Internship description

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1964, students from around the country traveled to Mississippi to participate in Mississippi Freedom Summer. Working hand-in-hand with civil rights organizations and African American residents of Mississippi, these students helped to shine a spotlight on the deep injustices of Jim Crow. At the same time, these students came to see the world with "Mississippi eyes," deepening their own commitment to racial and economic justice in ways that would last a lifetime.

To mark the anniversary of Freedom Summer, OUR Walmart and Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) are teaming up on a program to document the economic disenfranchisement that continues to afflict our country. Students from around the country, hand-in-hand with Walmart worker-leaders, will participate in an intensive summer of organizing and oral history documentation.

The project will last from May 26th to August 3. We will begin with an intensive four-day training in organizing, oral history, and video co-facilitated by OUR Walmart and INCITE, to take place between May 26th and May 29th at Columbia University. Students will then travel in teams to one of four regions across the country, where they will embed themselves with existing workers' organizations. For the next nine weeks, students will be a part of ongoing organizing campaigns, with a particular focus on conducting oral history interviews with workers, customers, and community members. The group will then regroup in New York City at the beginning of August (August 1-3) for a debrief and celebration, where we will plan next steps for the campaign.

Students will learn to do the following:

• Provide support and coaching to existing OUR Walmart leaders as they engage, recruit, and mobilize their co-workers.

• Build relationships with Walmart workers in their communities by visiting stores, identifying friends and relatives of local union members and community members.

• Conduct oral-history interviews with Walmart workers, customers, and community members.

• Identify and produce compelling narrative "shorts" that succinctly articulate the impact of Walmart on workers, customers, and communities.

How to apply

Students will be paid a stipend for their participation in the program, and will be reimbursed for travel expenses. As a part of their participation, students will be encouraged to help raise funds to cover program expenses. Interested students should email organizing@columbia.edu with a CV and a short letter explaining their interest, with the subject line "Summer for Respect." Letters of interest are due no later than April 25th, although we will be offering rolling admissions to qualified applicants.

The Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program is hosting James Moody for a two-day short course on April 28 & April 29.

Click here to learn more and apply.

This two-day course will familiarize participants with a range of ethnographic interviewing techniques and provide orientation to those techniques most appropriate for particular research questions and approaches. The course is March 6 & March 7. Applications due Friday, February 28. 

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND APPLY

The Center for Oral History Research/INCITE (Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics) is pleased to announce its 2014 Oral History Institute, “Second Generation Memories and Stories,” to be held June 16-27, 2014 at Columbia University in New York City.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND APPLY

In a pathbreaking move that has strengthened the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH), the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) has partnered with the Columbia University Libraries in managing and administering the activities and programs of the CCOH. INCITE and its founder Peter Bearman (Sociology) have worked closely with the staff of CCOH over the years, particularly in the development of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Projects and the Oral History Master of Arts program.

Under the terms of the new partnership, INCITE will have responsibility for the research, education, and outreach activities of CCOH. These include new oral history projects, the Oral History Master of Arts program (which was already jointly administered by CCOH and INCITE), the Summer Institute, and public programming. All of these activities will take shape under the CCOHR. The R stands for Research. The Libraries, in turn, will focus its energies on the curatorial and archiving aspects of CCOH’s mission. The Libraries will devote more staff and attention to acquiring, processing, and making more generally available the rich set of resources that comprise the CCOH archive. All of these activities will take shape under the CCOHA, the A stands for Archives.

This new relationship thus anchors CCOH firmly in faculty research and teaching, while bolstering Columbia University Libraries commitments to professional archival management through the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML).

This semester, Mary Marshall Clark, director of CCOHR, along with program coordinators David Briand and Sarah Dziedzic, all officially joined the INCITE team. The CCOHR will carry out a full portfolio of new and important oral history projects. CCOHA will continue to provide reference and support services under the management of the RBML. Research activities will take place at INCITE’s research space at 122nd and Broadway.

Click here to learn more about CCOHR.

The Interdisciplinary Center Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) cultivates public intelligence concerning socially and culturally vital ideas that can be advanced by research, education and conversation at the interdisciplinary seams that the social sciences share with one another, the humanities, the life and behavioral sciences: incite.columbia.edu.

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research's mission is to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, and to teach and do research across the disciplines: /ccohr/

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is one of the top five academic research library systems in North America. The collections include over 11 million volumes, over 150,000 journals and serials, as well as extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps, and graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are organized into 22 libraries and various academic technology centers. The Libraries employs more than 500 professional and support staff. The website of the Libraries is the gateway to its services and resources: library.columbia.edu.

The Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program is hosting a free short course on epigentics Nov. 22 & 23. 

Click here to learn more and apply. 

The Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows program, organized by INCITE and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is pleased to announce its cohort of 13 new fellows for the 2013-14 academic year. Members of the cohort span the social sciences, humanities, and life and behavioral sciences.They will join seven returning Mellon fellows from the 2012-13 cohort.

Click here for learn about the current cohort.

Click here to learn more about the program.

The Wall Street Journal highlighted INCITE's participation in a $2.6 million plan to digitize the New York Philharmonic's archives. The Research Project, Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic, 1842-Present, is overseen by Prof. Shamus Khan.

The article describes the project that analyzes "the orchestra's subscriber lists to create a database mapping New York's elites in the seats of the concert hall" in order to better understanding New York's "evolving social life."

"What if we knew who'd gone to the Philharmonic over the last 150 years—where they sat, who sat around them, what concerts they went to—and we knew where they lived in the world?" Khan told the Wall Street Journal. "We think that can tell us a lot."

Submission Deadline March 15, 2013

Seed Grant Program Objectives

INCITE, in conjunction with the Office of the Global Centers, is pleased to issue its second request for seed grant proposals to Columbia Faculty working with Columbia’s new network of Global Centers and the local and regional partners of those Centers.  Through this request for proposals, INCITE seeks to leverage Columbia’s diverse intellectual capacities and resources to build a vibrant and sustainable global research program, and facilitate the emergence of Columbia as a global university.  The INCITE Global Centers Research Grant program has four closely-related goals:

• To support substantive, innovative, interdisciplinary social science research at the Centers;

• To strengthen the research infrastructure of the Global Centers;

• To improve our collective understanding of critical issues that unite the diverse Global Centers; and

• To enable faculty to produce compelling, well-crafted proposals for external funding.

INCITE grants are intended to provide Global Center and Columbia-based investigators with funding to develop innovative and ambitious research proposals that by virtue of our seed support are well positioned to apply for and receive external funding from local and regional sources. INCITE seed grants funds are designed to strengthen the research infrastructure at the Global Centers, ensure the sustainability of an active program of research, and foster deeper connections with Columbia-based researchers and research institutions.

Projects may be regionally focused, international, or comparative. We strongly encourage interdisciplinary research proposals, partnerships with Columbia-based social science researchers, and collaborations among the Global Centers. We strongly encourage applications that focus on problems of deep social significance. Examples of these seam issues include—but are certainly not limited to—democratization, freedom of information, or inequality. New projects could also build upon the themes of last year’s awards- education policy and school choice in South America, refugee issues in Jordan and the Middle East, and historical dialogue and accountability in Turkey and the Middle East- by exploring these issues in new regions and in collaboration with different Global Centers.

Successful proposals will clearly describe the research problem, its significance in the local or regional environment, and its implications for the global research community. Successful proposals will clearly describe the project’s methodology, explaining how the project will answer the research question. Proposals should differentiate clearly between the seed grant project and the larger research program. Investigators should lay out how this research project will engage investigators in the regions supported by Global Centers with their Columbia-based counterparts, and how these relationships will contribute to the Global Center’s research capacities and infrastructure.

PLEASE NOTE: The INCITE Global Centers Research Grant program is not a small grant program. Grants do not fund stand-alone projects, ongoing research, curriculum development, documentary films, conferences or conference travel, or workshops.  INCITE will only review proposals with concrete plans for obtaining external funding and detailed budgets and budget justifications.

Eligibility and Review Process

Columbia University faculty and international research partners working on projects that can be facilitated by the Global Centers are eligible to apply for INCITE seed grants. At least one applicant per investigative team must be a full-time faculty member, research scholar, or research scientist at Columbia. Each proposal ought to identify both a Columbia PI and a PI from the Global Center(s).

Because it can take some time for projects to develop from conception to externally-funded fruition, INCITE Global Centers Research Grants are a long-term investment in Columbia’s Global Centers. For this reason, we will not fund postdoctoral fellows, temporary faculty, graduate student projects, or undergraduates under this mechanism.

All applications must be received in full by 5:00 pm EST on March 15, 2013. A committee of INCITE-affiliated faculty and members of the Columbia administration will assess the merits of proposals. Proposals are evaluated on the relevance of the seam area, on the intellectual merit and innovation of the proposed project, on the seed grant’s relationship to the larger project for which the investigator will seek external funding, on the project’s organization and judicious use of funds, on the project’s contribution to the Global Center’s research capacity, and on the plausibility of the investigators’ plan for seeking outside funding. We also consider the extent to which the proposed research is interdisciplinary and collaborative.

Over the next year, INCITE anticipates awarding 3-5 grants of roughly $30,000 each. Grants may be for up to $50,000 and may be budgeted for one or two years.  Applicants submitting proposals for INCITE Global Centers Research Grants can expect to hear back from the review committee within eight weeks of the proposal deadline.

Conditions of Receipt

Grant recipients must to provide annual reports on project activities, including updates on external funding proposals. Investigators who receive American-sourced external grants based on work resulting from an INCITE Global Centers Research Grant must administer those grants through INCITE if requested to do so. Investigators receiving non-US based external grants based on work resulting from an INCITE seed grant must administer those grants through their local Global Center, with Indirect Cost sharing determined on a case-by-case basis. Investigators should also acknowledge INCITE’s support in any papers, publications, or reports resulting from seed grant activities.

Where appropriate, research projects involving human subjects must obtain (and keep up to date) Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

Submitting Proposals

Please submit proposals electronically to Caitlin Deighan, at cdd2114@columbia.edu, by 5:00 pm EST on March 15, 2013. To apply, please submit the following as pdf documents:

• Proposal narrative (no more than 5 pages, single-spaced)

• Budget

• Budget narrative

• CVs for each investigator

• Figures or tables

• Plan for securing external funding

The Oral History Master of Arts, a program jointly supported by INCITE and the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH), was featured in CCOH's annual report. In 2012 OHMA welcomed its largest cohort in the program's history. Download the report to learn more about OHMA and CCOH.

New York, NY — Columbia University Arts & Sciences is pleased to announce the launch of a new center, the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE).

The mission of INCITE is to cultivate public intelligence about socially and culturally vital ideas that can be advanced by research, education, and conversation at the interdisciplinary seams that the social sciences share with the humanities and with the life and behavioral sciences.

INCITE culminates over a decade’s work of creating multi-disciplinary education, training and research initiatives. It assumes all the education and training initiatives of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, including the Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows Program, the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program and the Oral History Master of Arts.

“For the past decade Arts & Sciences has launched several collaborative research and education programs, centered around core priorities of the University, that all share a commitment to integrating the strengths of a variety of disciplines,” said Nicholas Dirks, executive vice president of Arts and Sciences. “By bringing some of these initiatives together under a united vision, we believe INCITE will become an important new site for innovative ideas that will lead to breakthroughs in knowledge and social engagement.”

The Center also catalyzes and oversees a variety of research initiatives. It houses the continuing projects on Understanding Autism and on Homelessness, and initiates  a collaborative research project to digitize and analyze New York Philharmonic subscriber roles over time to reveal a portrait of the role of the Philharmonic in the life of New York City. This project is overseen by Sociology Professor Shamus Khan and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“The Philharmonic project is just one example of the Center’s expansive and innovative research activities. It reflects our commitment to the belief that, by bringing together appropriate methods and knowledge from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, we can advance public intelligence through collective research and conversation, especially in emerging fields such as digital humanities” said INCITE Director Peter Bearman.

INCITE descends directly from the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences and the Bureau for Applied Social Research, established by Paul F. Lazarsfeld. To honor his legacy and to foster conversations that span substantive domains, INCITE has launched the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series. This series features public lectures and ongoing workshops that embody and honor Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches to develop knowledge.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MELLON SHORT COURSE ON QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE RWJ-HSS COURSE ON GRAPHICAL MODELS

(Note, the initial email was incorrect)

Jessica Hammer, a 2011-12 Mellon Interdisiciplinary Graduate Fellow, was quoted in a New York Times article about sexual harrassment in gaming. Hammer researches psychology in videogames and how videogame design affects players thinking.

Click here to view Hammer's personal website. 

Jeffrey Brodsky, a graduate fellow of the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), is chronicling the history of first campaigns. This feature, which launched July 20 on the Washington Post Web site, includes video interviews with politicians ranging from Bob McDonnell to Corey Booker, all recalling their first campaigns. 

Brodsky is a graduate of INCITE's Oral History Master of Arts program. 

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars program, including our Columbia University site, is designed to build the nation's capacity for research, leadership and policy change to address the multiple determinants of population health. The program is based on the principle that progress in the field of population health depends upon multidisciplinary collaboration and exchange. Its goal is to improve health by training scholars to:

• investigate rigorously the connections among biological, genetic, behavioral, environmental, economic and social determinants of health; and

• develop, evaluate and disseminate knowledge and interventions that integrate and act on these determinants to improve health.

The program is intended to produce leaders who will change the questions asked, the methods employed to analyze problems, and the range of solutions to reduce population health disparities and improve the health of all Americans.

Click here to apply.