A Year in Review— 2023
Dear Friends,
Here at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, our work is to consistently promote and remind ourselves and our communities of the rich, vivid, and ongoing knowledge that has been produced and is being produced by our various communities across the Global Majority. Because from our perspectives, a critical step towards treating each other and each other’s communities with greater dignity and humanity in all aspects of life is to acknowledge each other and each other’s communities as pillars of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. We see ourselves playing the long-term role of helping to bring us together locally here in Miami, nationally in the U.S., and globally by sharing knowledge about, and by, each other.
In that spirit, here are some highlights of our work in 2023:
We introduced the Global Index— a prototype database that we are building at the Miami Institute to facilitate our community’s efforts to further decolonize our syllabi and reading lists and to learn about each other’s work across the Global Majority in the Global South and North.
As a Florida-based nonprofit, we also have been present for, and have facilitated discussions on, the future of knowledge production among our Global Majority communities in the United States, including public discussions on the “Past, Present, and Future of African American Studies in the U.S.” We thank Carol Anderson, Noliwe Rooks, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and Sharon Austin for their active participation in these conversations.
The Miami Institute also has helped to coordinate a virtual forum among graduate students at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami and the City University of New York (CUNY) in NYC on "What exactly is ‘medical anthropology’ and what value, if any, is there in studying and belonging to the field?” We thank Gemma Galvez, Sergio A. Rivera Rodriguez, Stephanie Salgado, and Liz Perez for coordinating this forum.
While nurturing our ties to our local community here in Miami and national network of scholars across the United States, we also have partnered with the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) in Malaysia to facilitate a conversation on a briefing report from UNU-IIGH on global university rankings. We thank UNU-IIGH research lead, David McCoy, and colleagues Angel Calderon and Ellen Hazelkorn for their discussion of the report.
We are also collaborating with UNU-IIGH on a forum on what it means to decolonize global public health (this forum is currently ongoing), with incoming responses to UNU-IIGH’s David McCoy essay from global public health colleagues across the world, including Ted Schrecker and forthcoming pieces from Mark Padilla, Valeria Marina Valle, and Sethembiso-Promise Mthembu.
Separately, sociologist Rituparna Patgiri, based in India, provided her follow-up reflections on “Precarity in the Sociology Job Market in India.”
Our informal “Café en casa” series, established in collaboration with the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), has included intergenerational discussions among political sociologist Percy Hintzen and Africana Studies scholar Aaron Kamugisha; community activist Mary Curry and her grandchild, Jordan Curry Carter; and, social justice philanthropy guides Bina M. Patel, Cathy Garcia, and Marci Ovadia.
As we look towards 2024, we will keep as guide our vision for growth, which we shared with you earlier this year, and will continue our work to consistently promote and remind ourselves and our communities of the rich, vivid, and ongoing knowledge that has been produced and is being produced by our various communities across the Global Majority. We look forward to your continued engagement and support, whether by suggesting new forum topics, by becoming members or, more generally, by donating. We appreciate you.
Un abrazo,
Dr. Maribel Morey, Executive Director
