UC Pacific academic wins Fulbright award

University of Canterbury Professor Steven Ratuva has won a prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship to carry out research as a visiting professor in the United States next year.

New Zealand-based Fijian political sociologist Professor Ratuva will research affirmative action policies relating to Pacific Island minorities in the US and New Zealand and their impact in addressing group inequality. He will conduct research at three leading American universities; Duke University in North Carolina, Georgetown University in Washington DC and the University of California in Los Angeles.

“One of the aims of the fellowship is to promote New Zealand and its academic culture,” Professor Ratuva says.

His research, “Horizontal inequality and affirmative action – a comparative study of Pacific Island minorities in New Zealand and United States”, will be conducted in partnership with some of the world’s leading experts in the subject.

“I also look forward to promoting the University of Canterbury and creating research links with various US universities.”

The Fulbright Senior Scholar award is the most prestigious academic fellowship offered by the United States for the world’s leading academics to carry out research or teaching in US universities.

Professor Ratuva is the Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies and a professor in the Anthropology and Sociology Department in the University of Canterbury’s College of Arts.

The Fulbright award followed a rigorous and highly competitive process of research assessment, review and interview and is in recognition of Professor Ratuva’s international research expertise as an interdisciplinary social scientist. Part of this international recognition was his recent appointment as Chair of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) research committee on Democratization and the Military and member of the IPSA Research Commission. He is also a recipient of a Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden research award.

Professor Ratuva is founding editor of the new academic research journal, Pacific Dynamics: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and has published widely in the areas of Pacific regional politics; sociological and political processes theories; cultural change; conflict resolution; social protection; affirmative action; ethnic identity and politics; global, regional and national security; socio-economic development; electoral engineering; and constitutional reform.

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