About - Incite at Columbia University

At Incite, the worlds of scholarship, community engagement, the arts, and other specialties unite to ask ambitious questions and understand and engage the social world in surprising new ways.

Incite provides a home for unconventional ideas and a willingness to embrace experimentation, even at the risk of failure. We create space for collaborators to pilot novel approaches and ask and pursue questions without predetermined answers.

Our expertise is grounded in three areas: networks, narratives, and time. Through network analysis, we examine patterns of connection among people, organizations, and ideas. Through narrative analysis, we explore how individuals and communities make sense of their experiences and shape their worlds through the stories they tell and believe. Through temporal analysis, we trace how these patterns of connection and meaning evolve over time. Together, these analytical approaches help us understand the complexity of human experience—how people shape and are shaped by the social worlds they inhabit.

Where our expertise ends, partnerships begin. We recognize that expertise takes many forms and can be found in many contexts. This understanding drives us to look for partners beyond the walls of the academy, where people and organizations engage directly with challenges in different ways, developing practical wisdom through their efforts to transform themselves and their worlds. Incite opens doors between these contexts, building capacity in individuals, communities, and organizations, empowering them with the insights and tools they need to drive transformation on their own terms.

Incite Institute is housed at Columbia University’s School of Arts & Sciences.

History

Incite Institute finds its roots in three organizations: the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), a Columbia University research center founded by Peter Bearman in 2012, the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH), founded by Allan Nevins in 1948, and The American Assembly, an independent but Columbia-affiliated organization founded by Dwight Eisenhower in 1950, when he was president of the university. 

Each of these institutions brought distinct approaches to understanding and engaging the social world, approaches that now form the core of Incite's mission.

The oldest of these institutions, CCOHR, is the world's first institutional home for oral history. CCOHR has captured over 20,000 hours of recorded and transcribed interviews, including extensive biographical interviews with transformative figures like Anne Braden, Bayard Rustin, Frances Perkins, and Thurgood Marshall, as well as vital projects documenting philanthropy, social activism, and watershed moments like September 11, 2001. Through its life history approach, CCOHR connects individual biographies with larger social contexts, illuminating how people both shape and are shaped by the worlds they inhabit.

INCITE’s lineage traces back to Paul F. Lazarsfeld's Bureau for Applied Social Research, established in 1941. The Bureau, later renamed the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, became a founding center within the Institute for Social & Economic Research & Policy (ISERP) in 1999. Under Peter Bearman's leadership, ISERP built crucial infrastructure for empirical social science research at Columbia. This foundation led to INCITE's establishment in 2012, bringing together diverse research, education, and training initiatives. In 2013, CCOH’s research arm joined INCITE as the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, creating powerful new connections between oral history and social science research.

The American Assembly emerged from Dwight Eisenhower's vision for educational institutions to take a more active role in addressing complex social and political challenges. For over seven decades, the Assembly fostered public policy discussions through convenings, research, and publications on issues ranging from prison reform to nuclear disarmament to space exploration. When Peter Bearman became the Assembly's president in 2019, while serving as INCITE's director, the organization began reimagining its approach to public engagement, developing programs that would forge sustained connections with communities and create meaningful pathways for these communities to inform institutional decisions that impact them.

In 2023, these three traditions converged as The American Assembly dissolved and joined INCITE to form Incite Institute at Columbia University. This union honors a longstanding commitment to fostering public conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.

Today, Incite advances these complementary traditions of social research, oral history, and public engagement, uniting academics, research, community engagement, the arts, and other specialties to ask ambitious questions and understand and engage the social world in surprising new ways.