Community
IDSS values the diversity among our students, faculty, postdocs, and staff, and strives to create a community where each member is valued and feels that they belong. The range of cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of the individuals within IDSS is essential for pursuing our mission of addressing major societal problems using innovative, holistic, data-driven approaches. As a unit focused on improving society, we care deeply about the overall well-being of our students and community members, including their mental and physical health.
MIT Strategic Action Plan
MIT released the strategic action plan for belonging, achievement, and composition in September 2022. The plan provides an MIT-wide framework for fostering diversity and a sense of belonging across MIT, while allowing individual departments, labs, and offices to define and tailor their own efforts in this regard. The strategic action plan informs efforts at IDSS.
Research Initiative on Combating Systemic Racism
IDSS is well positioned to conduct data- and policy-driven research on structural racism. In 2021, IDSS launched the Research Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR). ICSR aims to launch and coordinate cross-disciplinary research on how to identify and overcome racially discriminatory processes across a range of American institutions and policy domains. The effort brings together faculty and researchers from all five schools and the Schwarzman College of Computing at MIT, as well as external partner institutions.
Students play an integral role in the execution of ICSR. Each research team includes graduate students from SES, TPP, and other MIT departments, as well as undergraduate students through UROP positions.
In AY 2021-2022, MLK Visiting Professor S. Craig Watkins was a key contributor to the initiative. Professor Watkins visited IDSS from UT Austin where he is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Founding Director of the Institute for Media Innovation. He engaged in creating the cross-disciplinary research agenda on systemic racism, bias in AI, and the role of big data in enabling deep structural changes during his time at IDSS. Specifically, Professor Watkins contributed to the Initiative’s Housing vertical by hosting a panel on “Home Ownership, Lending Discrimination & Technology” as part of the Beyond Fairness symposium.
ICSR will continue to build our expertise and forge connections to researchers studying racial disparities, and establish a community of researchers working in this area within IDSS, the Schwarzman College of Computing, and MIT and beyond.
