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Find out about their Projects
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Mahzarin R. Banaji, Department of Psychology
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Psychology, in the past, has paid relatively little attention to the development of social beliefs and attitudes. What we currently know about these concepts in children is based on verbal self-report measures that ask for introspective reports of what the child thinks and feels. These measures provide rich information about consciously accessible attitudes and beliefs, and especially with young children, it is conceivable that social pressures to report only acceptable views may not be as much of a problem as it is with adults. Yet it is clear that children early on are quite aware of the "right" answers to provide, and more importantly, just as with adults, children simply may not have access to their less conscious thoughts and feelings.
The need to move to indirect measurement of prejudice is urgent. A focus on these developmental questions has obvious potential for advancing knowledge about the origins of belief and preferences, of the ability to challenge and shape existing theories and knowledge regarding the nature of prejudice and the scope of its influence in everyday life. A commitment to Lewin's notion of "action research", of moving from phenomena in the world to the laboratory and back, has already led Dr. Banaji's team to consider the applications of their adult work to the workplace, as well as in legal and educational settings. Such communication has improved their science and there is the hope that such work will have a positive effect on the society that supports this work by discovering what society ought to teach and especially how society ought to teach about tolerance. Dr. Banaji's main focus regarding the application of the research findings involves devising environments that can reduce both conscious and nonconscious bias.
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Jacqueline Bhabha, University Committee on Human Rights Studies
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Forced migration has emerged as one of the critical human rights issues of our time. The forced migration of children fleeing war or persecution and traveling alone in search of safety represents a particularly compelling problem. Ms. Bhabha's project focuses on a question that has generated increasing political and legal concern internationally without receiving adequate scholarly attention: how effective are legal mechanisms to protect child asylum-seekers separated from their families because of persecution or trafficking? Ms. Bhabha is coordinating an international research project to investigate this issue in several key asylum destinations on different continents: the US, the UK, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary and Australia.
The inquiry is important because available (often anecdotal) evidence suggests that growing numbers of separated children are forced to leave their homes and that they find it much more difficult than adults to gain asylum. They have difficulties getting adequate legal representation; their cases are more likely to be postponed and to drag on over time than adults; and they have less chance of being granted refugee status. The outcome of an asylum application is often a troubling limbo of indeterminacy, rather than a reassuring guarantee of permanency. Yet the grant of asylum constitutes one of the most powerful and successful contemporary human rights remedies. Are separated children missing out on a key human rights protection? It appears that the increasingly sizeable phenomenon of separated children seeking asylum has not been matched by the development of appropriate legal protections or understanding of the problems that arise. This international research project studies the claims of children seeking asylum alone to determine the extent and nature of the disadvantage they face within the asylum systems of the chosen countries. The central question is whether these children, burdened by the double jeopardy of alienate and minority, are also legally discriminated against. If minority is a handicap rather than an advantage in securing human right protection, how and why is this so?
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Felton Earls, Medical School
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The central objective of Dr. Earl's work is to define, measure, and strengthen the skills needed in the development of children’s personal and collective efficacy. The acquisition of these skills requires active participation in democratic practices, where the conditions of fairness, respect and tolerance are valued. These practices are viewed as key attributes of schools and communities, which constitute necessary conditions for the promotion of child well-being and the protection of the human rights for children.
Most communities need assistance in overcoming the barriers towards instituting and sustaining democratic practices. These destructive circumstances are well known but poorly controlled. They include racism, ethnocentrism, war, terrorism and epidemic diseases. Dr. Earl's work seeks to engage children between the ages of 10 and 14 in the process of acquiring accurate information about these problems. The purpose of acquiring such information is intended to kindle children becoming actively engaged in applications of this knowledge. This objective of involving children is viewed as a frontier in health promotion, one that aims to enhance individual well-being while strengthening democratic ideals. The growth of tolerance and respect among children in a society should contribute substantially to fostering diversity and reducing disparities in the quality of life.
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Mica Pollock, Graduate School of Education.
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Global Youth/Global Justice (GYGJ) is a multi-sited ethnography that identifies and analyzes networks of young activists who are defining and addressing social inequality transnationally. The project selects and studies eight representative youth-dominated transnational advocacy networks, based in the U.S. and in selected locations worldwide, that involve activists outside as well as inside the organizers' nations of origin -- and that have young people analyzing social problems as orders created, and thus solved, through transnational processes.
The GYGJ project seeks to identify, analyze, and understand salient networks of youth, including young Americans, who themselves are figuring out how to connect transnationally with peers across the globe for the purpose of collective political action -- young people hoping quite literally to "change the world" through the creation and political use of globalization's human and technological networks. In the end, Dr. Pollock seeks to provide not just scholars but also youth, youth organizers and youth developers both within and outside the United States with key models of successful nonviolent and democratic transnational cooperation.
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Robert L. Selman, Graduate School of Education
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Dr. Selman's research focuses on what can be learned about the origins of tolerance and prejudice in young children through research on how students in elementary schools develop and express their awareness of these attitudes as they actively participate in literacy practices designed to promote the former and prevent the latter. Reciprocally he focuses on how to provide the findings directly to practitioners, in this case, elementary grade teachers, and explores how to study the uses teachers make of the information his team provides.
To respond to the first question, Dr. Selman focuses on the validation of methods for the assessment of children's developing awareness of the roots of both tolerance and prejudice by examining how children at different ages (K-5th grade), and from different backgrounds, make meaning of the multicultural children's literature focused on social justice themes. This will afford Dr. Selman's team the opportunity to study both the developmental antecedents (e.g., capacity for perspective coordination and conflict resolution skills) and cultural foundations (e.g. orientations of children from one background to children from different backgrounds) that influence children's inter-group relationships.
The second question focuses on the process by which teachers and researchers together can inform and change practice, using the knowledge the researcher gives back. The emphasis of this aspect of the initiative is on the translational process between research and practice, and it is designed to insure that researchers return to the source of their inspiration. Through a series of professional development "partnership workshops" for researchers and teachers alike, Dr. Selman's team will take what they have learned in the research on children’s meaning making and use it to improve the practice of promoting children's social awareness, at the same time studying .the dynamics in the workshops themselves.
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