November Newsletter

Thank you to everyone who attended the meeting to launch the Johns Hopkins Center on Global Poverty!

This Center has a very clear mission, fostering qualitative research on international development to come up with new approaches for ameliorating global poverty.  At the meeting in November we came up with a basic structure of how the Center will operate: at least for the first few years, anyone can propose an initiative, and it’s up to you to develop your initiative in whatever way you wish.  Whichever initiatives survive/attract energy will end up being what the Center is.

Here are some of the initiatives that people proposed and will be overseeing so far:

RINA is starting an initiative on rethinking development measures of “success” to include economic and status security (rather then just income).  To help her on that please email her at [email protected]

RYAN and AARUSHI are taking charge of multimedia operations, starting with short video interviews with faculty.  Email them at [email protected] and [email protected] if you’d like to help conduct the interviews or be interviewed.

JENNIFER will think through how the Center can partner with social movements.  [email protected]

MONICA is putting together internships for JHU undergrads at development organizations in DC.  If you are either an undergrad at JHU or a development organization in DC interested in this, please email [email protected]

MONICA is going to work with others on an edited volume on sustainable development—the idea being that the best way to demonstrate the potential of qualitative methods is to actually use them to help solve a problem.  If you’re interested in participating please email me at [email protected].

We have a bare-bones website that we will be filling out over the next weeks and months with more on each of these initiatives.

If you are interested in starting something new, just email me ([email protected]).  There is no shortage of possibilities. One idea we had, but that no one has volunteered to lead (yet) is submitting panels to the annual World Bank conference.  Another idea was qualitative research of RCTs, including ethnographic studies of RCTs in process (see these two great examples) and study of when and why policymakers act upon or ignore evidence produced by RCTs.  Another idea is an edited volume using historical process tracing to study causes of economic growth and failure.

If you’d be interested in leading these, or have some other idea (book reviews? a blog?), please email me.

Until we get a listserv going (if you’d like to do that email me!) please let me know if you’d like to be removed from the list.  If you know others who would like to be added to the list please ask them to sign up here.

Stay tuned for more soon.  In the new year we will think about how often to meet as a group, what kinds of workshops and webinars will be most helpful, etc.

All best,

Monica Prasad