An up-and-coming academic from the United States is teaching and conducting research at H. Lavity Stoutt Community College this year under the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Programme.
Tomorrow, residents will get a chance to hear her speak.
Hope McCoy, who has a doctorate in education from the University of California, Los Angeles, will deliver a public lecture on her award-winning book, From Congo to GONGO: Higher Education, Critical Geopolitics, and the New Red Scare.
A lecturer at Stanford University in California, Ms. McCoy will be in the Virgin Islands for six months working as a scholar in residence at HLSCC.
Her book is “all about soft power, specifically how education is a form of soft power,” she told the Beacon in an interview. “And I use higher education as a lens for understanding the geopolitical relationships between Russia and Africa over time.”
The book, she added, focuses primarily on three African countries: Zambia, Ethiopia and Egypt.
“And I show how, over time, there were both cultural and political connections that have brought these disparate regions together,” she said.
Ms. McCoy also explained the “new red scare” mentioned in her book’s title.
“So the new red scare would be the post-Cold War era — the fact that there is very much a fear of any sort of socialist ideals often in the West,” she said.
The book, she added, cites research from UCLA political scientist Edmond Keller on indigenous and other “forms of socialism that already existed” in Africa before Russia began asserting its influence there.
“That was an appealing political leaning for the people of these countries when they were approached by the Soviet Union upon their liberation from the West,” she said, adding, “The new red scare is less that I’m saying we should be scared, but it’s more identifying that people are scared and sort of naming the reality of the competitive nature of both geopolitics and also higher education as an industry.”
Research in the VI
Ms. McCoy chose to complete her Fulbright work in the VI in part because of the wide variety of Caribbean cultures represented here.
“I was interested in the Caribbean as a region and as a cultural entity, and the best place to study a variety of Caribbean people would be here,” she said, adding, “The BVI is a sort of perfect chance for me to observe multiple cultures from the region that play together.”
Ms. McCoy added that she is working on two research projects in the VI, both involving “how we teach culture in unexpected ways.”
One project involves researching the culinary school “to see the ways that Afro-Caribbean culture presents itself in the classroom,” she said.
The other project will assess how “local colleges can become sort of places for economic and political engagement” across borders, according to the scholar.
The cross-border aspect of the project makes the VI a good study location, she explained.
“What’s so unique about the BVI is so many people are from other countries in the Caribbean and moved to the BVI,” Ms. McCoy said. “So that creates this place that’s sort of a microcosm of pan-Caribbean thought. And so I’m curious about the ways that students and also staff who are from various places have all come together to this college and how that might yield partnerships back in their home countries, whether that be jobs for students, whether that be political participation.”
Ms. McCoy is also working as a guest lecturer at HLSCC, and she will be teaching the introduction-to-sociology summer course there.
Background
This Fulbright Scholar Programme is not Ms. McCoy’s first experience with the Fulbright Commission. Ten years ago, she received a Fulbright Student Research Award that took her to Russia.
At Stanford, Ms. McCoy is a lecturer and fellow in the Civic, Liberal and Global Education programme.
British Caribbean News