Social Change @ Northeastern
The Burnes Center builds on the many social impact projects taking place across Northeastern’s colleges and schools.
The Burnes Center is but one of many innovative and bold projects to promote social change and social justice across the University. We want to celebrate the broad range of social impact initiatives at Northeastern seeking to improve people’s lives.
SOCIAL CHANGE @ NORTHEASTERN
The following is a partial list that will be regularly updated. If your work is not on this list already, we would love to include it. Please share your information by emailing us and we will be in touch with you.
INITIATIVES
Current Projects: Social Change @ Northeastern
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Data Against Feminicide
Assistant Professor Rahul Bhargava (CAMD), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT, CAMD Affiliate)
The Center for Inclusive Computing, founded in 2019 at Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, awards funding to colleges and universities to scale best practices that increase the representation of women in undergraduate computing.
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Data Murals
Assistant Professor Rahul Bhargava (CAMD)
Civic data is typically locked up in reports that are hard to access for those that don’t speak the language of data. Data murals offer another path into data in community settings. We facilitate bringing community together around local data to find a story and then design and paint a collaborative mural depicting it. This changes the dynamics of power, ownership, and impact if civic data projects. So far we have created over a dozen data murals across the world, and inspired external partners to produce their own as well.
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Data Theatre
Assistant Professor Rahul Bhargava (CAMD)
Data is historically considered a tool for analytic support through visual interpretation, overlooking the potential of embodied representations. We explore dance and theater as paths to creating new understandings of information and bringing people together around data to increase collective empowerment and engagement. “Data theatre” workshops leverage participatory theater to investigate how people relate to data when asked to perform some story they find in it. We aim to move beyond traditional flat visualizations and leverage experiential modes of understanding to build new modes of representation that empower individuals and communities.
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Desegregating High School Music Education in Boston: Opportunities for Community Engagement and BIPOC Student Recruitment
Assistant Professor Rebekah E. Moore, Assistant Professor Francesca Inglese, Assistant Professor Victor Zappi
Supported by an OIDI/ADVANCE grant, this research project commences a two-part, 9-month study to investigate access to a comprehensive high school music education for BIPOC students in Boston, leverage unit resources to fill opportunity gaps, and make recommendations to support music student recruitment and retention from historically underrepresented groups. The project will include research reports, a spring symposium, pop-up course curriculum, as well as peer-reviewed and public-facing publications.
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Design for Emergency
Sara Colombo (formerly research scientist at NU/CAMD Center for Design, currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology); Professor Paolo Ciuccarelli (founding director, NU/CAMD Center for Design)
Design for Emergency is an initiative developed by NU/CAMD Center for Design to respond to COVID19. ItÕs an open design platform to catalyze and activate design forces to react to current and future emergencies. ItÕs based on a four-step cycle that moves from listening and understanding (1,2) to design ideation (3) and solutions development and implementation (4). It gathered more than 30 international partners from 12 countries and 20+ organizations so far, from universities to research centers and design agencies. With some of the proposed solutions already made available as products and services, DfE candidates to become a concrete resource for enabling change and increasing societal resilience.
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Digital Archive of American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance
Ellen Cushman
DAILP is a community-based digital archive created to support the ongoing creation of indigenous peoples’ knowledge, interpretations, and representations of the past. DAILP aims to become a collaborative place for indigenous language learners, speakers, and scholars to translate documents and other media across American Indian languages.