Attending the ACU Summer School broadens knowledge, practice, and awareness 

Bincy Mary George is a student at South Asian University in India, where she is studying for a MPhil/PhD in Sociology. She attended the ACU Summer School 2017, held at Bath Spa University in the UK, in August 2017. We spoke to Bincy to find out how attending the Summer School has benefitted her.

What made you decide to attend the Summer School?

As doctoral students we are often advised to be academically enterprising. Thesis writing sometimes seems like the sole activity of doctoral studies, and bears the risk of turning into a monotonous monologue within the four walls of the library. In such a scenario, attending seminars and summer schools, travelling to new places, presenting papers, sharing and gaining knowledge with co-students in the field, broadens our scope of knowledge practice and awareness.

I decided to attend the ACU Summer School in UK on 'greener narratives' as it was a great opportunity to discuss my environmental research concerns with co-researchers and activists from a range of different intellectual paradigms and native experiences. It was also an avenue to understand a new place, meet new people and cultures.

Why do you think it's important for students to take advantage of international opportunities during their studies?

The bewildering growth and expanse of ICT across the globe has made it difficult for any nation to have an independent or island growth strategy. History has taught us to grow and benefit in alliance with each other – academia and knowledge production should be no different from it. Continuous engagement and critical discussions with friends from across the globe enlighten us with their respective oral traditions, subaltern pragmatics and untranslated works that are otherwise inaccessible through global virtual networks. Hence, students should make best use of such international study opportunities when organisations like ACU provide them.

What did you learn from travelling to a new country and meeting delegates of different nationalities?

The ACU Summer School in 2017 gave me the opportunity to visit the United Kingdom. I appreciate the programme organiser's effort in making this visit to the UK as ecologically sensitive and educational as possible. The live experiments at the Avebury stone hedge and Avalon Marshes reaffirmed the UK's ability and our possibility of making a biodiverse landscape out of a wasteland.

How will you share the knowledge and skills gained at the Summer School now you're back in your home country?

The Summer School's theme of 'Creating greener narratives through the Environmental Arts and Humanities' is right on time as we are trying to comprehend the growing environmental disasters and debate its anthropogenic nature.

Since independence, my home country and its neighbours have given more emphasis to a narrow idea of economic growth and basic subsistence to its citizens. Industrialisation was not seen as a problem, but a boon to faster growth. It took us quite a long time to recognise the corresponding impact on our environment, and look to indigenous knowledge for sustainable growth.

What I take home from the Summer School is the idea of a sacred landscape in our everyday and how religious practices can be reinstated with environmental concerns.

Has the Summer School had an effect on your future plans and how?

The Summer School certainly influenced my future in terms of my research project and ambitions. I have become more sensitive to the role humanities and arts have towards understanding our relationship with our environment. It has broadened my scope of addressing solutions beyond the single narrative of scientific practices and into the everyday multifarious beliefs and rituals of people.

My current research aims to understand how the reimagination of the sacred and pollution is possible within Indian religious rituals. In future I hope to make more use of the networks and scholarships that ACU has in provision for scholars.

The ACU Summer School is just one way in which the ACU supports academic mobility across the Commonwealth and beyond. Each year, it brings together around 40 students – who are either final year undergraduates or postgraduates – for a week of interactive study, including workshops, field trips and group project work.

The Summer School is hosted by a different ACU member institution each year, selected through a competitive tendering process, and based around a different theme. Next year's Summer School will take place at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, centred on 'Designing and creating sustainable communites'. Read more or email [email protected]