2021 Summer Workshop: “Funding the Revolution in the Academe”
Note: This June 2021, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences hosted a three-day summer workshop on “Funding the Revolution in the Academe.” Here, the Miami Institute’s executive director, Maribel Morey, includes an abridged version of her introductory remarks from the first day of the workshop on June 10, 2021. Please note that recordings of all three sessions of the workshop can be viewed below and via our page dedicated to the summer workshop.
Hi, welcome to the Miami Institute’s first summer workshop on “Funding the Revolution in the Academe.” The Miami Institute for the Social Sciences is a nonprofit research institute, established, in June 2020, for many of us Global Majority scholars who have wanted to discover what it would mean to produce scholarship on the Global Majority in the social sciences beyond the white gaze of a dominating Global North academe and philanthropic circles. And by Global Majority, we generally mean minorities in the Global North and the Global South generally.
We are a research institute for and by the Global Majority, centering the work of Global Majority scholars in the social sciences. By doing so, we hope to be playing our part to address inequities in the construction of knowledge on the Global Majority in the social sciences, and in doing so, strengthening the integrity and rigor of these fields and helping to build more equitable national and international political economies. Because ideas about each other matter—they matter for each other’s sense of dignity, for our collective sense of unity and disunity at the national and global levels, and we scholars in the social sciences and neighboring fields play a part in creating these psychologies of unity and disunity among and within the Global Minority and Global Majority in the Global South and North.
As far as upcoming events at the Miami Institute, please stay tuned for our next disciplinary focus within our inaugural forums: sociology. These inaugural forums at the Miami Institute—which have begun with a focus on the fields of economics and then philosophy—are bringing together scholars in the social sciences and neighboring fields to discuss discrimination and bias against the Global Majority in our respective disciplines and to imagine what research in our fields would look like, for example, without white Anglo-American domination in universities and research funding both past and present. For example, which networks of past and present thinkers and works would we center? These inaugural forums begin with written contributions from authors, followed by a virtual Q&A among the authors. Please find the essays on the Miami Institute’s homepage and the virtual Q&As under “recorded webinars.”
Beyond our inaugural forums, we are also hosting a forum on social and solidarity economies to be published in Spanish, later this summer. This is a collaboration with colleagues at el Centro internacional de la investigación de la economía social y solidaria de la Universidad Iberoamericana (CIIESS) in Mexico City, Mexico, and la Red COMPARTE, a network of sixteen social organizations across eleven countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. We are also coordinating a forum on race and development, curated by Professor T.D. Harper-Shipman author of Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (2019).
At the Miami Institute, the idea for this summer workshop came to us during a board meeting a few months ago, just as we were preparing to launch our experimental funding model, inspired by mutual aid and solidarity economies around the world.
If you turn to our website’s page on our mutual aid-solidarity economy model, you can see how our experimental funding model has been rooted in our own efforts to try to take a step away from norms in academic funding. As we note on our website, during the past years, many of us scholars in the Global South and North have taken part in intellectual exchanges imagining national and global political economic models beyond neoliberalism, and relatedly, others long have been discussing and documenting the transformative potentials for solidarity economies across the world as guides towards a more equitable and sustainable future. Applying these thoughts to our own lives as Global Majority scholars, we have thought here at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences:
Could we, Global Majority scholars across the Global South and North, come together to finance ourselves this research institute designed for and by us? Could we break away from our own patterns in this neoliberal age of appealing for funding from elite funders in the Global North—themselves catalysts of the very national and global economic inequities so many of us hope to transform? That is, can we—as scholars—genuinely hope to transform the current political economic structure while still depending on it so wholly to finance our work?
With these questions in mind, this February we launched our experimental funding model at the Miami Institute, which leans on support on our base—fellow Global Majority scholars across the Global South and North. In doing so, we lean on the long histories of African American cooperative economic activity in the U.S. and of longstanding mutual aid traditions throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. And we join many others around the world coming together in solidarity economies—such as the ‘Banker Ladies’ in Toronto and the women of the Kudumbashree movement in Kerala. Finding inspiration too in the Yomol A’tel initiative in Chiapas, Mexico City, Puebla and Guadalajara, we aim also to re-engage with the dominant neoliberal economic order in novel and empowering ways. To this point, we not only include ways for Global Majority scholars to support the Institute, through open donations and membership subscriptions, but also offer a course for funders on the More Equitable Funding of Knowledge, which we launched last month.
Because as we imagine, it is counterproductive to imagine more liberated work— more liberated knowledge production—in the academe without also questioning its long-standing funding sources. And yet too, leaning on mutual aid and solidarity economy models is all very new for many of us academics, and we are very eager to hear others’ own efforts to create more liberating spaces for funding like-minded organizations and networks.
For that reason, we have planned this summer workshop. And we have planned it in dialogue with the DiSE Collective in Kerala, India and Toronto, Canada. We have thought it helpful to take a moment to sit with fellow scholars in the social sciences, leaders and practitioners in nonprofits and philanthropy, and organizers embracing solidarity economy and mutual aid models to discuss the past and present of social science funding within and beyond the United States and ways that experiences with cooperative economic models might inform the funding of the social sciences today.
Because we know that those who fund knowledge shape and control knowledge. We just have to think back to the Ford Foundation under McGeorge Bundy and the formation of Black Studies at U.S. universities in the mid-to-late 20th century. As Noliwe Rooks writes in White Money, Black Power (Beacon Press, 2006): “Although the Ford Foundation ‘actively tried to influence Black Studies programs through strategic grant making,’ the choices it made as to the types of programs and institutional structures it would support had far-ranging consequences for the future of Black Studies as well as for racial interaction on campuses” (26).
As scholars today, how can we not imagine and question the role of funding in our lives, and the ways that this funding shapes the parameters of our own thinking? Do we think that we are exceptionally less prone to being influenced by the Ford Foundation presidents, program officers, and their peers of today in shaping the contours of our research?
But at the same time, as we reflected further at the Miami Institute: Doesn’t elite philanthropy—the very foundations who have benefited from the injustices and inequities of racial capitalism—have an ethical and moral obligation to help build a more just future within and beyond the academe? Why should the less wealthy among us have to carry the financial burden of revolutionizing the academe, so that knowledge production in our fields become more rigorous, more equitable, and better approximate their roles as national and international public goods? And yet, it does matter for us to be funded by constituents—our base—rather than by benefactors. It keeps us accountable to us, Global Majority scholars coming together with the common interest of interrogating knowledge production in our fields, rather than a few program officers.
To this point, the workshop’s title—Funding the Revolution in the Academe—is inspired by INCITE!’s book, The Revolution will not be Funded (South End Press, 2007) and the book’s layered analysis on the nonprofit and academic industrial complex. As Andrea Smith writes in the book’s 2017 preface: “At the end of the day, and even while we resist the overwhelming role of elite funders in shaping and limiting the creative imagination of movements and scholars, “it is not really possible to organize outside of capitalism and thus outside of compromise” (x). Inspired by this book, and reflecting our own questions at the Miami Institute: What are the most liberating forms of funding? Perhaps it is not which one source is best, but rather, about keeping diverse sources of revenue that echo our institutional values.
We are thus here together in this summer workshop with open minds and hearts to think about and discuss all forms of potential funding for the social sciences—what would lead to more liberating scholarship, and thus too, towards a more rigorous and equitable academe? We are here to learn from each others’ work and experiences in the history and present of social science funding; funding ecosystems generally; and in mutual aid and solidarity economies. Because the academe is in need of a revolution, so that it becomes that much more of an inclusive, thoughtful, and rigorous space of knowledge exchange among all scholars from the Global South and North. And to get there, asking ourselves who should fund such a revolution and how is critically important.
So please join us today and the next two Thursdays as we sit with these questions!
-Maribel Morey
Maribel Morey is founding executive director of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences and author of the forthcoming book, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order (UNC Press, October 2021).
