RISD Global

RISD Global is a hub for discourse and cross-cultural exchange that supports students, faculty and members of the RISD community on campus and in the world. Through academic global engagements we value: reciprocal exchange of ideas and practices across cultures, borders and languages through dialogue, debate and immersive learning experiences; global engagements that broaden perspectives, decenter experiences and reframe assumptions; and mobility that connects students, faculty and partners with diverse traditions of, and approaches to, making across the world. We realize this work through teaching, learning, and research initiatives on-campus and in the world.

In her 2008 essay, “The Global Situation,” anthropologist Anna Tsing noted:

The excitement of the internationalization of scholarship encourages many of us to throw ourselves into endorsements of globalization as multi-layered evolution drawing us into the future. Sometimes our critical distance seems less useful than our participation. And yet can we understand either our own involvement or the changing world without our critical skills?

In a similar spirit, RISD's Global Faculty Fellowship program pushes beyond mere celebrations of globalization and all it affords (to some citizens of the world) to engage critically as artists, designers and scholars with its impacts.

Through the Global Faculty Fellowship, RISD supports faculty whose work responds to global issues and questions pertinent to our times and futures. Fellows are selected based on their commitment to research and practices that asks how artists, designers, cultural producers and scholars can respond to, or comment on, such global challenges towards positive impact.

Global Faculty Fellows are provided time and resources to embed themselves within different contexts across the globe that are critical to their project and inquiry, and which extends and deepens the ways in which RISD partners with colleagues internationally. Fellows are encouraged to develop public forums --through talks, panels, symposia, exhibitions, workshops, and publications-- on their research to engage the broadest community with the topic at RISD and beyond.

In academic year 2017-2018, RISD is supporting two Global Faculty Fellows and projects: Paolo Cardini’s Global Futures Lab, and Emanuel Admassu’s research project on emergent practice across the continent of Africa Where is Africa? These projects are being realized in close collaboration with partners in Cuba, Ethiopia, Italy, India, Iran, Peru, and Tanzania, among other locations.