 today on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Hamza Ripp of the Sand. Today, we are joined by cultural anthropologists. He's also the inaugural Dean of Al-Fan University, Dr. Steven Lai. Dr. Steven Lai, thank you so much for joining me on the show. Thank you very much for having me. All right, so the topic of discussion today is interdisciplinary education and its effect on social change. So, Dr. Steven Lai, when you mentioned interdisciplinary education, how do you think that's going to impact, or initiate social change, particularly in developing countries? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, we have to do something to disrupt some of the patterns that we've had, where we, you know, everybody trained to be a doctor, everyone trained to be a chartered accountant. So, how do we provide a training for people that enables them to do really all jobs rather than specific jobs? And I think one of the issues that we've had in the United States and in Europe, you have like sort of very vocational schools that train people to do a job. Well, as long as that job is stable, that's very useful. But we're in an economic landscape where the jobs are changing, like literally every generation has to carve out a different kind of job for itself. And of course, you don't want to change careers every 15 years. So a job that allows you to adapt to those changing economic landscapes is actually what we need for the future. Now, given the demographics of the global south, in particular places like Pakistan with a very young population, the people today in Pakistan, the people who are going to be the future of Pakistan will need to plan on changing careers a few times or accepting a pretty substandard, dissatisfying landscape where their jobs are obsolete before they, well before they reach retirement age. So one of the things about this kind of interdisciplinary education is it draws on natural sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and it really equips people to move with those changing job landscapes as they arise, as they appear. Okay, all right. So when we talk about interdisciplinary education in general, and you say, you're talking about merging natural sciences with social sciences, and then you obviously have international relations, politics, political science as well. And then you also have, you know, science, for example, biology, you have botany, you have physics, and you also have, you know, chemistry as well. So isn't it extremely difficult for a youngster to try and make sure that they can merge all these concepts together? Because obviously, if you do get all these subjects together, you are well equipped to initiate social change, but it also can be a very tedious and cumbersome task. It can be extraordinarily tedious, particularly when you've got students who love one thing. You know, I've got students who come and they love poetry, they love the arts. They hate math. So it takes quite a bit of kind of, you know, nudging and persuading and convincing to help them understand that actually these aren't diametrically opposed ways of learning or ways of thinking. So math for me underpins all other subjects, right? A solid foundation in the math, mathematics as a philosophy, mathematics as a toolkit, mathematics as a pragmatic way of describing and manipulating the world around us seems to me a starting point for the arts, for chemistry, for biology. So it really is, we've got to get away from math as arithmetic alone and think of math in that much broader sense that Bertrand Russell would have talked about or indeed that Aristotle would have talked about. You know, that when you go back to Aristotle, of course we're not doing that kind of liberal arts of the rhetoric and trivia. We are much more in that kind of four field than natural science, social science, arts and humanities, et cetera, from the kind of 19th century. But right there, we've got to understand math as not just counting, not just arithmetic addition, multiplication, division, subtraction, but actually a way, a philosophical way of describing the world that will make sense in Urdu, in English, in French, in Persian, in Chinese, and if the Alpha Centaurians ever make it here in Alpha Centauri, right? This is the true universal that really does help us to describe and model the world around us. And you're right, it can be very tedious, it can be very difficult, but actually if it's taught well, it's exciting. I mean, it really does open possibilities and it becomes something that instead of kind of teaching you how to do a thing, what it does is instill that passion for learning how to do whatever you need to do going forward. So you become a problem solver, a critical problem solver that isn't daunted by changes in IT. I mean, I've been adapting to different IT software platforms my entire life and I love every new tool. Give me the TikTok, the Snapchat, whatever the next thing is, I'll try it. I will not be afraid of it. And what we don't want is for the brain to atrophy because we have learned one thing too narrowly and we've become too focused on one set of methods, one set of concepts that is fine for one job, but what happens when that job changes? That's what we really need to adapt our students for. Okay, so when we talk about social change, I mean, developing countries face challenging problems. We're talking about extreme poverty, we're talking about inequality, we're talking about political turmoil, we're talking about an economic crisis. I mean, if you take a look at the region, Sri Lanka has just witnessed a complete economic meltdown where sovereign debt just exploded, which resulted in popular protests and the Rajapaksa regime being deployed and now we have a new government. And Pakistan does face a very similar situation, obviously with the IMF bailout plan hanging by central votes. And the fact that you have soaring inflation and poverty and lack of community empowerment, but there's also to trigger social change, you also need awareness, awareness regarding, you could say human rights, awareness regarding peaceful coexistence and what it means to be a citizen of a country of countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka. So in that respect to tackle these pressing problems, how do you think interdisciplinary education can play a role? I think that is the nub of the question really, because we have to be thinking about how you apply whatever your education is. So think about the complex problems facing Pakistan. None of them can be fixed solely by a technical solution. None of them can be fixed solely by social scientists. I am a cultural anthropologist. I would love to be able to go into the rainfed areas, these rainfed areas of agriculture that I've worked in for almost 30 years, and fix them, right? I would love to be able to go in and say, here's how you do it. I can't do that. I need to work with hydrologists, geologists, agronomists, economists, I need to work with them in tandem so that we come up with really quite innovative solutions that don't merely repeat the mistakes of the past. So if you look at development, and one of the ways I got into this, I started working with the various agricultural kind of extension officers coming out of NARC, the National Agricultural Research Council, Pakistan Agricultural Research Centre. I was working with them with local farmers in the Northern areas. And of course, we were bringing in extension workers from, well, we were bringing experts from Canada, from Australia, coming in and helping people to understand how to produce high yield varieties. High yield varieties of crops are clearly important. We've got a growing population, we need to feed them. We have to be more efficient in how we grow food. But of course, one of the things that we kept coming across is that the social relations on the ground were simply completely exotic and alien to these foreign experts. People from Canada would come in and they would say, well, get a combine harvester. Why do you have a hundred people working on your land? And then we tally up, what happens to those hundred people if we toss them off the land and we put a combine harvester? A, it'll take a thousand years before that combine harvester comes close to the wages paid to the farmers at the time. So it made no financial sense for local farmers to do that. But also, a very dear friend of mine, he did try to modernize his farm. He put 2,000 people off the land, 2,000 peasants that had been working on his land. He said, go away. I'm now a modern businessman. I'm gonna do this on a commercial way. He was the only farmer I knew in the region who had to travel with armed guards because he had displaced 2,000 people. He'd robbed them of their livelihood. Now his solution, his explanation was this is modern Pakistan, they need to find other occupations because this old kind of really futile agricultural system isn't good for them. It's not good for the country. It's not producing food in an efficient way. And he's 100% right. But you can't do that from one day to the next which is exactly what he did. So this man whose intentions were noble, whose intentions were correct, then had to live the next 15, 20 years of his life constantly worried about retribution from one of those people who had been displaced. That we need to understand. We need to understand how to use the high yield varieties. I'm not against those. How to use better water management tools. Absolutely, I'm not against those but understand that this is happening in a system where we still have some vestiges of old kind of extended multi-generational relationships between service cast and landowner cast, farmer cast. Those can't be eradicated overnight. We can eradicate them. I mean, there's a lot of things that we wanna eradicate about them but what we can't do is take people's livelihood away without having viable alternatives on offer. And that's exactly what's happened in so much of development and modernization is we have basically introduced a new economic system a new agricultural system which doesn't need as many people. So suddenly from say 200 or 300 people working on a farm you only need 10. Well, what happens to the 190 or 290 that no longer have a job? That's part of why we need a more systemic way of thinking about these problems. And I think that's really what we wanna do with this interdisciplinary research. We want people to come up with good solutions and then anticipate what are the problems that are caused by our solution? Figure out how to resolve those. What are the problems that are caused? But it's an iterative process, right? Every problem causes, every solution causes more problems. How can we head off the worst of those problems? How can we anticipate all of the problems as far as we can? And I know there's jokes about the unknown unknowns but how can we reduce those unknowns unknowns to the smallest possible number? That's really what we're after as a systems way of thinking is what helps us get better solutions to complex problems. Okay, so when we talk about the I honestly think that indigenization of those solutions is extremely important. I mean, each country has its own unique way of actually doing things. And some of these unique ways would actually be considered idiosyncratic by many Western countries and Western academics and Western policy makers for that matter. Do you think that indigenization of the solutions who enter disciplinary education remains a challenge or can it be considered to be an opportunity? I think it's 100% an opportunity and I think it is the only viable way to produce sustainable interventions. And this applies as much to Pakistan as it does to the United States, to France, to the UK. Actually, there is an awful lot of local knowledge, local practice that when we roll it out from the top what we find is resistance. What we find is resentment and we very often leave people behind with those solutions. We say, here's your solution. If you want a viable middle class life here's the box you have to fit in. And of course, this is what's happened in Europe. We've all fit inside those boxes to our detriment. We have actually a whole history of people who have suffered as a consequence of that. I think we can do better going forward. We don't have to repeat the mistakes of the past. So anthropologists have long kind of praised the idea of rather than indigenous because indigenous brings in all kinds of complex issues about who was first but local knowledge, local understanding. So there's some wonderful ethnographic work from, for example, the mining industry in South America which really suggests that the way miners have made sense of capitalism is completely at odds with the way a New York banker, a JP Morgan banker would be thinking of capitalism. So when they hold a bill in their hand it doesn't mean the same thing. It doesn't have the same relationship that a bill would have in a JP Morgan banker's hands. And that's not to say this is a better way or a worse way, but we must work with the way people understand the world around them. So anthropologists have devoted an awful lot of their methodological development to try and figure out how do people think of the world? What do they think is right? What do they think is wrong? What are the values? So if we're talking about well-being as an aspirational goal, well, well-being must be defined by the people who will inhabit that well-being. It's not my well-being that counts. It's the people who will be affected. The people who have to live with the intervention. Their well-being, their understanding of well-being is what we need to be working towards. Well, many countries also suffer from bureaucratic inertia. And you do see bureaucracy as being resistant to the idea of maybe interdisciplinary education due to different priorities. I mean, a country like Pakistan which obviously does face internal and external security challenges might actually think of this idea in a very different way as compared to maybe a country like Singapore who would actually ensure that such indigenous solutions can actually be implemented to a larger extent. How do you break the bureaucratic inertia barrier? Is it about crafting a proposal that would resonate with the bureaucrats? Or is it about convincing bureaucrats that this is the way to actually go about it? Because without legislation, without policy-making at the top, it becomes merely an academic idea. Well, I think there's two answers to that. One, you do exactly what you're saying. You have to develop good proposals. You have to work with the top. For whether I think the bureaucracy of Pakistan is good or bad is neither here nor there. It's irrelevant what I think. What matters is this is the organization. These are the organizations responsible for implementing policy across these countries. Oh, we have to work with them. But at another level, one of the things I think through the Aga Khan Development Network and Aga Khan University have demonstrated is that this is a country where there is space for, for lack of a better word, I'm going to call it civil society. There is space for civil society to move well beyond what the bureaucracies might imagine is possible. So if you look at much of the progress that's happened in this country over the last 30 years, and there is no denying that there's been tremendous progress in a number of areas in Pakistan over the last 30 years. I mean, I've been coming and going for 40 years and this is not the same country that I first came to in 1982. It has almost unrecognizable from the early 80s, right? Much of the progress, much of the kind of economic growth, the development has happened really around those bureaucratic constraints. They haven't been working within the bureaucracy. They have basically found the loopholes and raced ahead, right? So this is one of the areas where bureaucracy is often finding itself trying to racing to catch up to things that have really sped ahead. And I think looking at the education sector in Pakistan is a good example. The education sector in Pakistan has exploded in the last 15 years. And the organizations like the Higher Education Commission are, you know, they are really, this is no criticism of them. They are racing to keep up with a field that just exploded way faster than anyone imagined it would in the year 2000, right? What we have today is a landscape of educational institutions, private and state, and not-for-profit and religious and non-religious that really was kind of unimaginable, certainly unimaginable in the 1980s. So now we have organizations like in the UK, you know, the OFS office for students and all of those organizations that regulate these institutions, Pakistan is developing those institutions. They are finding their way. They are figuring out how do we regulate such a diverse landscape of educational institutions because those institutions institutions haven't waited for the bureaucracies to tell them where to go. They have filled in every available niche and space to be able to do that. Yeah, a very good example of that would be IDEA Karate. Perfect example. Absolutely. So it's tied to a public university, but it's independent. It has definitely secured an independent funding source and it has done something which really has put it on the global landscape. So we'll give credit to IDEA for many things. You know, I mean, people say they're a competitor. I don't think of them as competitor. I think of them as a collaborator, as a partner. We are all shooting for the same higher standards and higher goals. But when I meet people in Britain who do their undergraduate degrees and their MBAs in IDEA to come back and work in Britain, that tells me that IDEA has filled a niche that is perfectly possible all over Pakistan. We can be a global center of excellence at higher education. Indeed, even at secondary education, although I'm not in favor of sending kids away from their parents too young. So I mean, higher education is where I'd aim for. Okay, so when we talk about the layman, obviously Pakistan, let's come to the problems obviously for countries like Pakistan and the developing world who suffer from high illiteracy and lack of awareness, especially in the territory or the rural areas for that matter. Don't you think it would be a good idea to try and make sure that workshops and seminars can actually be conducted in the territory instead of some of the main big cities such as Karachi, Lahore, and Asfaba for greater impact so that there would be more inclusion as far as members of the Baloch population is concerned or members of the Pashtun population in the Khyber-Pakhtun-Pah is concerned to try and make sure that they understand the fact of interdisciplinary education and its impact on social change or its impact on their communities and their livelihoods. I couldn't agree more. I think this is a vital responsibility of all universities in the country. Now, it's very difficult at the higher education level, at the tertiary level, to affect the kinds of changes that you are really alluding to. I think where we do it in Aga Khan University is not so much through the Arts and Sciences Program but through our Institute for Educational Development. So my colleagues in what we call the IED, they are actively involved in teacher training. We've set up our own Aga Khan exam board, which again is about introducing a local Pakistani relevant exam board that will not replace local boards. I'm not trying to replace the Cindy Board or Punjabi Board, but give people an alternative that prepares them for programs like ours, the Arts and Sciences Program, and indeed prepares them for liberal arts programs in the United States or in Europe or in Australia. Now, when you talk about the illiterate populations, the people who really are at the, the kind of really left behind populations, now they can be very hard to reach. They can be very hard to reach in a way that matters, that is impactful. And that's something that I think takes long, takes longer and takes patience and persistence. So one of the things that I've always done is, I've always tried to go beyond the urban areas, go to villages, go to within Karachi, to go to the kind of underdeveloped areas, the underserved areas, deprived areas of some of the slum schools, these kind of self-built housing areas, not necessarily because the kids in those schools will be able to get admission to AKU. But what I want those kids to know is they should be aspiring to higher education. They should be aspiring to something more. This is crucial. We don't want whole segments of the population, either here in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world, to give up, right? I lived in a mining village in the north of England for 10 years. My kids went to the local school. Many of the kids there came from mining families. And one of the tragedies that I saw was many of these children by year two had already decided education was not for them, that they were not the kind of people who went and did A-levels or even necessarily finished school at all. So many of those children in my children's school dropped out after primary school. They left school at 13, 14 years old because they had decided education wasn't for them. Now, the school was good. They were trying, but I have to say there were one or two teachers in there who had it in their mind that these kids weren't fit for higher education. And so when I went and complained to the teachers about bullying, my children being bullied, they said, oh, was it this kid? Yeah. Don't worry, that kid will be gone. That kid's not got a hope. And then I suddenly felt sorry for the bully and thought, well, of course, this kid's a bully. If this is how the teachers think of that child, if the teachers think this child can't actually get better by the age of seven, then what hope has that child got? So we really do need to stop killing our children's passion for learning, passion for education. We need to do that at the youngest possible ages. Now, of course, that is beyond what I can handle, right? Here I am sitting in a university in Karachi. I really can't go to every school. I can't go out to every part of Balochistan as much as I would love to. But what I can do is I can go out to secondary schools in rural areas. I can invite them to come to my university to open days and whether or not they are the kind of student who will have the profile that would get them into AKU, I can be sincere and say to them, they must be aspiring to greater than people expect of them, right? Children are much more capable than we often give them credit for. And I wanna be surprised by what children do. I don't wanna predict what they can do. I wanna say, this child, go ahead, surprise me. Change the world, do something I never expected. Some of those kids will come to AKU and we will help those kids get better, not get better, that's the wrong word. Develop skills to go out and do something that will astonish the world, that will transform the world. Some of them will go to IBA, some will go to Habib, some will go to alums, some will go to government colleges and they will astound the world, but we all have to work together to make sure that we're not leaving children behind simply because we've decided, oh, that's a poor kid who comes from a poor family, criminal family. So that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna be drug dealers or criminal elements. I don't believe children inherit the sins of their mothers and fathers. I believe children are, they are the future and they have the potential for whatever they're after. What we have to do is guide them and make sure that the resources they need as far as possible are made available. So let's talk about social challenges. I mean, obviously you have this horrendous attack on churches as well as 80 odd houses in Joramwala and Paslavad, which was motivated by victory. As a Muslim myself, I can clearly say that this has nothing to do with Islam. This has more to do with these, these fringe elements trying to use religion as a tool for greater visibility, if you want to call it. But there are social issues. There are issues with regard to inclusion, peaceful coexistence. And we're all saying what's happening in neighboring India as well. And then countries like Sri Lanka have obviously had this problem between Buddhists and Muslims for quite some time and Buddhists for Christians for quite some time. How do you think interdisciplinary education can address these social challenges, challenges regarding inclusion, peaceful coexistence? There's a lot of talk about interfaith dialogue. But clearly, I mean, you've had such exercises before, but they're not really having a meaningful impact. No, and there's a danger with the kinds of interfaith dialogue that you basically only attract people who are already 90% there. You don't get the people who are, the kinds of people who would weaponize their faith to point people at others and say, go kill them. Whether they are Muslim or Christian or Buddhist, as you say, Pakistan doesn't have a monopoly on people who use their religion for violent means, who use it- You also have white supremacy in the United States as well. Oh, that's a perfect example, absolutely. I mean, we hear American politicians talking about the country being a Christian nation for Christians. And I sort of shudder when I hear that because that's not the Christianity that I understand, right? Christianity should absolutely not be about only for Christians and Christian ideology or get out. That's really quite alien, certainly alien to the United States, but I think it's alien to Christianity. And I'm not here to defend religion or condemn religion. People weaponize ideologies all the time. And one of the things here is that identities have become politicized. So whether you are a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or a woman or a man or an African American or an Irish American or whatever your identity is, it's become something much more than a set of sort of trivial attributes that kind of describe something about you. It's become something that indicates something political about you, right? So if you are a Muslim American, then you must be X, Y, Z. These are your attributes. If you are a Christian American, then you are these other attributes. And of course, that's not helpful, right? That reduces people. It sort of turns people into tiny little stereotypes of themselves. And we are all more complex than that. And I think this weaponization of identities, whether they're religious or ethnic or any other class-based identities, this weaponization of identities, it has been manipulated by people who really benefit from conflict. And there are people who benefit from conflict. We can't deny that. Conflict serves some people's interests. As you say, you know, the tragedy in drumwala is really something that we've seen played out time and time. Again, I don't know the details of what happened there, but I know that in some other cases, there's actually been an underpinning land dispute. So if you've got a land dispute and you're willing to use identity politics, these kind of weaponized faith-based politics to win a land dispute, well, that is something that is actually now manageable because now we're not talking about the esoteric metaphysics. We're talking about material conflicts of interest, but we can deal with those. We can actually sit down and we can have, we know that we can have land disputes. And I studied land disputes in rural Punjab for more than a decade. And I know that you can have those without killing, right? It is possible to have land disputes that look very violent. You can control that violence and you can actually manage those. People are willing to kill for them, but you can institute systems that get people to step back from that level of violence and engage productively and constructively. And actually everyone understands that there cannot be an all-win, win-lose situation that you've got to walk away with a win-win. People have to compromise. That is actually possible. Now, what is it that's happened in a place like Jamala? I don't know the details there. What has this happened in some of these other areas where, I mean, I've heard of politicians who've been killed and it certainly, first it looks like terrorism and then you realize, oh no, actually, there was something much more crude here. There was something to do with money, right? This politician was killed because of a money dispute with another landlord or another politician. And so those are the kinds of things that we need to peel back some of really what I would call the proximate causes of the conflict, get to the ultimate causes and see about dealing those. So one of the real causes of conflict in Pakistan today and has been for many years now is issues of water and arable land, right? If you have land that has water, then you have something that is worth way more than gold. People will kill for it. So how do we manage those? Because many of the conflicts on the surface may seem sectarian, but if you look in detail what you're looking at is something much more material, much more life or death, actually, arable land is a life or death situation. Sectarian conflicts, we can discuss at length in places like Haga Khan University, right? We can discuss those and we don't have to kill each other. We can walk away, agree to disagree. When it comes to those life or death issues of water, of arable land, of food, then I think we are much closer to that point where people are not willing to walk away with disagreements. They will kill to maintain the security, food security, water security for their group. And that's what we need to figure out. How do we actually peel back some of the proximate causes of conflict to address those ultimate causes of conflict in a way that will allow us then to turn around and deal with the proximate causes, which are real. I'm not knocking on. I'm not saying that sectarian differences aren't important. They matter, right? But are they the sort of thing that people should kill each other over? I don't think so, right? I don't think people should kill each other full stop. Let me say that. I am not a killer, but I think that we need to be able to pick apart these conflicts. And that's where the interdisciplinarity really comes to its, it really shines. Because if we are interdisciplinary approach, then we don't get distracted by the shiny bubbles of the proximate causes of the problem. We can peel those back and try and understand the ultimate causes of problems. And of course then, figure out how we can, how we can come up with a compromise solution that works well enough for everyone that we are willing to bumble along until the next conflict arises. And again, you'd never do away with conflict. What we have to do is manage the violence associated with a conflict until the next conflict arises. And by the way, that's something I learned from living in a village in Punjab. Living in a village in Punjab, filled with conflict. And what does it people do? They manage the violence around the conflict in order to have a life that you can live. And then they get from one conflict, the conflict's never in. And what I thought, what I realized is, they're not trying to solve conflict once and for all. They are not fantasists about conflict. They know it will always be there. What they do is manage the violence around it so that they can live with a conflict. It's not like they say it sounds like it's depressing. No, no, no, it's okay, it's okay. Dean of Avalokan University, cultural anthropologist, Dr. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me on this show. Thank you very much. That's all that we have for us today on Think Check Away. Just follow us on social media, you can blog me and do share our comments until next time, take care.