From 1 to 29 March 2022, I had the privilege of staying at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance, Switzerland near Geneva along with a truly *wonderful* community of scholars. I'd like to take the opportunity in a series of blog posts to cover my one-month research stay because it was unexpectedly one of the most rewarding intellectual and personal experiences I've had in a long time. Not only did I get to conduct research in Switzerland (an important country for international drug policy) and finish off and send my book (yay!), but it also taught me the importance of building and contributing to a supportive and encouraging community. Preparing for and participating in this stay coincided with a lot of major life changes and I finally had the chance this March to properly reflect on them.
Already missing this amazing breakfast view :’)
I was originally meant to go from February to March 2021. A month after I started my UEdinburgh Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society postdoc in September 2019, I got to go on a birthday trip to Geneva to research WHO archives for five days.[1] Using this material, I planned some articles but also felt the story was big enough to write a book so I applied for this residency, which I'd heard about from people at CBSS. Back then, I didn't have a contract so I wrote in my proposal that my aim was to draft 48,000 words worth of chapters and win a contract with a major academic publisher. I had one paper in the works, which was provisionally targeted at the International Journal of Drug Policy (IJDP). The IJDP paper sadly didn't get through to the second round of peer review but I’ve had it accepted as "Governing Drugs Globally: The World Health Organization and Public Health in International Drug Control"! It’s ahead of print in the spring 2022 issue of The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs (SHAD) so please check it out :)
The planned spring 2021 stay was postponed a year due to COVID-19. When I got the news, I was in Japan for an extended stay, which I’d arranged with my line manager at Edinburgh. In the meantime, throughout April 2021, I remotely arranged the "Scotland in the Global" workshop (with Japan-UK time differences) while participating in the "Asia in Histories of Science Diplomacy" seminar series (superbly arranged by Aya Homei at Manchester and Gordon Barrett at Oxford) and preparing a 3-year JSPS postdoc in Japanese to work with Professor Kazuhiko Yago at Waseda University’s School of Commerce on the Japan-India-World Bank project I’m currently pulling together from Nagoya. In late April/early May 2021, I got the MQUP advance contract and the tenured associate professorship at Nagoya University - I’ll discuss in another post about preparing for academic job interviews in Japan.
NU campus photo I took after my interview April 2021- can’t believe it’s almost been a year!
Throughout May to September when I was due to start, I was super excited about Nagoya but I now had to move the last eight years of my UK postgrad life, which had accumulated in my Edinburgh apartment, to Nagoya – in the midst of COVID-19. Suffice it to say, my body broke down with a severe allergic reaction. I was due to give a talk in early July 2021 at the Modern Japanese History Workshop, but I had to have it rescheduled to February 2022. There was no way I could move all my stuff out alone, so I had to call my dad to help me move out, which he kindly did. While keeping on top of the Japanese government’s COVID entry policies throughout July, we sent ten boxes via mail, got our PCR tests, and eventually flew home via Frankfurt on the same flight as some European athletes making their way to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
My last month in Edinburgh, July 2021
In September 2021, I started at GSID as a new faculty member and was so busy trying to keep up with how things worked at Japanese national universities. I forgot about the research stay until I received word in October that the Foundation was ready to accept researchers again. In order to go, I had to ask for formal permission, first, because staff at national universities need to follow the Japanese government’s policies regarding international travel during COVID, and second, because April was the start of the new academic year, there was a lot of preparation that we needed to do as core faculty from January, which I was not familiar with as a new hire. I won’t go into details, suffice it to say that the preparation process in the lead-up to March 2022 was a good learning experience for me in terms of understanding administrative procedures in Japanese universities and my responsibilities as a new faculty member. However, due to COVID, I’d already been unable to undertake several research trips to Switzerland throughout 2020 that I’d won funding for while in UEdinburgh. And given that my manuscript deadline was coming up, I was quite determined to go. Thanks to the support of the GSID faculty and the administrative staff throughout October 2021 to February 2022, I finally received approval and booked my journey.
On the morning of my departure, 28 February, Russia attacked Ukraine and my outbound flight from Narita to Schipol was cancelled, and rebooked instead to Helsinki, which was then again cancelled in the space of an hour. I couldn’t sleep at all the night before my flight and decided to just go to Narita in the morning to enquire about the situation: many flights to Asia and Europe had indeed been cancelled. I luckily ended up re-booking my flight via Dubai around 10 pm, arriving a day later than planned – I spent the entire day at Narita airport drifting in and out of sleep (my mom had kindly accompanied me for a few hours). I was so tired by the time I boarded my flight to Dubai that I thought I would sleep the whole way; however, clearly I was excited to be going to Switzerland because instead of sleeping, I watched two Bollywood films. I arrived in Geneva on 1 March, a beautiful sunny day. Stay tuned for future posts about what I got up to!
Kalank (2019) is sold as a love story but I think it's more about Hindu-Muslim tensions on the eve of Independence. It's got some of my favourite actors Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan, Aditya Roy Kapur, and a beautiful soundtrack: all songs are good, especially: First Class, Aira Gaira, Tabaah Ho Gaye, Rajvaadi Odhni, and Ghar More Pardesiya!
The Big Bull (2021) is about stockbroker Hemant Shah (based on Harshad Mehta) who used loopholes in India’s banking system to commit securities fraud between banks. This one had me *staring at the screen* - I was fascinated by how the man was portrayed as a fraud who also allowed middle-class Indians to invest and contribute to the country’s economic growth (in contrast to the The Big Short (2015), where stockbrokers are just evil or greedy). More than that, I had just presented at the MJHW a week prior, part of which showed that Japanese commercial lending (which India had to turn to in the absence of low-interest development aid) in the 1980s was a key reason for the events in 1991. I didn’t know about the 1992 Indian stock market scam and the involvement of senior treasury officials![3] I need to talk about this film in another post and research further.
[1] Met some interesting people in the Geneva archives, one of whom was in WHO as a postdoc on Sarah Hodges "What's at Stake in the Fake" Wellcome grant. Sarah basically inspired me to start the whole AIDS in India project during my MA at Warwick. [2] The final piece came out in the middle of March 2022 during my stay. Hope to have a post out in SHAD’s sister blog Points to promote my paper and my upcoming book, so stay tuned for that! [3] Lekha Rattanani and Daksesh Paprikh, ‘Securities scam: Harshad Mehta throws banking system, stock-markets into turmoil,’ India Today (14 June 2013). https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/cover-story/story/19920531-securities-scam-harshad-mehta-throws-banking-system-stock-markets-into-turmoil-766377-2013-06-14.