Data and Racial Inequality Project - Incite at Columbia University
Data and Racial Inequality Project
A center in pursuit of understanding inequality and opportunity by asking new questions—and answering them with new methods.
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Personnel
- Mario Small Director
- Learn More dripcolumbia.org
The proliferation of large-scale, administrative datasets from private companies and governments has created the opportunity to answer entirely new questions about economic well-being and upward mobility.
The Data and Racial Inequality Project seeks to take advantage of this opportunity by stimulating collaborations among sociologists, economists, urban planners, spatial analysts, engineers, and others to better understand and redress urban inequality.
This opportunity requires understanding the limits of such data, bringing fieldwork to bear as needed, and addressing new conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges.
This center stimulates collaborations among sociologists, economists, ethnographers, spatial analysts, urban planners, and others to better understand inequality and increase opportunity.
Projects led by the Center
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go to the Everyday Mobility and Movement Segregation project
Everyday Mobility and Movement SegregationUnderstanding racial segregation—not by where people live—but by how they move about the city.
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go to the Local Entrepreneurship and Urban Inequality project
Local Entrepreneurship and Urban Inequality
Examining the two-way relationship between local entrepreneurship and neighborhood conditions.
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go to the Racial Inequality and Financial Access project
Racial Inequality and Financial Access
Examining the nature, precursors, and consequences of racial differences in access to financial services.
Latest news
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go to the Meet the lab tackling the global forced disappearance crisis news
Meet the lab tackling the global forced disappearance crisisThe Social Study of Disappearance Lab—which examines disappearance as a social phenomenon—joins Incite Institute. -
go to the Capturing an oral history of global investigative journalism news
Capturing an oral history of global investigative journalismSupported by Incite Institute, Columbia Journalism School researcher Adiel Kaplan is archiving the last 50 years of international investigative journalism through oral history interviews. -
go to the Introducing the 2025 Incite Institute Doctoral Dissertation Fellows news
Introducing the 2025 Incite Institute Doctoral Dissertation FellowsEleven Columbia PhD students are using everything from archaeological digs to economic modeling to tackle some of today's most pressing questions—how communities survive trauma, whether Arctic plants can keep pace with climate change, and what justice looks like in contested spaces. -
go to the Columbia's administrators are fooling themselves news
Columbia's administrators are fooling themselvesIn a New York Times guest essay, Columbia Labor Lab co-director Suresh Naidu writes that Columbia's deal with the Trump administration won't stop government retaliation against the university.