My Fellowship Year: Internationalism Against Inequality

My friend raised her hand and made a scribbling gesture to ask for the bill. Over lunch, she had told me that France, where she spent a number of years working for the International Trade Union Confederation, had decided to recognise work experience as equivalent to some undergraduate degrees. This change, she explained, had been achieved by unions and social movements that saw access to higher education and the validation offered by academic titles as a question of privilege.

I had been telling her about the troubles I’d had in the Argentine academic system as someone who did most of his learning in the public sphere: the 12 years spent getting a different kind of education at Greenpeace Argentina, the personal but unshakeable need to prioritise campaigning in my free time, the feeling of constantly being torn on practical decisions such as whether to prepare an essay for my State and Society class or instead travel to another city to take part in a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting. My case wasn’t like those of the people in France that my friend had been telling me about. While I had had privileges, nevertheless the combination of my work hours, a bit of injustice, and of course my own decisions, had done me no favours in terms of charting a smooth course through formal academia.

Then, as she was ordering the bill, my friend remembered another opportunity: a fellowship at a UK university for people who have worked to support social causes for at least ten years, whether or not they have a university degree. The fact that the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme decided to lower the barriers to eligibility made a lot of sense to me, given that the programme itself is focused on inequality.

After hesitating for a few months, and then talking to a German colleague who had gone through the experience and is now a Senior Fellow, and after digging into the programme’s areas of focus, I decided to apply. The process is simple and allows applicants to outline their capabilities and life experience. A few months later, I had a virtual interview and two weeks later, the final confirmation arrived: my fellowship journey was beginning!

Reducing inequality is about breaking open silos of concentrated power and providing people from the margins with access to the opportunities and resources that are usually hoarded by the privileged. Because of its geographical location and its historical standing within the British higher education system, the London School of Economics and Political Science struck me, at first, as one of these exclusive, elite centres of academic knowledge. But joining the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme has allowed me to see it from a very different angle. The fellowship aims to open up academic silos to a wider range of people, practicing what it preaches by empowering leaders from every corner of the globe and giving them the tools to challenge inequality the world over.

Although its English-medium environment still represents a hurdle for those whose first language is not English, the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme is a unique academic opportunity that provides first-rate theory and practice for people who don’t necessarily have a university degree.

The programme has two parallel streams that are in constant dialogue. One, the Residential stream, is more academic in focus, with Fellows following a year-long Master’s in Inequalities and Social Science at LSE (for which a bachelor’s degree is indeed required). The other, the Non-Residential stream, is built around a funded personal project in the field of inequality, which can be centred on research or social action. Fellows in both streams join together to undertake four intensive modules during the active fellowship year. When they complete that year, they also become permanent members of an ever-expanding community of Fellows from all seven Atlantic Fellowships worldwide.

By lowering barriers and allowing access to high-quality academic content and a global network of inequality-challenging leaders, the programme is able to catalyse new connections and diverse perspectives. It also provides a real-world reaffirmation of the fact that there is no one way of doing things, but rather many possible paths, each involving different interpretations, methods and even end goals. It can serve as an accessible launchpad, too, for those who have been forced by circumstance to put off formal study, but who remain passionate about making structural changes to a system that feeds and perpetuates inequality.

The programme delves critically into the neoliberal theory, extractivism and economic colonialism that have allowed the industrialised countries of the Global North to exercise power over the developing countries in the South. It also analyses the origins of the privatisation of the commons, brings in biopolitics (especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic), makes intersectionality a constant analytical thread, and questions the role of international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

At the same time, it offers cutting-edge economic viewpoints that question GDP as a measure of growth and inclusion, and instead proposing alternatives like Kate Raworth’s model of Doughnut Economics, which aims to integrate social and environmental concerns into a balanced form of growth, distribution and environmental protection.

The fellowship modules also cover fiscal frameworks with the potential to strengthen redistribution away from economic elites, brings the issue of tax evasion out into the open, and seeks to reduce inequalities of access to healthcare. More than that, however, it provides tools to reinforce fellows’ skills and leadership so that theory can be turned into practice in the diverse settings from which they are drawn together.

In Argentina, people talk about the “University of Life”. That’s the phrase we use to argue that our life experience often provides perspectives, connections and degrees of awareness that the ivory tower never could. The opportunity offered by the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity aims to bridge that gap, and to help to increase the impact of the thousands of social-change leaders in the Global South who are already working toward social and territorial transformations, but who also want to widen both their intellectual outlook and their networks of global action.

While I’m still in the middle of the fellowship and it is thus too soon for me to evaluate it as a whole, the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme has already given me a whole new set of perspectives on inequalities and how they relate to the incredibly urgent crisis we are now facing.

The uniqueness of my experience is that while COVID-19 restrictions mean that my cohort has not yet travelled to London to meet personally, we’ve gathered together virtually as a community during the biggest lockdown in human history. From our perspectives in different locations – from Trinidad and Tobago to Serbia, from Kenya to Malaysia to Mexico – we have seen how health inequalities are rising and a range of policy responses are being rolled out by different states, and how the strength of civil society can fill the gaps that both the state and the market leave unattended.

In these moments of massive paradigm breakdown, we have seen that global and collective bottom-up thinking can spark creativeness and hope, in place of shadows and oppression. Why not apply to join us?

Applications for the 2022-23 Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme close on 10 January 2022.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.