The University of Arizona's Center for Latin American Studies is selected to join the Tinker Field Research Collaborative

Through the Center for Latin American Studies the University of Arizona has been selected as one of the 11 inaugural members of the Tinker Field Research Collaborative. To support our participation, the Tinker Foundation’s Board of Directors approved a five-year grant that has been matched by the generous contribution of several UArizona colleges and units, including the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Graduate College, the School of Government and Public Policy, the College of Science, and the College of Humanities.

Since 1982 the University of Arizona's Center for Latin American Studies has managed Tinker research grants. The Tinker grants have allowed hundreds of UA graduate students of a wide variety of fields to conduct research in Latin America. These awards allow students to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of language and culture, to familiarize themselves with information sources relevant to their studies; to conduct pilot studies and preliminary investigations, and to develop contacts with scholars and institutions in their fields. At their return, graduate students present their results in the annual Tinker Symposium.

Being part of the Collaborative means that Tinker support will be more stable and continuous. It also means that we will be involved in cooperative opportunities with partner institutions. As announced in the Tinker website, these opportunities include “joint experimentation, tool-building, and knowledge exchange on the institutional level. This may include pre-departure support to students, resources to encourage responsible practices in field research, networking of current and former Field Research Grant recipients, and approaches for monitoring, evaluation, and program improvement.”  As part of the Collaborative, LAS is committed to supporting UArizona graduate students who would not otherwise be able to conduct field research in Latin America.

More information on the Tinker Field Research Collaborative can be found at https://tinker.org/tinker-field-research-collaborative/