Message from the Director CBER

Message from Director CBER

Human beings are curious creatures, always asking questions, seeking to understand the world around them. We have organized ourselves into communities that have become increasingly interwoven and interdependent. Every day we learn and unlearn how to live with each other in ways that are fairer, more egalitarian, and more just. At the same time, we also work every day to exploit social inter-dependence for the benefit of the few. Research has a crucial role to play in this ongoing dynamic. We know today that societies prosper when we have a better understanding of the relationships within them. And at its core, this is the knowledge that students of the Social Sciences and Humanities seek.

The goal of CBER is to provide an infrastructure to support the work of scholars in the Social Sciences, Business and Humanities to conduct research that is interesting, rigorous, and relevant. These are exciting times for research. We have unprecedented access to big data, a variety of mixed methods, digital archives, and open-source tools. There are increasing opportunities to link academic research to policy initiatives and build bridges across the academic, development, private and public sectors. To this end, CBER has taken a number of initiatives. We bring faculty members together to discuss their research in our Brown Bag Series. We work on resource mobilization through grant writing. One of our main goals is to coordinate across research initiatives and develop connections inside and outside Pakistan. We emphasize inter-disciplinary research and encourage researchers to venture beyond their disciplinary limits in order to arrive at fuller, more nuanced understandings of their research questions. We have also initiated an International Annual Conference series with which we hope to establish a strong, resilient, and cutting-edge research tradition at IBA.

With every passing day, we have new experiences to make sense of and new problems to solve. One thing that has become apparent is that we cannot solve these problems in isolation. We invite you to share your work with us. The art of inquiry comes in many forms, and we support a wide range of initiatives. Interdisciplinary research and collaboration is absolutely essential for understanding the world, and perhaps in that pursuit, making it a little better.

laila