|
By Erin Nicholson (MALD '00)
Although Segarra's heritage is half Ecuadorian and half North American, she spent her early years looking beyond the Western Hemisphere. A native of the East Coast, Segarra grew up in Washington, D.C. and attended Brandeis University, where she majored in Political Science with an emphasis on development and Africa. After writing a senior thesis on Nigerian politics, she had hoped to be selected for the Watson Traveling Fellowship to travel to Nigeria. She didn't get the fellowship, but the consolation prize changed the course of her career: she received a ticket to go to Ecuador for the first time. She fell in love with the culture and decided to stay for a year. From that point on she devoted herself to becoming a Latin Americanist. In the late 1980s, Segarra attended the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where her summer internship in Bolivia helped defined her niche in development. While working for an American-based non-profit organization, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International, she found herself in a nation coming to grips with radical structural adjustment programs. Much protest accompanied the transformation of the state's role. The job turned out to be more substantive than she had bargained for: she was the only English-speaking person in the office aside from the Director, who announced two weeks after her arrival that he was going to Europe for the summer. Thus Segarra's internship responsibilities expanded to include essential tasks for the organization's survival, such as writing up its five-year multi-operational plan and meeting with the local USAID office to secure funding. The latter was hardly a problem: Segarra recalls that USAID was practically giving money away, but there weren't enough organizations to which to give it. The agency believed the state was a failure so they aimed to increase the participation of non-profits in providing social services. Through this work, Segarra became interested in the longer-term issues of development, how the state's role was changing, and how the private sector and the non-profit sector were pushed to work together in this new environment. Upon returning to Columbia for her second year, she applied for the Ph.D. program in the Political Science department to study the politics of this experience. Eventually she did her field work in Ecuador and contributed to a publication entitled The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation. When asked about what kind of approach works best to encourage governments to reform, Segarra suggests a project-based approach to avoid confrontation. "Networks that link civil society, the international development community and the state bureaucrats around specific projects have shown the most success. It's a way of not placing one institution above another," Segarra says. For every aspect of reform, programs have to deal with international, regional, national, and citizen clients. Making use of these complex relationships is essential to effecting reforms: "Looking across institutional boundaries is the way to capture politics and policy in the developing world." Aside from the fact that one of her dissertation advisors attended Fletcher, respect for this kind of multi-institutional approach is one reason why Segarra was attracted to our school. She didn't want to work in an environment with strong departmental boundaries, but rather in a place where interdisciplinary thinking is rewarded--an attribute Segarra appreciates at Fletcher. In commenting about her Fletcher experience, Segarra says she is impressed not only with the "remarkably high quality of students" but also their wide range of backgrounds and considerable professional experience. Segarra puts it this way, "A real plus for the Fletcher student body is that people have worked. It makes a huge difference in the way people approach problems and think about issues." For international relations schools in general, however, Segarra sees a slightly disturbing trend: over the past decade, area studies have declined. Though this trend is beginning to subside, Segarra explains that it is most visible in the way jobs are advertised for political scientists. "More and more, academic institutions are attempting to look across national institutions, but without grounding in a particular area. Schools are trying to rationalize their faculty along these lines." She says, "You could make an argument that globalization leads to this homogenization of cultures. But really, it leads to greater contacts, in which there are many more possibilities for mistakes . . . [the] ability to know cultures is more important as we are becoming more and more integrated . . . the idea of broadly applying policies, programs and strategies without a good working knowledge of specific contexts leads to bad policies and inefficient outcomes." Looking into the future, Segarra says that, five or 10 years from now, she'd like to see herself at an institution such as Fletcher. She hopes to have close links with policy-making beyond the ivory tower. She also intends to look more broadly outside Latin America to examine state reform, the new complexity in governance, and compare how modern institutional structures are similar or different across different regional contexts. Segarra is only an occasional Boston resident: each week, she commutes north from New York. She said that she likes Boston's European feel but, given a choice of any city in the world, she would live in Paris. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, modern art (particularly Latin American art), and, of course, Salsa dancing. Finally, a question submitted by Jen Lahue: "If Professor Segarra had to be fruit, what kind of fruit would she be?" Segarra's response, after much interrogation as to how I came up with this question and why someone would want to know such a thing. . . was a pineapple. Her explanation was that in old English culture, the pineapple was a symbol of welcome and invitation. Students who've had the opportunity to study with Professor Segarra can attest that with her open office door and receptivity toward students and their research ideas, she does in fact embody such amiable attributes. If you haven't studied about Latin America or development yet, look for Professor Segarra's classes next semester: Political and Social Change in Developing Countries (Politics 221) and Authoritarianism and Democracy in Latin America (Politics 290). Comments? Write us at letter@fletcherledger.com |
