Dr Shidong Wang, Director of the Oxford Prospects and Global Development Institute at RPC, updates us with how the centre is working during lockdown.
It is not always a bad thing to work at home. I have picked up some early year skills of planting, observing the sprouting of spinach and strawberry seeds under protective plastic film in the warmth of the greenhouse. It takes patience and perseverance to bring my garden into good shape this season.
By way of introduction (to any new acquaintances), and updating (to our known colleagues), permit me to draw from OPGDI’s dual heritage: It is for us the best of times and the worst of times, and indeed, this crisis brings both danger and opportunity. It could hardly be otherwise, given our institute’s established interdisciplinary focus on the development of East-West relations within a globalised world. So inevitably, the pandemic’s “first punch” hit us from the East, with our Chinese academic partners and participants unable to travel to the UK at the start of the year, followed by the “second punch” a few months later when the virus reached us here in the West. Along the way, we learned that it takes even more work to “un-book” events and programmes than to prepare them! But we are far from flattened, continuing to contribute as much as ever to Regent’s resilience and community.
Working remotely from home, our six staff have formulated online contingency plans, specifically designed to suit distance delivery and configured into themed Clusters intersecting subject disciplines. In this way, our partner universities will be able to offer their students exploration of Oxford education through OPGDI’s annual summer programme, and this year technologically transported to participants’ laptops. Lacking the strawberries and cream, but with a nourishing plate of academic flavours from Philosophy, Politics, Economics, Law; to English Literature, Performing Arts, Education; and Foundations of Human Science with Artificial Intelligence, Chemistry, Physics. Though without the punting, there is plentiful pastoral input in the interactive workshops crafted to nurture students through the trajectory of university application, student life and career options beyond. We are privileged to have as lecturers renowned academics, many Fellows of the Royal Society and British Academy, who are extending their live lecturing to virtual range. This online initiative also sustains the “growing cycle” for OPGDI’s Visiting Students Programme which brings the brightest students of China’s top-tier universities to Regent’s and other Oxford colleges each academic year.
At the more “matured” stage of the academic ecology, the University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Equality and Diversity is supporting OPGDI’s effort to take our 5th University Presidents’ Round Table, postponed from May in Oxford, to China (possibly) at the end of the year, if the global circumstances permit.
Some seeds planted last year, are now bearing fruit. The publication from the Social Governance Research Symposium held last Michaelmas Term is now under final review by contributing editors Dr George Leeson and Prof Robert Walker. Interviewing videos from the 2019 visit by the College’s Honorary Fellow Dr Mo Yan will soon be published by the British Library. The newly-elected Rhodes Scholar Yan Yan – our VSP student of last year – will be joined in Oxford by Li Jingdi, an alumna of our summer programme and currently at European Molecular Biology Laboratory, commencing her PhD with the Zoology Department in October.
Much as this is a time for innovation, it is above all a time for holding fast to OPGDI’s foundational motivation of international scholarship and interchange. Coronavirus has given a potent lesson in the value and vitality of expertise, of research which is both comparative and collaborative.
It is at times like these that we can demonstrate our steadfast friendship, endurance and commitment – to our partners in China and around the globe, as with our home community here at Regent’s. We also renew our sights onto a world which is more visibly interconnected and interdependent than ever.
