Calvin geography professor awarded fifth Fulbright to Africa

Last week Johnathan Bascom traveled 7,500 miles southeast and arrived back in East Africa.
“Fewer and fewer geographers focus on sub-Saharan Africa,” said Bascom, a longtime geography professor at Calvin. “The region is ‘drifting off’ our profession’s collective map for research and teaching.”
A lifelong commitment
But this area of the world is certainly not out of sight or out of mind for Bascom. For nearly half a century, he’s spent significant time in the region, principally in Sudan, Eritrea, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Via a 2025-26 Fulbright Scholarship through the U.S. Department of Education, Bascom arrived in Ethiopia to help work alongside a local university to meet an expressed need.
“In 2021, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Ethiopia introduced an ambitious plan to produce 5,000 PhD-qualified faculty in five years,” said Bascom. “But the critical need is training for these PhD students in how to write a dissertation.”
Equipping future leaders
Through Bascom’s most recent Fulbright, his fifth in total, he’ll help meet this critical need. As a Fulbright Teaching/Research scholar at Arba Minch University in southwestern Ethiopia, over the next nine months Bascom will focus on training PhD students and faculty in the process of writing, advising, and defending dissertations. He will also deliver relevant public lectures, help strengthen AMU’s GIS capacity; and work on collaborative research projects.
“These requested deliverables from AMU will build capacity by equipping and empowering faculty and PhD students to mentor, teach, and research,” said Bascom.
Personally impacted
While Bascom realizes his calling overseas is an important step of obedience in partnering to help future teachers in the region, he’s also keenly aware of the profound impact spending time in sub-Saharan Africa has had on he and his family over the course of his entire life, from spending time as a child in Ethiopia when his dad was a missionary doctor to beginning his professional career with nine months of research in an Eritrean refugee community in eastern Sudan.
“Living in a tent, carrying drinking water from the well, struggling with dust and heat and experiencing some of the many vicissitudes of life in rural Africa built a vital point of identification with the people and places of East Africa that remains in me to this day,” said Bascom. “When we go to Ethiopia, we are grounded again. When we step out of the world of massive choice and many ultimately marginally important decisions, things become more vivid, including stars, creation, and cultures. My family has been profoundly impacted by living in cross-cultural settings, it’s transformed our value structure.”
Enriching the classroom experience
And over the years, Bascom has reinvested those experiences and learnings back into his classrooms on 鶹’s campus.
“I’m able to link key concepts we’re reading about in texts to vivid encounters with human beings facing incredible odds economically, socially, health-wise, and so on,” said Bascom. “These next nine months will further inform my courses at Calvin, supplying new stories and experiences that I can share with my students that will deepen their understanding, appreciation, curiosity, and empathy for other regions of the world and their cultures.”