On preparing the proposal

I started planning the project with a default assumption that China and India, as countries of the largest source of migration to Canada, should be included in our project. And Australia, as a destination country with many similarities with Canada (a British colony that recruits immigrants to meet its labour shortages and demographic decline) should also be included. I used these assumptions to defend my choice of countries in the proposal for an international partnership. But I am now wondering if choosing these countries was simply a matter of ‘path dependency.’ Much of the literature on immigrant families in Canada either focuses on, or includes, people from China and India. What we learn from our project will undoubtedly add to what we know, especially as our partners will be doing research within their own countries not in countries their populations have migrated to. We will also be studying the evolution of the partnership itself, which is worth doing. Nevertheless, I am wonder if a partnership among less well-known countries of emigration and immigration would have opened our minds to new possibilities and challenges. Did I settle too quickly on these four?

In identifying the research centres and their leaders, I again took the familiar path of ‘who do we know, and where? Anna is based right here at CERC/Ryerson. I had met Rajan and Sun, and they were also known to other Ryerson colleagues. Only Loretta and her research cluster were new to me but were identified by the successor of a research centre leader I met at the small conference hosted by CERC. All this to say that perhaps researchers’ networks are closed circuits, which are difficult to enter for those are not already known to designers of new projects. This challenge is greater in international collaborations because researchers have fewer opportunities to meet, work together, or learn about each other’s work. Entry into such networks is further complicated by our colonial legacies which direct the flow of knowledge from ‘central’ to ‘peripheral’ countries. How can we open up the networks? How do we begin to learn from and about each other?

I was reminded of the colonial mind set in our research culture when a research support staff at Ryerson presented a long ‘Letter of Agreement’ to be signed by our potential partners’ institutions. I was not aware of the need for it until the proposal was well under way. The staff person told me that it was not a ‘requirement’ but important for convincing evaluators that we were seriously committed to developing a partnership. Our colleagues in China and India had it duly signed and returned but research support staff in Australia objected to some items in the agreement. This led to a revised agreement between the Canadian and Australian universities. I did not ask for all the agreements to be revised because as a non-binding agreement it only had symbolic value and I was rushed for time to upload everything. It did, however, raise other concerns about how the unknown evaluators would assess the proposal.

My biggest concern was about the proposed budget. I feared that evaluators would object to the fact that the budget allocated to all the centres was the same while the cost of research assistants, research expenses and cost of living are obviously not the same. It would have been ideologically unacceptable as well as practically challenging to attach different monetary figures to each centre’s contribution to the project. I am delighted that evaluators of this proposal did not object to the budget at all but this issue may raise its head in other international projects.