This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the SBE Directorate. It has both scientific and societal benefits, and integrates research and education. This REU site is a collaboration among three different academic institutions, Davidson College (DC), Johnson C. Smith (JCSU), and University of North Carolina-Charlotte (UNCC). The goal of the REU and the ongoing project is to provide training in social science methods to undergraduates and to generate original research exploring differential access to food, housing, and healthcare in underserved neighborhoods northwest Charlotte. The project places students in research settings alongside faculty members and key community players to define and creatively address social problems. Students who take part in this REU will enhance their research skills to identify the sources and mechanisms that reproduce social inequities. This REU will focus on the methods of studying differential access to food, housing, and healthcare as important indicators of historically and socially rooted inequalities. The intellectual focus of the REU will be to define access as both an outcome of historical and social processes and as a contribution to ongoing and future disparities.
We expect this REU will help students build scholarship by learning how to plan and conduct research and share their results with academic and public audiences, including through a planned edited volume that includes student work. We will also work with students to show them how to engage with policymakers and community partners through communication tools like memos and policy briefs. Students will also have the opportunity to learn about how to engage with issues of access through social entrepreneurship through work with the Centers for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at all three academic institutions. Students will be able to pursue interests in public humanities through creative approaches to public outreach at the end of the summer. In all these ways, faculty, student, and community partner teams will be able to share valuable research about the value and immediate applicability of social science research on access to food, housing, and healthcare to community organizations and the general public.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
