The Burkle Center funds faculty research working groups and faculty research projects led by UCLA faculty in support of the study and analysis of significant questions of international policy and politics. Faculty Research Working Group activities can take various forms, such as a series of roundtables, reading groups, speaker symposia or workshops centered on a theme. Faculty research project grants are seed grants designed to jump start major grant proposals in the realm of international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and issues of global cooperation and conflict. Themes must address a topic or topics related to international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and/or issues of global cooperation and conflict.
Faculty research grants are awarded annually during late spring to fund project during the next academic year.
Christian Dippel, Assistant Professor of Economics, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Research Project: This project seeks to collect detailed annual data on British colonies during the First Globalization from the mid-19th century up to WWI. From the early 19th century, British colonial authorities started collecting amazingly detailed data for each of their colonies, often at the parish-level. A particular emphasis was placed on trade statistics because these constituted the main source of local tax revenues. This data-source, located at the British National Archives and the British Library in London, has never been systematically digitized or used for a large-scale comparative study. This data will therefore both generate original research and exert a positive externality on the profession by making available a very large new data-set which sheds completely new light on a large portion of the 19th global trading world. Understanding how the benefits from globalization can be spread broadly so that they can be harnessed to generate a virtuous cycle in which trade, innovation and economic development become mutually reinforcing is today more relevant than ever.
For further information contact Christian Dippel at the Anderson School of Management: E) Christian.dippel@anderson.ucla.edu (P) 310.825.7465.
Robert Trager, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Research project: This project focuses on the creation of a new dataset of state inferences about the future behavior and intentions of other states, and the development of grant proposals for the National Science Foundation, the European Research Council and other funding organizations. In the international relations field, no such dataset of inference currently exists despite the centrality of the question of how states draw inferences about each others’ future behavior. The dataset will draw on British inferences from 1854 to 1914, a period that saw many varying international contexts thus providing a unique resource for international relations scholars. Analysis of this data will be used in Trager’s book project, Diplomatic Calculus in Anarchy.
For further information contact Robert Trager at the Department of Political Science: E) rtrager@ucla.edu (P) 310.825.8809.
Roger Waldinger, Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology (Working Group Chair); Ruben Hernandez-Leon, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology; and Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Associate Professor, Department of Education.
Status: Although migration is clearly a domestic issue, it is driven by cross-border social networks; it therefore inherently produces international spillovers – remittances, cross-border communication and travel, diaspora politics, as well as homeland-oriented immigrant philanthropy – that in turn trigger responses from home countries, seeking to influence the emigrants and access their resources. During 2012-13, the Migration Study Group will continue its bi-weekly program of speakers, with plans to once again assemble an interdisciplinary group as well as invite international speakers. The bi-weekly series will be complemented with a one-day workshop per quarter. Furthermore, the Group will cosponsor a small interdisciplinary, international conference on “A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and their Homelands,” with the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris.
For further information contact Roger Waldinger at the Department of Sociology: E) waldinge@soc.ucla.edu (P) 310.206.9233.