Joint Princeton-Columbia Graduate Student Workshop, September 29 - October 1, 2000

National Identity and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective

Regional Session Overview and Objectives

Time Period

This session will take place mid-day on Saturday, from 1-3:30pm. We purposely scheduled it for this time to provide a break from the intensity of small group discussions and to allow for interaction with a different group of people early in the workshop. It is preceded by lunch and followed by a coffee/snack break. Group members are free to choose to take a break during the session, but no refreshments have been scheduled midway.

Objective

The idea of this session is to allow participants working on the same country or region of the world to meet each other and share region-specific experiences. While participants in this session may have significantly different approaches to the subject of the workshop, they may well be people you will meet regularly in the future due to your interest in the same region. Thus, one objective of the session is to allow participants to develop professional networks among scholars in their chosen region of study. Another is to allow participants to share knowledge regarding research approaches to the region in question. Finally, we hope that this session will present an opportunity for results on the interaction between national identity and public policy to accumulate into a regional picture.

Participants

Participants have been divided into four groups based on the country or region of their research. The groups range from six to eight people in size and are labeled: Japan, Western Europe, post-communist states, and post-colonial states. Each group also has been assigned at least one faculty mentor. If you feel that it would be more appropriate to attend a group other than the one assigned to you, please contact the organizers to discuss a possible change in group assignment.

Format

This session will be chaired by a faculty mentor. Since participants will not necessarily have read the paper submissions of each participant in advance, the session will begin by each participant succinctly summarizing her/his research objectives, status, and importance in a way that will be understood easily by a diverse audience of follow regionalists. This format was suggested by our faculty mentors as a way of developing an important professional skill.

Each participant will be given five (5) minutes to introduce her/his research in response to the following question: "How do you conceptualize the link between identity and public policy in your research?"

It is up to the group to decide how to structure the 2 1/2 hour session, but one way would be to allow each participant to offer his/her summary in succession (which would take approximately 40 minutes), then brainstorm about topics to follow-up on for the remaining time. It is expected that the interests of each group of regionalists will vary, so we thought it best to allow each regional group to determine how best to spend the remaining time.

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