2021-22 SCI Postdoctoral Fellows report on their inaugural year

Dongxian Jiang - SCI Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Philosophy

My first year as an SCI fellow at Stanford was a rewarding experience. In Spring 2021 I finished my first ever solo-teaching, “Political Thought in Modern Asia: Between East and West” (POLISCI 235N). Although my research focus is on China and the Confucian tradition, I decided to broaden the scope of the course by including three great Asian traditions: Confucianism in East Asia, Hinduism in South Asia, and Islam in Muslim-majority societies. In this discussion-based course I could honestly tell students that I would learn with them and from them so we can unravel some difficult concepts and questions together. I got 13 highly motivated students and the conversations were always productive and insightful. Most students in this class viewed the seminar as a major step for Stanford’s Political Science Department to develop a more inclusive and diverse curriculum. Their progressive and radical political viewpoints helped them to be more receptive to non-Western political ideas, especially those that were critical of liberal individualism. But this ideological tendency also frequently led them to romanticize non-Western values, as if Asian communitarianism can perfect the world whereas liberal individualism is the greatest evil in modern times. To counter this “romantic Orientalism” I asked students to pay special attention to the richness and complexity in all intellectual traditions. In modern Asian societies in particular, traditional texts and values have always been interpreted in various ways. Some interpretations are more friendly towards modern liberal values and critical of indigenous traditions, while others weaponize the illiberal dimensions of their traditions to criticize the modern West. To show students this internal complexity, in the second half of the quarter I arranged them to read important texts in modern and contemporary Asia that disagreed directly with each other, even though they rely on a same set of canonical texts. In the end, I think to some extent I changed students’ minds. Even if they still tended to use non-Western values to bash Western liberalism, they did take the internal complexity of the Asian traditions into consideration. Compared with their midterm papers, their final papers also presented more nuanced arguments. I was most pleased when I saw some of them choose to conduct independent research to explore issues not fully covered by our seminar discussions. After teaching was done, this seminar was welcomed by students with positive responses in the teaching evaluations. I am deeply grateful that the SCI gave me this opportunity to offer a course that I truly love to teach.

Alicia Steinmetz - SCI Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Political Thought

The Stanford Civics Initiative offers an intellectually robust, self-reflective, and collegial atmosphere for exploring crucial questions about the role of the humanities and humanistic social sciences in this time of fast-paced and unprecedented technological transformations and scientific accomplishments. My year as an SCI fellow was a period of immense professional growth, both as a teacher and as a scholar. I benefitted from designing and teaching my own syllabi, participating in curriculum development with an interdisciplinary team of faculty and postdocs, and presenting my work in multiple venues across the university. The SCI fellowship provided an excellent setting for transforming my dissertation into a book manuscript and fostered the development of several new research projects. Meanwhile, frequent teaching workshops and conversations with colleagues exposed me to innovative pedagogical techniques in higher education, while also encouraging me to explore the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches in my own teaching.

A summary of my year:

· Presented new work on six occasions

· Participated regularly in three workshops

· Audited two courses, as well as numerous teaching workshops

· Taught two courses as instructor of record

· Worked on course development for new first year curriculum

· Organized and held a book manuscript workshop