Meet our new tutors! Sara Bolghiran & Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal
This semester, you will notice some new faces in our tutor team. Amongst them are Sara Bolghiran (politics) and Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal (PRINS), who have taken the opportunity to briefly introduce themselves in this article. Curious to get to know the person behind the face? Read on!
Meet: Sara Bolghiran
My name is Sara, I am a PhD student researching processes of knowledge production and acquisition in contemporary Islam. My background is in Liberal Arts & Sciences, as I graduated from Leiden University College (LUC) in the Hague with a major in World Politics. I have continued this interdisciplinary trend throughout all of my studies, as I pursued an MSc in Governance of Migration and Diversity and an MA in Religion in Global Politics. Aside from focusing on religious studies, (political) philosophy, and intellectual history, I enjoy watching anime, Korean dramas, and arthouse films. I also love to draw and paint, and I am an avid collector of teas (I do not like coffee) and all the accessories that come with it.
What are your expectations as a tutor of International Studies?
This semester I will teach Politics. I am looking forward to exchanging ideas, perspectives and narratives in a cross-cultural setting. I think discussions will be dynamic and hope for the (virtual) classroom to be a space wherein curiosities can be explored and shared. I think International Studies as a programme offers a great platform to do so. I am looking forward to learning things from the students as well – teaching is never a one-sided process in my experience.
How will you deal with the challenges our current circumstances pose?
When thinking about the challenges that COVID-19 poses on all of us, my most important corona challenge when it comes to teaching will be managing the technicalities – I am not great with technology and the potential awkwardness of a virtual classroom is something that I am not too keen about – but I am sure that more people can relate to this and that it will be fine after getting used to. Generally, I think I will pursue a “trial and error” kind of way, whereby I will try to make the classes as interactive and inclusive as possible but at the same time be aware of having to adapt things quickly when they ought to be improved. Although it is more of a challenge overall, I think there are still a lot of things that can be done to have a useful and memorable experience.
Meet: Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal
First of all, I am a wife and a mother of two boys (1 and 7 years old). I am also a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. My research interests include poverty, social protection/policy, aid, and developing country–donor relations. My dissertation is a comparative case study of the political economy of social protection in Cambodia and the Philippines. Before my PhD journey, I worked for more than a decade in the non-government/non-profit sector back in my home-country, the Philippines. I worked e.g. in a non-government organisation that organised urban poor/informal settlers and rescued and assisted prostituted and trafficked women and children. I also worked in a network of NGOs whose main thrust has been participatory governance, which means that we lobbied and employed pressure tactics, if necessary, to make sure that grassroots communities, NGOs, and other civil society groups got to participate in government development planning and budgeting processes.
What are your expectations as a tutor of International Studies?
At International Studies, I am tutor for the third-year course PRINS, which is rather a unique course in the sense that there is conscious effort towards reversal of roles between tutors and students, i.e., tutors are simply accompaniers. In that context, I expect to learn from student-consultants’ research and be surprised by the recommendations, solutions, and even challenges and critical feedback they would provide to partner-organisations. I also expect students to learn that an effective consultancy does not only entail sharpening one’s analytical and technical skills, but also looking inward and being aware of one’s biases, privilege, and potential impact on people’s lives, especially if the consultancy involves less powerful and less influential groups of people.
How will you deal with the challenges our current circumstances pose?
The biggest “corona challenge” that I foresee is to develop a connection with students, which, I suppose, could have been facilitated by in-person sessions obviously because one can feel the vibe from students, see their cues and reactions, and just have a spontaneous chat with them. It is hard to have these in an online setting but I am hopeful that through communication within and outside the tutorials, we can achieve this connection somehow. I think it is important to focus on and make the most of the advantages of online learning. When I did my bachelors, a purely online mode of learning was unimaginable (which means that this was a long time ago). But today almost everything is at one’s fingertips, and that’s awesome.