After the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police in 2020 and the unrest that flared across the globe in response, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab re-assessed their work.
“We really took that time to reflect on what it is that we are doing here,” Lab Program Director Misuzu Schexnider, (MPP, 2015) recalled. “Does our research really matter? Are we doing anything with our work that makes the world better and helps prevent the kinds of things that we’re seeing in the news every day?”
Spurred on by these questions, IEL researchers committed to include more community engagement in their work from start to finish. They aimed to modify a research approach that’s typically extractive and make sure that it benefits participants throughout the process—beyond the expected presentation of a research paper at the end that all hoped would lead to greater equality and improved lives.
So, when the City of Chicago reached out to the lab to evaluate its guaranteed income project in 2022, Inclusive Economy Lab Senior Research Director Shanta’ Robinson proposed an innovative way to foster that engagement: Ask participants in a Chicago guaranteed income program that the lab is analyzing to photograph and write captions about their experiences.
The result, in part, is PhotoVoice—a traveling exhibit of participants’ artwork that will be on display from Nov. 4 through the second week of January in the Keller Center’s Harris Commons. The exhibit already has been presented at the Harold Washington Library and three city library branches.
“General statistics on guaranteed income’s impact might help convince some people that it is—or isn’t—a beneficial policy for certain groups of people,” said Nour Abdul-Razzak, a Research Director at the lab and a Research Associate at the Harris School of Public Policy. (PhD in Public Policy, 2019) “That evidence is important, but it doesn’t always have much real-world effect. Sometimes you need the storytelling, the narratives, to bring it to life. You need to show the underlying lives that the data points to and highlight the voices of those most impacted by these policies.
“Together, the data and the stories in combination are really powerful when it comes to convincing people,” Abdul-Razzak said.
Apart from that objective, IEL researchers wanted access to this work to be free, in neighborhoods and public spaces, Robinson said.
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