Up to six Transregional Center for Democratic Studies Fellowships will be offered in the Fall of 2002 to GF students able to demonstrate serious commitment to the comparative study of current social, political, and economic transitions taking place in different regions of the world. The Fellowship will offer a $ 3,000 tuition or research grant (depending on individual circumstances) during the Fall 2002 semester.

The TCDS Fellowship seeks to encourage and support an environment for new kinds of research which, while focusing on common issues faced by societies undergoing systemic transitions, would be informed by expertise on their respective cultural and political contexts, and therefore contribute to a deeper understanding of processes taking place both globally and locally. The TCDS Fellowship is also designed to facilitate opportunities for joint research projects by GF students and graduate students from other regions of the world who are studying similar issues. Students awarded the Fellowship will be working closely in small teams with junior visiting scholars, who bring different but complementary perspectives (two from Africa, two from Latin America, and two from Eastern Europe). They will be invited by TCDS to conduct parallel research at the GF during the Fall 2002 semester.

The Fall 2002 TCDS Fellowship program will focus on four specific themes. Proposed research proposals/projects should relate to at least one of the following broad clusters of themes:

• Public Sphere and Political Culture
• Nationality-Ethnicity-Gender
• Civil Society and Social Change
• Democratization, Political Justice, and Economic Equity

Each recipient of the TCDS Fellowship will be required to enroll in one course (or audit a course if course work is completed) addressing one of the themes above, and to work closely with a faculty on the Fellow’s specific project and with other fellows within one of four small working groups organized according to the themes listed above. The TCDS Fellows will be expected to participate fully in the Fall 2002 TCDS Work-in-Progress Workshop and to discuss progress on their research in the workshop during the fall semester. Final versions of papers will be presented at the TCDS Fall Conference at the end of December and will be published as part of the TCDS Working Paper Series.

Fellowships are open to GF students who have completed all requirements for the Masters degree and have begun their Ph. D. course work. Applicants should already be pursuing research in the following fields: political science, sociology, economics, or anthropology, and be interested in employing a comparative perspective. They should have a demonstrated commitment to both scholarly research and involvement in civil society and civic organizations. Preference will be given to students who are alumni of the TCDS Democracy & Diversity Summer Graduate Institute sin Cracow or Cape Town.

Interested applicants should submit a 1-2 page statement of purpose describing their research project and how it relates to any of the four themes of the TCDS Fellowship, and how it would benefit from a collaborative, transregional research setting; CV or resume; GF transcripts; and names of two GF faculty members willing to serve as references (no actual recommendation letter is needed), to: Robert Kostrzewa, Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs and Scholarships, Mezzanine, 65 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, fax: (646) 486-0755. For further information on the program, contact Timo Lyyra at TCDS, tel. 212-229-5580, e-mail lyyra@newschool.edu.