As the year comes to a close we have a tradition to look back at all the stories and content from the last year and vote on our favorites. The top highlights is a snapshot of the year at MIT GOV/LAB and our collaborations with partners (You can also see the top stories from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017).
Here are our top five picks from 2022 with a few extras thrown in. Happy new year!
Partner Spotlight: Rawlance Ndejjo, Makerere University School of Public Health in Uganda by Akskat Singh. This Q+A with Rawlance delves into his interest in public health, how the interdisciplinary research collaboration with MIT came about, and navigating the challenges of building partnerships between Global South and North institutions. (To learn more about the research outputs, check out this summary of results on “Measuring How Trust Shapes People’s Attitudes Towards Covid-19 Vaccines”).
Governance Innovation website. Our Governance Innovation initiative has been in beta mode, evolving and morphing, over the last year or so and the new microsite gives a strong sense of what we are doing to combine design-thinking and special sciences to create innovative governance solutions. We’re especially excited how this initiative is partnering across MIT with our inaugural Morningside Academy Design Fellow (Meet Mariama N’Diaye) and two designer-researchers embedded with government partners in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
Trust Mini Guide by Gabriel Nahmias, Nuole (Lula) Chen, Alisa Zomer, and Lily L. Tsai. Trust is so much a part of what we do — from building relationships with partners to measuring the relationship between people and government. We’ve been publishing research on trust for a long time and this guide is a first attempt to step back and see how trust is a thread throughout our work and provide a resource for practitioners to understand trust better, how we measure it, and how it can be applied to governance challenges. (Check the links for more on how trust intersects with our research on Ebola, Covid-19, community policing, and more).
Political Science Graduate Students Use MIT GOV/LAB Funding to Conduct Dissertation Research by Will Sullivan. Our graduate students are tasked with coming up with unique research that can contribute to broader knowledge about political science and our society. As they get into the later stages of dissertation work, they often disappear to the field or to the library, so we nominated this piece as an update and reminder about the amazing work they are doing.
MIT GOV/LAB’s Engaged Scholarship Model by Nuole (Lula) Chen, Lily L. Tsai, and Alisa Zomer. Our engaged scholarship ethos is critical to how we approach research collaborations with partners, but we never put out an external explanation of how and why we do what we do. So, when Evidence in Governance and Politics asked us to contribute to their series on academic-practitioner partnerships, it was the perfect opportunity (thanks, EGAP!).
Photo of Boston, MA by Lance Anderson on Unsplash.