The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, or Sylff, is a fellowship programme initiated in 1987 to support students pursuing graduate studies in the humanities and social sciences. To date, endowments of USD 1 million each have been presented to 69 universities and consortia in 44 countries.
The Sylff programme aims to identify and nurture leaders who will overcome differences in nationality, language, ethnicity, religion, and political systems to tackle global issues, and whose high integrity and drive to address issues unique to their respective countries can make a real difference. About 16,000 students have received fellowships since the programme's launch, and many of these Sylff fellows have gone on to become leaders in a variety of fields following graduation.
The financial support I received from the SYLFF Foundation was crucial in funding my research work during the 2022/23 academic year. I am grateful to the SYLFF Foundation for this outstanding opportunity that allowed me to pursue high standards in my work, advance my research and continue an important stage of my fieldwork. As I am committed with multi-sited ethnography and engaged in working with different social movements and local communities, the development of a part of this ambitious research project would not have been possible without the support of the SYLFF Foundation.
Carolina Fontes dos Santos is a PhD candidate in International Relations/ Political Science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and Affiliate at the Gender Centre. Her research focuses on feminist movements in rural areas in Brazil and their participation in international food governance through their engagement in transnational social movements to negotiate political voice as well as public policies in the context of international organisations. Carolina is a researcher-activist interested in gender issues, feminist international political economy, social movements, transnational participation, food sovereignty and food systems.
I am grateful to the SYLFF Foundation for their financial support, which has helped me fund my second year of doctoral work at the Institute. The SYLFF Foundation’s generous funding supported my living expenses in Geneva during the autumn 2021 semester, where I dedicated my work to writing and defending my preliminary thesis dissertation. In the spring 2022 semester, I moved to India for some months, to initiate fieldwork for my doctoral research. I am thankful to the SYLFF Foundation for its crucial financial support, which has helped me carry out these various research activities in the present academic year.
Riddhi Pandey is a PhD candidate from India who is interested in researching institutions, practices, and lived experiences of confinement in various contexts in the Global South. Her current fieldwork involves engaging with individuals and families who have experienced incarceration first-hand. For this, she will be gathering written and oral narratives about carceral life in various parts of India. Throughout the year, she has been participating in several academic and research skills workshops and conducting remote fieldwork, all of which have contributed significantly to her PhD research.
I thank the Sylff Foundation for repeatedly sponsoring my doctoral studies at the Graduate Institute. The funding I have received from the Foundation has made a world of difference to the time I have been able to devote to my research as well as to my work’s quality. In the last year, thanks to their funding, I was able to defend my candidacy paper and bring my research somewhat closer to its final leg.
Swati Malik is a doctoral candidate in international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research interests span the fields of public international law, law and technology, and international administrative law.
The Sylff scholarship has allowed me to pursue my research and present it in international conferences, especially during this difficult period characterised by the pandemic. My job market paper studies the impact of services liberalisation on education and the gender education gap in India, while my two other papers focus respectively on the effect of access to electricity on kids' schooling in rural Nigeria and on the role of merit-based scholarships on economists' career trajectories in Italy. Thanks to the generous support from the Foundation, I have been able to finalise these works, which I plan to submit to international peer-reviewed academic journals, and to hand in my PhD thesis on time.
Enrico Nano is an applied microeconomist studying how different levers can improve human capital accumulation, mainly but not exclusively in developing countries. His research interests cover education, labour, trade and agricultural economics, and he specialised in applying microeconometric tools in these fields, particularly impact evaluation techniques.
The support provided by The Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research has allowed me to strive for academic excellence in giving my family and me the financial security necessary to focus solely on my work. Being a Sylff Fellow in 2018/2019 and recipient of the Sylff COVID-19 relief in 2021 not only proved decisive for writing and defending my thesis; it also permitted me to compete for funding to engage in social outreach activities with the community I have been working with for my research. Therefore, the Sylff Fellowship gave me the opportunity to develop myself as an engaged anthropologist seeking change in the world based on academic research.
Raphael Schapira is a 2022 Mecila Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America based in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2021 he received his PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute. His research interests include the anthropology of sport and the body, embodied research, urban anthropology, mobility, and populism. Based on fieldwork undertaken in Rio de Janeiro among practitioners of the martial art Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he has published on evangelical Brazilian jiu-jitsu, urban sociality and inequality, and infrastructures of (im)mobility. An avid practitioner of Brazilian jiu-jitsu himself, he studies how social processes at large are (re-)created through bodily martial arts practices.