But, no, it’s not. No language can have that kind of function, right? The best tool to develop your humanity and your knowledge is your native language, and with that, you can also learn other languages. So, that’s why I think it’s really important for teachers, scholars, leaders, linguists and anthropologists to really look at this issue very closely—also psychiatrists—to deeply understand how to correct it, because until it’s corrected, you’re going to have a nation that’s totally upside down. As my colleague Yves Dejean says, we have a country that’s upside down because the schools are upside down.

Nerina: Haiti is a beautiful country, has a long history even pre-Columbus, and after the years of the colonization it was a proud moment when Haiti became independent before other countries did at the beginning of the 19th Century. But what do you think or feel went wrong, why does Haiti still struggle?

Michel: I think that Haiti, as you said, is a beautiful country with an amazing history. It was one of the first lands to welcome Columbus when he got lost. Of course, he didn’t discover Haiti. He just got lost there. That’s why he called it the “West Indies.” And the Amerindians welcomed him to their own detriment because very quickly they were decimated. It was the first genocide in the Americas.

We’ve had this glorious history whereby the Europeans brought in the Africans as enslaved labourers, then these Africans managed to outwit the Europeans: they won an amazing independence war, back in the beginning of the 19th century. There’s something that our founding fathers understood. Jean-Jacques Dessalines who was our first president understood that we may have won the war of independence in terms of getting rid of the French, but if we don’t also become independent culturally, intellectually, linguistically, then we won’t really be independent.

He also understood that there was this danger of neocolonialism. So although the French had been expelled, there were descendants of the French in Haiti, there were also free blacks who for selfish interest wanted to just replace the French and not share the wealth with their compatriots, but create a new class of colonizers that could then oppress their own compatriots.

This is what we’ve seen. We’ve seen that in Haiti from the very beginning there was this small class of free blacks, the blacks who were free even during the colony, but also the mulattoes (descendants of French who mated with African women), and they replaced the colonizers, the French colonizers. One thing that they did that was actually quite clever was to enlist the school system as a way to preserve power, because very early on, although there were attempts at the very beginning to say ‘well, we need to use Kreyòl for the school system because given that we are a population that speaks mostly Kreyòl that’s what should be used’, but those proposals from the very beginning were excluded. So, what happened is that the school system very early on was based on French which means that only those who could speak French, and that was already a very small minority, would have access to success.

So, it’s basically a privilege given to the elite that became cemented, and became so entrenched in the society. That’s what we’ve been living with since then. So that’s the tragedy of Haiti, that’s the problem. But now with all that we know about language and education, I think that we can do another revolution, which is to convince the leaders and the population that our native language, our national language, is essential for our freedom.

Nerina: You wanted to use your knowledge to change the situation, right?

Michel: Absolutely. I really believe in something that Karl Marx said, that what is important is not only to understand the world, but it’s also to be able to change it. In linguistics, and in all the humanities—anthropology, history, psychology…—we have all this knowledge about the way the mind and society work. But what good does it do if we have all this knowledge, but we cannot make the kind of changes that will make the world better, and the lives of people better? What good does it do if we build all this knowledge about Creole languages, but at the same time Kreyòl speakers cannot benefit from this knowledge? Sometimes it’s even worse, Kreyòl speakers sometimes suffer because of the kind of statements and theories that linguists have been producing for centuries about Creole languages, classifying them as if they were the world’s simplest languages. This is the very reason why certain scholars and educators prefer to use French instead of Kreyòl, because why use a language that’s ‘simplest’ when you can use a more ‘sophisticated’ language, meaning French. You see…

So this is one area where the knowledge being produced by linguists is actually undermining the livelihood and the future of the very speakers of these languages that we study. At least, we have to understand the impact of these kinds of ‘knowledge’ and question the basis for them. Because if we have any doubt whether our knowledge is solid, then we should really think of what are we doing in the real world with this knowledge? How can we make it better?

Nerina: You are the founder and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. When and how did it start?

Michel: I like to think of it as having its roots from my childhood because as a child I was never allowed to use my native language in the school system as a means of knowledge. I was prevented from using it. When I was a computer scientist, my first job as a professional computer scientist was to write programmes for linguists who were trying to help computers to understand language, to have computers able to read, say, the New York Times and be able to pronounce text for people who cannot read, for example. As I was doing this work, I couldn’t help but think about my own language, Kreyòl, and I realised that if I were to write the same programme for Kreyòl it would also work maybe even better because in Haitian Creole we have a very transparent and logical spelling system which is a lot better than what you have both for English and French. It’s a very logical, transparent spelling where every sound is always written with the same letter. It’s very rigorous and logical, which would make it much easier for a programme to be able to read Haitian Creole as compared to French or English.

From that moment onwards, I was always thinking about the use or misuse of Haitian Creole, our national language, in the school system in Haiti.

Now, to make a long story short, in my work as a linguist I always kept in touch with colleagues in Haiti. The one colleague that really influenced me a lot, his name is Professor Yves Dejean, who used to run this state office to promote Kreyòl in the 90s. So, Yves Dejean invited in the mid-90s to do a seminar at the Kreyòl Language Bureau in Haiti, and there I met other linguists who, like me and Yves Dejean, understood the importance of promoting Kreyòl as the main language of education. So, we did some work together, training young linguists to understand the structure of Haitian Creole and to also realise that it has the full complex structure that makes it capable of expressing science, mathematics, philosophy… so there is no reason to exclude it from the school system.

So, when the earthquake happened in 2010, I was on this phone call with Yves Dejean, and all of a sudden, we got cut off! Ten minutes after, I realised that there was this major earthquake in Haiti. So, of course, I was very worried! Thank God, he was safe, his house was safe.

But then in the aftermath of the earthquake, me and my colleagues at MIT were discussing the best way that we could help. We realized that the best way was not to send money or bottles of water. The best way to help was to try and change the school system from the inside. In fact, Yves Dejean wrote a manifesto soon after the earthquake, where he says that the best way to rebuild Haiti is not with cement or with infrastructure, but it’s to rebuild Haiti from within, from the soul, to change the attitudes of the leaders of the society towards their own native culture, and their own native language. If we can do that, then we can really rebuild a Haiti that will be better for all.

So that moment after the earthquake and talking to Yves Dejean, I realised that what I could do at MIT is to try and create a team of colleagues, because at MIT we have very good scientists, educators, mathematicians, and engineers. Then we could see how we could bring some of our know-how and share it with Haiti, at the same time also expand our own humanity and expertise at MIT. So, it would be a two-way relationship where MIT would be sharing with Haiti, but at the same time, Haiti, with its own rich history and expertise and human capital, could share with us. So basically, both MIT and Haiti would expand and become better in the process. It would be an opportunity for both MIT and Haiti to try to create a new kind of university that might become a model, not just for Haiti, but for the entire world.

Nerina: What are the main pillars of this programme?

Michel: Our goal in the MIT-Haiti Initiative is to try to share with Haiti the best know-how at MIT when it comes to teaching and learning, because MIT is one of the best universities in the world. I think we’ve become very good at developing methods and tools and resources for students to learn in a very creative fashion. This notion of creativity is at the core of the initiative, because when I was growing up in Haiti I remember very well that, in order to succeed as a shining student, it was a matter of just memorising lessons, and being able to recite them by heart. If there is one feature that characterises the Haitian school system, it is rote learning. It starts from kindergarten and first grade, where children are being taught to read text they don’t understand. All that matters in ‘reading’ is to be able to sound out and repeat words without understanding them in any deep way. So, this is what my colleagues and I felt, from my own experience as a student, needed to be changed in order for the country to use the full capacity of its citizens who are very creative. If you look at Haitian art and at children on the farms in the rural country, those children are very creative, and yet they go to school, and their creativity is shut off and not exploited. So, the goal then was to create a school system, from kindergarten to university, where you can learn in a very creative way, you can learn in an active fashion.

The main aspect of the MIT-Haiti Initiative is to introduce methods and tools for active, creative, interactive learning. To do that, we need one indispensable condition which is that the students have to be able to use the language they are most fluent in because they cannot be creative learners if they have to use a language that they are not comfortable in. So that’s the second piece of the initiative.

The third piece is something that MIT is very good at, which is the use of software and tools that trigger and promote this kind of interaction.

So that’s basically the MIT initiative.

Nerina: What is the relationship between language and personality?

Michel: I think in Haiti the relationship between language and personality is such a clear one. For example, if you go to Haiti, you will be pressed to find a typical Haitian giving any joke in French. If you are in a courtyard or on the playground, all the jokes and stories and songs happen in Kreyòl. And those in that context who switch to French, they switch to French to be formal. When you go and court a girl, in order to impress her, you have to speak French, so she thinks that you are smart and well educated and of a good social class. But then once you get comfortable with the girl, you would switch back to Kreyòl. Once I was on the phone talking to my girlfriend, I was maybe 11 or 12, and we were talking in Kreyòl, and the mom heard us speak Kreyòl, got offended, and picked up the phone and said ‘Sir, please speak French to my daughter! You are disrespecting her by speaking Kreyòl’. I could speak French, but I was so frozen by this command that I had to hang up the phone. This shows you how, in Haiti, that link between language and personality is so clear because you cannot be yourself in French. For most Haitians, to be true to yourself is to speak Kreyòl.

Nerina: What motivates you, Michel?

Michel: I think it’s my own history in many ways. But also when I go to Haiti and I see those children and speak to them, I can feel and hear their intelligence and creativity and desire to succeed and I can feel that they have the capacity to succeed. Then, to look at them in the school and they start failing, but it’s not because they are stupid. They start failing because the school system is set against them. That is what motivates me.

Nerina: Do you have a dream?

Michel: My dream, really, is to see the Haitian leadership own that project because, so far, the project has been pushed on the MIT side, and by a growing number of Haitian teachers and faculty at the level of high school, elementary school, and university. But, for that project to have fruit in the long term, at some point it has to be owned by the Haitian society in total—meaning the government, civil society, the parliamentary system….

So my dream is that at some point, hopefully soon in the future, there will be political leaders in parliament and in the executive , alongside the society and all the NGOs, that will realise that for the country, or any project, to succeed, there has to be models like the one we are promoting where the national language is at the core of the project, but also that it be participatory—that everyone can participate without any barrier of language or technology. Of course, I would hope that a stronger alliance between MIT-Haiti and the powers that be both in Haiti and beyond.

And eventually the bigger dream is to have this initiative become a model for other communities—in Jamaica, Curacao, Seychelles, Mauritius, Latin America, Africa, and all over. Did you know that 40% of students are still being taught in a foreign language? That’s a huge number. And also what is really crucial is that there is a direct correlation between those countries that do not use their national language and the countries that are impoverished. So, the most impoverished countries are also those that do not make use of their local languages. So, the bigger dream is that this model will be applied globally, that in each community with a local language, the school system will enlist that local language in the teaching. On paper this is what UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, USAID… that’s also what they believe in. Obviously, there is some blockage against this. But hopefully, in my big dream, those blockages will disappear.

Nerina: Is there a question that nobody ever asks you but you wish somebody would?

Michel: One question that I would like to be asked is: What would I have loved to do if I were not doing linguistics? What other profession would I have liked to have had!

Nerina: And what would you have become?

Michel: I have asked myself that question many times. And I answer it when I go to dance class! I have a dear friend who is an Afro-Haitian dance teacher, and I’m part of his company’s board as an advisor, and I often like to go to his dance performances. Whenever I see beautiful dance performances, I wish that I grew up in a country where boys could have taken dance lessons and become dancers. When I dance it makes me feel really good! So, sometimes I wonder if I would have enjoyed being a professional dancer, would I have enjoyed dancing maybe ballet or Afro-Haitian dance or the kind of dances that the Alvin Ailey dance company performs because they are so beautiful. It’s like a different language, but a beautiful language that people can speak even though they come from different backgrounds. So, in Jean Appolon’s dance classes, when you go there on Saturdays, you see people from all walks of life, of all ethnicities and sizes and ages, and all together they dance beautifully, and when in the class everybody feels so good and so happy! You see this community they built through dancing, and even though people don’t speak to each other that much. But they dance together, they have the drums going through their souls together, it creates that kind of coziness and love and bond that I rarely experience elsewhere. So that’s what I think I would have liked to become maybe, a dancer.

Nerina: My last question, what is life about?

Michel: Well, it’s like what I tell my little boy, that life is trying to make a change to make the world better. It could be very small, it could be something you do within yourself or in your family or neighbourhood. But in your life, if you can make that small change that will make someone’s life better, then it makes life worth living. Life is also about love: without love, life wouldn’t be worth living. That’s what I think life is about: to make some change that will make someone’s life better, and to fall in love and enjoy love and love other people and be loved by other people. That makes life worth it!

Nerina: Thank you so much for this conversation.

Michel: Thank you Nerina, that was a nice interview!

Nerina: And thank you for watching, thank you for listening, thank you for sharing. If you have any suggestions please feel free to reach out to me. See you soon, and keep wondering. Bye, ciao.

Biography:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. Founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. Fields of scholarship: inguistic theory, Creole studies and the relationship among linguistics, ideology, education, human rights and development.

Learn more about Michel's work:
en.wikipedia.org/Michel_DeGraff More about: MIT-Haiti Initiative
Connect with Michel:
twitter.com/MichelDeGraff facebook.com/michel.degraff linkedin.com/michel-degraff-a

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