Introducing the Miami Institute: Why Miami
Note: U.S. journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted last night: “Are we all supposed to just cook dinner and watch TV like all of this is normal?” During these moments of heightened national and international stresses, how do we go about our daily lives including our work as scholars? What is the continued value of our research, thinking, and writing? Using W.E.B. Du Bois as example—who not only lived through two world wars, but researched, wrote, and published books from Atlanta University in a Jim Crow South, and continued finding purpose in his role as editor of The Crisis even after reporting on the East St. Louis massacre of 1917 which he witnessed first-hand— there is value in remaining continuously attentive about knowledge production in our fields including knowledge produced on the Global Majority. Because ideas about each other and ourselves have real-life consequences for our communities and arguably increasingly so during moments of heightened regional, national, and international anxiety. In that spirit, we move ahead with this third and final introductory post, even with and precisely because of our anxieties. Here, Maribel Morey reinforces the significance of the Institute’s incorporation in Miami and introduces its projected work plan, deliverables, and the focus of its first online forums.
“I insisted on writing outside the white gaze, not against it but in a space where I could postulate the humanity writers were always being asked to enunciate.” -Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019).
With its geographic location in Miami, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences signals its intentions to be an equal meeting place among Global Majority scholars in both hemispheres, with some distance from the white Anglo-American gaze in elite academic and funding institutions in the Global North.
As William A. Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton note in their 2019 report, “The Color of Wealth in Miami,” 65% of the Miami region’s population identifies as Hispanic/Latinx, and it is home to “the largest share of Colombian, Honduran, and Peruvian populations in the United States (Motel and Pateen, 2012), and at present, holds the largest concentration of Haitians in the country (Motel and Pateen, 2012; also see Zong and Batalova, 2016).”
The city’s roots in the Global South is a constant reminder to us at the Miami Institute that the Global South is an intellectually vibrant, diverse, and contradictory space. Existing in this Global Majority region of the United States, we are reminded too that discrimination and bias against the Global Majority can be, has been, and is practiced among the Global Majority. So if our goal— as it is— is to center the scientific output of Global Majority scholars in the social sciences as means both for improving the integrity and rigor of these fields and for building more inclusive national and international political economies, we keep in mind the importance too of maintaining critical engagement with work produced among us in the Global Majority. In this way, we expect that this intellectual space created by and for Global Majority scholars will be stimulating and purposeful.
And so, without a dominant white Anglo-American gaze defining the research questions we ask and the conversations we have within and among our fields in the social sciences, we are creating space at the Miami Institute to have serious, difficult, sincere, and consequential conversations about knowledge production in our fields among us Global Majority scholars.
Over the years, the Miami Institute plans to underscore the significance of its physical location in this Global Majority region of the Global North with all of its contradictions, though equally too to embrace a strong open-access virtual presence that will help nurture its growing network of scholars throughout the Global South and North.
At first, we will emphasize a virtual presence because of our initial grassroots funding model and present COVID-19 realities (discussed in a previous post). Building the Miami Institute’s open-access virtual platform furthermore complements calls to democratize access to knowledge across both hemispheres. In the long-term, it also complements climate activists’ long-standing calls to minimize air travel, and this is a call that the Miami Institute has internalized in planning its own board meetings and yearly events. In this way, board meetings during the first two years will be virtual, and then transition to three quarterly virtual meetings and an in-person annual meeting. And rather than hosting numerous in-person workshops and events throughout the year, the Miami Institute will concentrate on two summer workshops, one virtual and another in-person.
In the spirit of reflecting its evolving communities of scholars, the Miami Institute will maintain English as its main language of communication online and in-person, though it also will publish and hold seminars in other languages, most immediately in dominant languages amongst the Global Majority. Relatedly, it is worth flagging that the Institute’s founding leadership is based in the Global North. However, as our networks in the Global South continue to grow in the process of building the Institute, our leadership too will evolve to better reflect our growing community of Global Majority scholars in both hemispheres.
That is to say that the Miami Institute always will strive towards intellectual rigor and thoughtfulness as a creative space for and by Global Majority scholars, from our leadership and forum topics to the languages we use to share our ideas as Global Majority scholars.
Most immediately next week, please join us here on this site for the launch of our inaugural forums bringing together social science scholars imagining what research in their fields would look like without white Anglo-American domination in universities and research funding, both past and present. We will begin with a forum on economics followed by forums on political science, sociology, history, law, psychology, anthropology, and some interdisciplinary fields. These early forums will set the stage for the sorts of questions, scholars, and works—both past and present—that the Miami Institute will begin to probe and analyze online in its dual efforts to center the scientific output of Global Majority scholars in the social sciences and to address discrimination and bias against the Global Majority in the production of knowledge in the social sciences.
To stay up-to-date with our forums, please sign up on our homepage. Or simply follow us on Twitter (@miami_institute)!
-Maribel Morey, Founding Executive Director, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences
