As part of the Watson Institute for International Studies' Global Media Project, Robert Jensen, a visiting associate professor at the Watson Institute, is working on a documentary that explores gender bias in the developing world through the problem of missing women in India.
The Global Media Project, Jensen said, provides a unique experience for academics to work with filmmakers and have their research disseminated to a larger, more diverse group of people. "There is all this really great and interesting research that's going on that nobody knows about besides academics," Jensen said, citing important yet largely unread research published in academic journals as an example.
One goal of the project, launched in 2005, is to bring academics and filmmakers together to produce new documentary media on important issues, Jensen said.
Other aims of the Global Media Project are "to see what lies behind and beyond the screen," and "to study the expanding role of media in war and peace," according to the project's Web site.
Jensen said he has been working with visiting fellow Deborah Scranton '84 on a documentary in the hopes of exploring what it is about "the level of economic development and political and social institutions that pressures couples to have only sons," in developing countries.
Jensen said his interest in developing countries grew out of his concern for the state of poverty in the United States and the current welfare system.
"I had always been interested in poverty because in my family background, we were not wealthy," Jensen said. As a graduate student, he said, he met a prominent economist who had been doing work in India and South Africa who encouraged him to do work in these countries. Jensen took his advice and traveled to India, with little idea at the time as to what he wanted to research.
As a "graduate student, you have to be an entrepreneur," Jensen said, noting that most grad students do work based on the research their adviser is doing or has done. "Another way is, 'Let me go around, out in the field, and poke around and strike out on my own.' "
Jensen began studying a group of poor fishermen in Kerala, a southern region of India, examining how the introduction of cell phones affected their profits. He concluded that the use of cell phones helped the fisherman increase their profits by allowing them to find out which markets offered the highest prices on a particular day.
"Information can be extremely powerful for alleviating poverty because there are so many inefficiencies related to information," Jensen said. His work on the effects of information technology on poverty then shifted to how information technology raises the status of women, particularly in rural India.
It was an interest in gender bias that brought him to Brown, Jensen said, and to his current documentary project.
"The Global Media Project was definitely one of the things that brought me to Brown," Jensen said.
