Anne-Isabelle Richard: ‘Equal cooperation is particularly important in this field’
Assistant professor Anne-Isabelle Richard has received no fewer than three different grants for research and teaching on relations between Europe and Africa.
Shortly after the Second World War, regional cooperation was a hot topic. In 1948, regional universities were established in Western Europe, East Africa and the Caribbean. The aim was to connect the region and train future leaders. Richard found this interesting. ‘As a politician or administrator, you can come up with this idea, but people often do something different from what you hope they will.’
Almost eighty years later, there are major differences, both in how the universities have developed and in the forms that regional cooperation has taken. Richard: ‘I want to know how that variation works. Why are the results so different?’
Virtual international collaboration
A VIS grant will enable Richard to involve her students in this research. ‘The grant is intended to enable me to collaborate with colleagues elsewhere in the world, in my case East Africa and the Caribbean, to develop a course in which students collaborate online. ‘In this case, we want to work with students to examine the relationship between education, the state and regionalisation. The grant provides the opportunity to develop both the academic side and practical matters. If you want to bring together students from different regions, what is a convenient time, and what online platforms are accessible to everyone? How do other educational cultures and teacher-student relationships work?’
'In this field in particular, it is important to work together as equals, to discover how you can support and help each other in an equal way.'
Jean Monnet Grant
That is why she co-authored an application for the Jean Monnet Grant. ‘It is being led by Leuven, with seventeen partners in Europe and Africa,’ she explains. ‘Together, we want to explore the relationship between the African Union and the European Union and investigate how knowledge can be brought together from different perspectives. You see that the EU is really trying to use an inclusive narrative, but then a word from the colonial era is used that is offensive in Africa. As a humanities scholar, you can play a role in this. That's why we're also organising two summer schools for PhD candidates as part of the project: one here in Leiden and one in Cape Verde.'
Transatlantic Platform
And then there is Richard's third project, for which she is receiving a grant from the Transatlantic Platform: ‘International relations are not shaped by politics alone, of course,’ she says. 'Civil society is at least as important. That is why, for this third project, we are looking at the trust that international organisations and citizens had in each other and how they may have wanted to change that. What waves of change were there in the twentieth century? We are working on this with a team from England, the US, Canada, Switzerland and myself.’
Busy, but enjoyable
With all those international exhibitions and projects, Richard's schedule is well filled for the coming years. 'Of course it's busy, but it's nice that it's all teamwork. That way, you inspire each other and learn from one another.'