May 10, 2024 - (海角社区CI) Associate Professor of Health Science Lydia Dixon and Professor of History
Jim Meriwether will both travel overseas in Spring of 2025 on Fulbright Scholar Awards.
Dixon is headed to Edinburgh, Scotland to research rural midwifery practices and Meriwether is off to Budapest, Hungary to lecture to American Studies classes and to continue to research his current project 鈥1956: Freedom Struggles Crossing Continents.鈥
Dixon鈥檚 area of research has largely been rural midwifery in Mexico, but when she saw the opportunity in Scotland, she thought an immersion in Scottish rural midwifery might bring her research an interesting perspective. She will be connected with Edinburgh Napier University (ENU), which has one of the largest midwifery programs in Scotland.
鈥淭he UK is having a crisis around getting enough rural maternity care in general because it鈥檚 hard to train people in the cities and convince them to go to work in small towns,鈥 Dixon said. 鈥淭his new post graduate program is designed to train nurses who are already living in small rural towns using online education and periodic clinical rotations at approved sites.鈥
Mexico, Dixon said, is having a similar problem, but with more pushback from the medical community.
鈥淚n Scotland with the national health system and ubiquity of midwifes, they鈥檙e not fighting such an uphill battle,鈥 Dixon said. 鈥淚鈥檓 fascinated to find out how differently midwives are viewed in Scotland.鈥
Meriwether鈥檚 fellowship in Budapest brings his research full circle as he traces an arc of human rights struggles in and around 1956, from Montgomery, Alabama to Pretoria, South Africa to Budapest. One of the elemental questions Meriwether hopes to research is, what was it about 1956 that had several parts of the world seeing human rights struggles?
鈥淚 think historians grapple with that,鈥 Meriwether said. 鈥榃hat鈥檚 in the water? What鈥檚 making 1956 such a moment for these struggles for greater rights and freedom?
Much of Meriwether鈥檚 work up until now has been exploring connections between the civil rights movement and African liberation struggles. This work looks into the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56 ignited by the arrest of a Black woman, Rosa Parks, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. emerged from heart of the protests as one of America鈥檚 prominent civil rights icons.
Meanwhile, in Pretoria South Africa, systemized racism called apartheid dictated what Black citizens could and could not do. In 1956, about 20,000 women marched to the government buildings in Pretoria to protest the government鈥檚 control over the movement of Black women in urban areas.
And in Europe, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution protested oppression from the Soviet Union.
鈥淓urope is adding a new dimension to my research,鈥 Meriwether said. 鈥淚n Budapest, I鈥檓 going to look deeply into the archives and into the oral histories of that period of time to find out more about transnational connections taking place.鈥
As a L谩szl贸 Orsz谩gh Distinguished Scholar in American Studies in the Fulbright Scholar Program, Meriwether will spend the Spring 2025 semester at E枚tv枚s Lor谩nd University (ELTE) in Budapest. Founded in 1635, ELTE is the leading and longest continuously operating university in Hungary.
This is Meriwether鈥檚 third Fulbright award with the first one taking him to Zimbabwe and the next one to Kenya. Meriwether loves the international perspective the Fulbright experiences bring him, and the value it adds to his teaching.
鈥淟iving and working in an international setting reminds us how wide and wonderful our world is,鈥 Meriwether said. 鈥淎nd it鈥檚 wonderful to bring some of that perspective back to campus.鈥