Knowledge for public action.
Incite is an interdisciplinary institute at Columbia University.
We produce knowledge for public action. We do so by joining with people and organizations within and outside the university to rethink our understanding of what knowledge is, how it’s created, and how it can be used.
Oct 2022: New Yorkers from all five boroughs convene at Hey Neighbor NYC—an art project created by Assembling Voices Fellows Kisha Bari and Jasmin Chang that invites organizers from distinct communities to interact across cultural, geographic, and interest-based silos. Photo by Emily Schiffer.
Featured work
Photo: Pete Souza
The Obama Presidency Oral History
We’re partnering with the Obama Foundation to produce the official oral history of the Obama Presidency. The result of this collaboration is a comprehensive, enduring record of the decisions, actions and impacts of this historic presidency.
To date, we’ve interviewed hundreds of people—including senior leaders and policymakers within the administration, elected officials, foreign leaders, campaign staff, journalists, and other key figures outside the administration, as well as members of the public who had a connection to the Obama Presidency.
The Elder Project
We’re partnering with Emerson Collective and Baldwin for the Arts to support acclaimed author Jacqueline Woodson’s I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of our Elders.
This ambitious oral history project seeks to preserve the stories of elders who have shaped America—from Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders to survivors of Stonewall—before they’re lost to history. Though the project’s collection of narrators is diverse in geography and lived experience, each story is united by common themes of identity creation and migration.
Photo: Emily Schiffer
Assembling Voices
Assembling Voices our year-long Fellowship for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, performers, activists, workers, and others with compelling ideas for public initiatives which bring people together around issues of democracy and trust.
Centers
-
As one of the world's leading centers for the practice and teaching of oral history, the Columbia Center for Oral History Research seeks to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, provide public programming, and teach and do research across the disciplines.
-
Columbia Labor Lab leverages the tools of social science to understand and strengthen efforts to rebuild the economic and political power of workers. The Labor Lab works in partnership with unions and worker associations, affording us access to unique data and providing us opportunities to directly test the implications that follow from our work.
-
The Columbia Privacy Lab (“c/privacy lab” or “cpl”) helps communities collectively advocate for privacy. We pose technical and sociological questions around user privacy and rights, connected to broader themes of democracy, transparency, and public trust. Cpl teaches skills for protecting privacy in digital, educational/campus, and community spaces. Cpl provides space for reciprocal learning opportunities, building trust and creating accessible ways of understanding digital privacy and its far reaching socio-political consequences.
As an entity embedded in Columbia University, we recognize the historical and institutional legacies of the campus’ relationship to its neighbors. Cpl is committed to learning alongside people of color and marginalized communities.
-
The proliferation of large-scale, administrative datasets from private companies and governments has created the opportunity to answer entirely new questions about economic well-being and upward mobility. This opportunity requires understanding the limits of such data, bringing fieldwork to bear as needed, and addressing new conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges. We stimulate collaborations among sociologists, economists, ethnographers, spatial analysts, urban planners, and others to better understand inequality and increase opportunity.
-
Building the United States' first archive to center the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated individuals.
-
Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program is the first program of its kind in the United States: a one-year interdisciplinary MA degree training students in oral history method and theory. Through the creation, archiving and analysis of individual, community and institutional histories, oral history amplifies the critical first-person narratives that constitute memory for generations to come.
-
The Trust Collaboratory explores the social dynamics of trust through interdisciplinary, collaborative, and publicly-engaged formats. The Trust Collaboratory leverages its work to better understand how building and repairing trust can support a thriving democracy in the 21st century.
