The Junior Fellows Program

The Junior year is an ideal interlude for students to reflect on what they have learnt during their first two years in college and to begin consolidating their interests and skills necessary for their senior year, while considering the wide range of options available within and beyond academe. The Junior Fellows Program provides Juniors with an opportunity for immersion In social theory, social research, and social action through intensive interaction with scholars active across the broad spectrum of the disciplines. Through lectures, symposia, Seminars, readings, discussions, excursions, and scholarly writing, the Program is aimed at nurturing an intellectual community seeking to bridge scholarship and citizenship through critical engagement with problems that impede the development of a just and sustainable global civil society. The Junior Fellows Program seeks to promote forms of scholarship that stitch together different disciplinary fabrics in academic practice, as well as new forms of student and faculty engagement with issues that define our times. This is an in-house Signature Program for students whose concentrations entail significant work in the social sciences or cognate fields of inquiry, and is open to any Junior with relevant expertise and interests.

The core and defining component of the Junior Fellows Program is the Proseminar in Social Scientific Inquiry, led by two faculty members. Through intellectual exchanges with social scientists and interdisciplinary scholars in a variety of settings, Junior Fellows become acquainted with professional standards for scholarly work as practiced by their own teachers and by an array of guest lecturers and workshop leaders. Throughout the Proseminar, participants will be expected to think and write collaboratively, expansively, and rigorously, honing their methodological and research skills, en route to preparing papers for professional conferences, planning for senior theses, and contemplating post-baccalaureate life.

The Program is conceived in the legacy of a social scientist and activist such as W.E.B. DuBois who inspires an ethos of multidisciplinarity, plurality and multivocality. The Arts and Humanities are clearly present in his repeated use of musical, literary, mythical, and other expressive forms and motifs in his analysis of the problem of democracy. The Sciences and Pre-Professional programs are crucial to his research and analysis, given his interest in the application of specialized skills and knowledge in addressing human experience, historical consciousness, and struggles to overcome. Certainly, interdisciplinary and interdivisional programs are well within this convoked community, Insofar as these areas of study similarly speak to human, social and political problems and their potential solutions, and importantly, the wide spaces between them and how they are traversed. Despite the Junior Fellows Program’s roots In the Division of the Social Sciences, It will be committed to interdisciplinary scholarship and collaboration, explicitly gesturing to creative extensions and modifications and adoptions across campus. We envision exciting work that would involve students from a number of disciplines beyond the social sciences.

PROGRAM SPECIFICS

Junior Fellows earn 6-8 credits. All Fellows will enroll in a 4-credit Proseminar in the fall. Juniors will automatically transfer into the spring Proseminar; those who will be in residence for the spring will enroll for tour credits, and those who spend the spring semester at another institution will complete the program with two credits, with reduced or modified requirements still consistent with the objectives of the Program.

During the academic year 2008-2009, the Program will consist of a series of regular meetings (the Proseminar), engagements with Invited scholars, working dinners, symposia, trips to regional events and institutes, independent scholarship, and collaborative work. A list of speakers will be publicized In April 2008.

Students will be assisted in developing projects and executing them, with a special emphasis on public scholarship in the form of publications or conference presentations. Here they will be guided by a faculty member in their field, and the Prosemlnar leaders, and facilitated by the Program Director to collaborate with peers or faculty. By the end of the fall, Fellows will be expected to submit a proposal to a conference or a publication or both. By the end of the spring semester, Fellows should have either presented at or attended a conference, published in an undergraduate or popular publication of repute (or have confirmation to that effect).

Queries must be directed to Asma Abbas, Faculty in Politics and Philosophy, at aabbas@simons-rock.edu.

2008-09 Program Theme:
Home and the Haunts of Modernity
Download a brochure (PDF)

The theme for our first Junior Fellows Program is “home” as trope, element, and object of social scientific inquiry. Whether in its resonance with notions of origins, dwelling, foundations, constructions, stability, etc., metaphors and valences of home are numerous, and inhabit some of the most basic presumptions of, and most visceral challenges to, our desires and our strugg1es in this world. The program will explore our explicit and implicit attachments to home as a notion and an actual place, as a part of both our intellectual and experiential comportments.

As the Division of the Social Sciences, we are prepared to commit ourselves to “Home” as a canny and somewhat organic concept that figures at once in epistemological and ontological concerns of our disciplines. It is a puzzle that, while serving as a topic to which we can reach out from our diverse pedagogical and scholarly habitats, forces us to consider not only what home is, but also how it is insinuated in our methodological and formal investments, at work and in everyday life, as part of broader trajectories of thought and practice, or as dissenters from them. We hope that Fellows will be able to bring their own pursuits, interests, and proclivities to bear on “home” in direct or indirect ways collaboratively responding to questions we will together articulate in response to the various engagements with speakers and with texts broadly understood. It takes seriously the challenge of late modernity to questions of subjectivity, identity, alienation, desire, freedom, where they must be found and how do we know we’ve found them (and at what cost), these yearnings that make us card-carrying citizens of a colonized and globalized world.

Home lingers overtly or covertly in the quests of scholars and students all across the humanities and the social sciences. Home is the oikos that forms the root of the words economics and ecology, and is in the nostos which infects literary, philosophical, artistic, political endeavours. It is the heimat that can be home only to some, and the real or imagined community—or nation—for which we fight. Is home something we are of or something we are from, is it our source or our origin, is It something we came from or something we are going to? Do we build the homes other live in or do we live in homes others build? Does the state determine who lives with me in my home, and do I decide when I can leave it? Is home a right or a privilege and how must it be distributed? Home is the walls I want to break down, and then at the same time Is the room of my own I want. Home is the locale in local politics, and it is In nature in iIts purity or its construction. When we want a house that can include everyone, and we when we want to destroy the master’s house in which we have been forced inhabitants; when what we call home sometimes threatens us to seek refuge and when home is what cannot contain our madness and banishes us to an asylum; as we seek foundations and justifications for truth and as we commit to questioning the foundations of the truths; as we fight for privacy and as we resist domestication; as we make domestic violence political and as we struggle to keep “politics" out of our bedrooms—We are addressing the myriad spirits of home. It is so again whether home is what forms our personalities and desires or it is what shackles them, whether we spend our lives resisting it or submitting to it, whether home is a temporal or a spatial notion, and whether someone else's search for being at home everywhere in the world amounts to no home anywhere in the world for my being. We invite you to dwell with each other, and with us, In these plural yet integrated haunts.

FACULTY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Asma Abbas, Linda Anderson, Nancy Bonvillain, Virginia Brush, Ryan Carey, Chris Coggins, Brian Conolly, Philip Mabry, Anne O'Dwyer (chair), Mary Marcy, Barbara Resnik, Samuel Ruhmkorff, Nancy Yanoshak, Tai Young-Taft

PROGRAM STAFF 2008-09

Program Director: Asma Abbas
Proseminar Coordinators:
Asma Abbas & Philip Mabry (Fall 2008
Philip Mabry (Spring 2009)

HOW TO APPLY

All current Sophomores (or JA Juniors) who expect to be in residence as Juniors during the fall of 2008 are eligible to apply to the Junior Fellows Program. While the Proseminar is designed as a two-semester sequence and all Fellows are expected to be in residence in the fall of their Junior year, some students may choose to study away during the spring semester. The Program is open to all eligible students regardless of their "chosen" concentrations. In addition to their interests and good academic standing, applicants must have the proven ability to organize their time well to keep pace with the activities of the program, and to produce work in accordance with professional expectations. Interested students must submit an application outlining the nature of their interests and how they correspond with the broad objectives announced in this brochure. A completed application will include:

(1) Letter of application to Selection Committee, addressing your purpose in applying to the program, thoughts on this year's theme and what you can bring to it.
(2) Copy of moderation letter
(3) Copy of transcript
(4) Curriculum vitate
(5) Letter of reference from BA Program Advisor or other faculty member
(6) A paper or essay that contains the kernel of something you will be interested in pursuing and developing over the following year

Complete applications must be received in the Office of Academic Affairs by Monday, March 17, 2008. They should be addressed to:
Program Director
Junior Fellows Program 2008-09
Division of Social Sciences
Bard College at Simon's Rock

The selection committee will communicate its decisions by Monday, March 24, 2008.