Warren Wilson College’s Vesely-Flad and Tam-Claiborne receive Fulbright scholarships

Press release from Warren Wilson College:

Warren Wilson College professor Rima Vesely-Flad has received a prestigious Fulbright award to teach Africana studies in Ghana.

Vesely-Flad, who serves as the director of the Peace and Justice Studies Department and as an associate professor of philosophy and Africana studies at Warren Wilson College, will teach four liberal arts courses at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).

“It will be a profound personal and intellectual experience to teach religious and philosophical ethics in an applicable way, using contemporary real-life case studies in Africa,” Vesely-Flad said. “I anticipate that it will be greatly challenging and rewarding.”

Two of the courses she will teach are already part of GIMPA’s core liberal arts curriculum, and the other two will be electives that highlight the role of African scholars and leaders. One of the courses, Social Change in Africa, will examine two case studies on transition to power: South Africa and Rwanda. In another course, Religious Ethics for Leaders, students will investigate theoretical approaches to the study of religion and examine anthropological and ethical teachings from three religious traditions that originated outside of Africa but are currently practiced on the continent—Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.

Vesely-Flad lived in Ghana last year when she took a sabbatical. During that time, she focused on writing a book called “Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation.” The book focuses on contemplative practices that foster resilient leadership in grassroots movements led by people of African descent. The idea arose out of her first book on the U.S. penal system and the Black Lives Matter movement, “Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice.”

“The current challenge to policing and mass incarceration of Black bodies fuels every aspect of the book, which began as a question about what role contemplative practice plays in frontline Black activist communities, and has evolved to examine intergenerational trauma of Black people and how Black people can be liberated,” Vesely-Flad said.

She said Ghana is an ideal place to write about the theories of psychological liberation for people of African descent. As the first Sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonialism, Ghana has offered great inspiration for Africans across the continent as well as African-descended peoples in the diaspora. In the U.S. in particular, Vesely-Flad said, Ghana has been particularly meaningful: W.E.B. Du Bois spent his last years in Ghana; Maya Angelou lived and wrote in Ghana; Malcolm X visited twice during his last year; and Martin Luther King Jr. attended the nation’s independence celebration, and it inspired his increasingly global vision of freedom.

“My scholarly work emphasizes theories of race and social justice movements in the U.S.” she said. “I have also taught on anti-colonial movements in various African countries as well as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. During the Fulbright grant, I anticipate steeping myself in the voices of African thinkers in humanities and social scientific disciplines.”

She said her training in ethics and public policy will help her incorporate the humanities in the curriculum of public administration majors in the new School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at GIMPA.

“I am excited to teach critical thinking courses at an institution of higher education that prioritizes public administration skills,” Vesely-Flad said. “I am deeply inspired by an institution that teaches the humanities alongside practical skills.”

She said that aspect of GIMPA reminds her of Warren Wilson, which, unlike most liberal arts colleges in the U.S., offers practical majors such as social work and environmental policy with a core liberal arts curriculum and applied learning experiences through the Work Program and Community Engagement. She expects that the experience of teaching in Ghana will inform her approach to teaching ethics and leadership courses back at Warren Wilson.

At Warren Wilson, Vesely-Flad teaches philosophy, Africana studies and global studies, and she leads the college’s Peace and Justice Studies Department. Within the Peace and Justice Studies Department, she directs the “Inside Out” program, in which Warren Wilson College students take classes alongside incarcerated women in a local prison.

Vesely-Flad said she hopes to build enduring connections at GIMPA and throughout the city where it is located, Accra. She hopes her Fulbright experience will lead to establishing a study abroad program for Warren Wilson College students in Ghana, and to creating a student exchange program for Ghanaians to study at Warren Wilson.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic has delayed her travel to Ghana until at least January, Vesely-Flad said she is looking forward to the day when she and her family can return. During her sabbatical year, she said, she experienced Ghana as an incredibly hospitable, welcoming environment for families. She said she is excited to interact with college students and other scholars there on a daily basis.

Daniel Tam-Claiborne, a recent graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, has received a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct ethnographic research and write a novel to address questions about culture, identity and belonging against the backdrop of contemporary U.S.-China relations.

“My project will allow me to experience the world of my characters, enmeshing myself with the people and places that celebrate their true complexity,” Tam-Claiborne said. “Through it, I hope to bring about a renewed understanding of the people—strangers and natives alike—who make China home.”

He said writing can be a powerful tool for reaching people on a more individual level, and he hopes the novel will serve as a vehicle for social change.

“As humans, we are primed to feel uneasy and even adversarial towards people and experiences that we don’t understand or find difficult to relate to. But what would it mean to have a portrait of U.S.-China relations that was more complicated than the static headlines we often see portrayed in the news?” Tam-Claiborne said. “In an increasingly divided world, writing can be a tool for bridging that distance, to break free from the way we see ourselves and more fully embrace others.”

Though his project has been delayed until at least January of 2021 due to COVID-19, Tam-Claiborne said the public health crisis has also propelled his project into the present moment his project in ways he couldn’t have imagined when he originally wrote the proposal.

The novel, titled “Transplants,” focuses on the story of two women of Chinese heritage who do not feel at home in either of the two countries of their parentage, and whose uneasy friendship at a rural university in China radically changes the trajectory of both of their lives. Tam-Claiborne’s research project involves conducting ethnographic research to develop these two protagonists.

“While there are increasingly more works of fiction that deal with the position of Chinese in America or Americans in China, relatively few delve into the politics and the particularities of Chinese Americans in China,” Tam-Claiborne said. “I hope to continue in the tradition of writing about the Asian diaspora and the universal feelings of loss, displacement, and the search for meaning in foreign places.”

The first part of Tam-Claiborne’s research project will take place at South China Normal University (SCNU) in Guangzhou, located in the Guangdong Province. He will participate in an international writing residency and use a combination of participant observation and phenomenology—qualitative methods he studied as a graduate student at Yale University—to understand the experiences of Chinese students who have studied at American colleges. Later, he will travel to his ancestral village in Taishan to do field research on the history, development, and evolution of the village and its inhabitants.

His novel is influenced both by his grandparents’ own migration story and his own experience growing up half Chinese in the U.S. Tam-Claiborne said he grew up grappling with an identity he could not easily classify, and that difficulty only intensified when he graduated college in the U.S. and began teaching English in rural China.

“This story connects to larger ideas that are being faced by people all over the world—of migration, of belonging, of being turned away because of certain aspects of their identity that are immutable, that they are born with, that they can’t change,” Tam-Claiborne said. “I don’t imagine that this will speak to or answer all of those questions, but I hope it will provide a little bit of light, some kind of respite for people feeling stretched between places or not having a sense of home.”

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is one of the most widely recognized and prestigious international exchange programs in the world. Sponsored by the U.S. government, the program supports research, study and teaching in more than 140 countries.

“Our program is proud of Daniel’s achievement, and thrilled that he’ll have this invaluable opportunity in China, post-graduation, to teach as well as to research and develop his MFA thesis into the novel he envisions,” said Debra Allbery, director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Tam-Claiborne, who graduated from the MFA Program for Writers in July, said being part of the program at Warren Wilson College transformed his life and helped improve his writing in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

“It’s been a huge culture shift in terms of how I see myself as a writer after having the experience of meeting faculty and being exposed to an incredible cohort of people who are all passionate about the same things,” Tam-Claiborne said.