Shared Futures

Dickinson College

Susan D. Rose
Professor of Sociology
rose@dickinson.edu

Over the past 20 years of teaching at Dickinson, I have had the privilege of working on a number of innovative teaching projects with students, a diverse and interdisciplinary team of faculty, and community members. These projects are integrated into the Sociology Department curriculum but they expand beyond disciplinary lines. In addition to teaching my regular courses in the Sociology Department, I helped organize and direct the first Mosaic program that then developed into a major institutional commitment to integrate the study of global education with domestic diversity. Dickinson had an excellent record in international education, but it was less effective in addressing the complex challenges of domestic diversity. It was time to explore more effectively the similarities and differences in inter-cultural and intra-cultural communication- at the international, national, and local levels; to bring together the academic and experiential levels of experience and knowledge; and to recognize the importance and power of integrating the intellect and emotion in order to address these issues more effectively. These early teaching-research collaborations led also to the creation of the Community Studies Center.

The American Mosaic college-community collaboration was an experiment in multicultural education that combined oral history, ethnography, memoir, and political economy.  The first Mosaic took place during the spring 1996. Some 25 students and 3 faculty (Rose - Sociology, Barone - Economics, and O’Brien - English and American Studies) came together with students, teachers, workers, local business people, and parishioners of Steelton, PA to explore questions of mutual interest: how does one make a living, raise a family, negotiate school, sustain faith, and relate to others in the mid-1990s in a small, yet richly diverse, town in America?  Interacting across race, ethnic, class, gender, generational, age, and religious lines, members of the Dickinson and Steelton communities engaged one another in the union halls and classrooms, in churches and cafes, at the mill and in the cemeteries.  After six weeks of academic study, the next 7 weeks involved intensive fieldwork in one of the first steel mill towns in the United States. Dramatically affected by deindustrialization, Steelton is struggling hard to survive economic hard times. A five-year follow-up (2001) focused on the migration, family, and work narratives of members of Steelton’s African American community. That same year (2001), we also launched our first Global Mosaic to Patagonia, Argentina. Our interests in migration and ethnic-labor relations inspired us (Borges - History and Latin American Studies and Rose) to collaborate on a comparative study of trans-Atlantic migration to the oil company towns of Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia, Argentina and the steel-mill town of Steelton, Pennsylvania. In the fall 2003, a follow-up to the first Adams County Mosaic (Enge - Anthropology, Borges, and Rose) engaged students in community studies with host communities in Adams County, Pennsylvania and the sending community of Peribán de Ramos in Michoacán, Mexico. Twenty-one Dickinson students had the opportunity to participate in intensive fieldwork in these communities which lie on opposite ends of the continent, but stand connected through family, work, and circular migration.

I have also participated in the Crossing Borders (CB) program, which was designed as an innovative model for diversity education that encourages culturally diverse students to live, work, and study together in multiple contexts both within the United States and abroad. Crossing Borders brings together up to 20 students from Dickinson (a PWI), and Dillard, Xavier, and Spelman (all HBCUs) to spend four weeks in the summer in Cameroon, West Africa. Students then return to Dickinson College for the fall semester to continue their studies of the African diaspora, and race and ethnic relations and community building in contemporary America.  In the spring semester, students study either at one of the HBCU campuses. Thus, the program works with the intersections of international and domestic diversity as students experience a variety of border crossings, both within their group, between them as Americans and Cameroonians, and then as they return to the PWI and HBCU campuses.

My own fieldwork and teaching have taken me to Guatemala, the Philippines, South Korea, Denmark, and Germany. And I directed Dickinson’s Center for European Studies in Bologna, Italy 1990-1991.

David G. Strand
Professor of Political Science
strand@dickinson.edu

I’ve taught at Dickinson for 25 years in the political science, East Asian studies and history departments.  My special area of teaching and research interests is modern Chinese politics and history. I’ve also taught courses on other topics including comparative urban politics, Asian politics, human rights, and political leadership.

My interest in study abroad programs began as an undergraduate at Lawrence University. I participated in programs in West Germany and in the United Kingdom.  As a graduate student at Columbia University I pursued doctoral research in Taiwan and Japan.  Though my dissertation was a study of Beijing in the 1920s, the gradual nature of the post Nixon-Mao thaw in U.S.-China relations meant that I had to wait until 1982 to reached Beijing (and mainland China) for a year of research.  By that time I was already teaching at Dickinson.  Since then I have made six other trips to East Asia for periods ranging from a year to a month or two. My most recent visit to China was this past summer.

In the 1980s, along with several other faculty members, I helped develop an East Asian Studies major at Dickinson that is language-based (an intermediate level of Chinese or Japanese is required for the major in addition to a selection of introductory and advanced courses) and includes a senior research thesis as a capstone experience.  The East Asian Studies Department (which I currently chair) now numbers about eight full-time faculty positions representing a variety of disciplines (history, political science, anthropology, sociolinguistics, literature, economics, legal studies, and film studies).  I helped negotiate our original exchange program in Beijing. I also helped lead a month-long study trip of non-Asian studies faculty to China.  This experience became the model for our current summer program in China.  I’ve been the author or co-author of two recent successful grant applications: one a Freeman Foundation faculty chair and associated programs in “Asian Law and Culture” and an ASIANetowrk and Luce Foundation Asian art consultancy (the latter is designed to better integrate Asian art collections at liberal arts colleges into the curriculum).

My scholarly experiences include fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Peking University, the Inter University Program for Chinese Language in Taipei, and the National Humanities Center.  I am the author of books and articles on Chinese urban history and the history of civil society and the public sphere in China including Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (1989), and Reconstructing Twentieth Century China: State Control, Civil Society and National Identity (co-editor) (1998). I am currently working on a new manuscript entitled “`Getting Up and Giving as Speech Isn’t Easy’: The Perils and Promise of Chinese Public Life.”