Shiv Ganesh Wins President’s Award for Global Learning 2022
Three innovative faculty programs partnering with international businesses and universities in Sweden, India, the United Kingdom, and Ecuador have been selected to receive the President’s Award for Global Learning. These are the first programs selected within the renewed vision of the award, designed to increase student involvement in solving global challenges and strengthen faculty interdisciplinary collaborations.
The programs address timely and important global issues, including the ethics of global supply chains, anti-racism in academia, and environmentally sustainable architectural design. Students who participate will engage in project-based teams with international partners and faculty mentors to tackle these complex issues.
The President’s Award for Global Learning empowers students and faculty to examine real-world interdisciplinary topics while incorporating in-country learning into the classroom experience. Each awarded faculty team has identified a challenge that can be addressed with an international partner in a global context.
The awarded faculty/student teams will implement their projects between January and December 2022. Faculty teams receive $5,000 to support the student projects and class activities, and individual faculty members each will receive a $9,000 honorarium. Faculty and students also will receive fully funded travel as part of the award.
Dr. Ganesh’s project is with Dr. Sharmila Rudrappa in Sociology. It is titled “Cotton Threads: Fabricating Ethical Production and Consumption in the Garment Industry” Their International Partners are Nudie Jeans in Gothenburg, Sweden and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore in Bangalore, India.
This faculty-led program aims to help students learn about the ethical production and consumption of high fashion through coursework, field visits, and independent research in three sites: Texas, Sweden, and India. The program team will partner with the company Nudie Jeans, headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, working with their suppliers and academic collaborators in Bangalore, India. Program goals are to teach students how the company strives to: achieve ecological sustainability; instill social justice across production nodes in global commodity chains for growers, textile workers, and garment workers; and offer radical transparency to consumers on ethical production processes and profits. Students will have the opportunity to integrate the skills and knowledge developed over Spring and Summer 2022 to test Nudie Jeans’ business model in Texas, which is the largest grower of cotton in the U.S.