The WSIP Grad Workshop brings together graduate students from across disciplines to share work, learn from one another, and center interdisciplinary thinking. As the testimonials below confirm, students from a variety of disciplines and career stages have benefitted from the WSIP workshop’s intellectual community. The workshop is open to all who are interested, yet most participants are doing some kind of intersectional and/or anti-, post-, or de-colonial work. Students with a long-historical orientation or interest in interdisciplinarity per se are especially encouraged to join this community. Coordinated by Professor Laura Doyle, the Workshop typically meets 3-4 times a semester. Interested students are encouraged to get in touch directly with Laura (ldoyle@umass.edu) with a brief description of their research interests (1-2 sentences).
WSIP Graduate Workshop meeting schedule Spring 2024
- Mon Feb 12, 1:30-3:30 (South College, Tower Room)
- Mon March 11, 1:30-3:30
- Mon April 1, 1:30-3:30
Presenting my work to a multi-disciplinary audience has helped me articulate my thinking better. Further, learning about the work of other graduate students working on decolonization in different disciplines has broadened my understanding of the subject, helping me situate my own work with a more comprehensive understanding of the scholarly conversation. Finally, the workshops have provided a friendly, collaborative space for learning where we have together grappled with our responsibilities and challenges as students, researchers, and teachers
Saumya Lal (English)
My experience with WSIP has been an invaluable part of my graduate experience. I’ve found, through WSIP, a slow, patient, and even gritty forum for the hard work of building and transmitting knowledge amongst a broad array of scholars. I can confidently say that my work with WSIP has influenced my own work. A brief example: I’m an economist, and my research uses colonial archives to document the trajectories of wage labor in British East Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. Understanding the archives not just as repositories of technical data (i.e. XX tons of coffee exported, 1928), but as sites and expressions of power that present as well as conceal particular data, has expanded the scope of my questions about the institutional machinations of British colonialism, and has made my work much richer.
Jonathan Jenner (Economics)
I am a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the beginning stages of writing my dissertation on representations of fashion and dress in Caribbean historical fiction. This workshop offered me a unique space to present my work and to receive valuable feedback on my methodology from peers who are also engaged in transdisciplinary research projects. Workshops like the one led by Dr. Doyle bring graduate students and faculty together in a non-hierarchical way and in doing so, generate space for inclusive intellectual engagement—across languages, disciplines, and institutional roles.
Siobhan Mei (Comparative Literature)
The Workshop is exactly the kind of intellectual space that should be part of every graduate experience—it allows students with a common interest in world politics but different disciplinary homes to come together and ‘cross fertilize.’ In doing so, I have become aware of some of my own intellectual biases and assumptions.
Signe Predmore (Political Science)