About Incite Institute
Incite is an interdisciplinary institute at Columbia University.
We produce knowledge for public action. We do so by joining with people and organizations within and outside the university to rethink our understanding of what knowledge is, how it’s created, and how it can be used.
We generate insight.
Grassroots history-keeping in the South Bronx, academic books and articles, an interdisciplinary technology magazine, archiving movements against mass incarceration, large-scale oral history projects, a campaign to unionize health care workers—this is some of the work we do to produce new and useful knowledge. Through rigorous methods and fresh collaborations among artists, students, academics, activists, and others who want to join us, we pioneer practices to incubate novel ideas that impact society in order to see the previously unseen.
We incite change.
Strengthened worker organizations, improved autism healthcare, youth-led voter engagement events, creative-led community organizing. We seek to impact society and peoples’ lives not only through the knowledge we and our collaborators generate but also by how we produce that knowledge and locate it in the world. By joining together diverse people and experiences, we help integrate different kinds of expertise and build bonds and strategies that produce change. By siting this work in academic and non-academic locales—neighborhoods, magazines, arts organizations, professional books and journals—we engage all our partners in enacting their versions of society and their lives.
Centers and Labs
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As one of the world's leading centers for the practice and teaching of oral history, the Columbia Center for Oral History Research seeks to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, provide public programming, and teach and do research across the disciplines.
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The Collective is a hub for networks of people with a diversity of lived and academic expertise learning from each other through doing and creating.
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Columbia Labor Lab leverages the tools of social science to understand and strengthen efforts to rebuild the economic and political power of workers. The Labor Lab works in partnership with unions and worker associations, affording us access to unique data and providing us opportunities to directly test the implications that follow from our work.
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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. This opportunity requires understanding the limits of such data, bringing fieldwork to bear as needed, and addressing new conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges. We stimulate collaborations among sociologists, economists, ethnographers, spatial analysts, urban planners, and others to better understand inequality and increase opportunity.
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Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program is the first program of its kind in the United States: a one-year interdisciplinary MA degree training students in oral history method and theory. Through the creation, archiving and analysis of individual, community and institutional histories, oral history amplifies the critical first-person narratives that constitute memory for generations to come.
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The Trust Collaboratory explores the social dynamics of trust through interdisciplinary, collaborative, and publicly-engaged formats. The Trust Collaboratory leverages its work to better understand how building and repairing trust can support a thriving democracy in the 21st century.
Our History
Incite finds its roots in two organizations: the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), a Columbia research center founded by Peter Bearman in 2012, and The American Assembly, an independent but Columbia-affiliated organization founded by Dwight Eisenhower in 1950, when he was president of the university. It's from these two sources that our institute draws its mission.
The Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE)
The original INCITE center was itself a descendent of the Bureau for Applied Social Research, established by Paul F. Lazarsfeld in 1941. In 1999, the Bureau—by then renamed the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences (PFL-CSS)—was a founding center within the Institute for Social & Economic Research & Policy, or ISERP, a research institute built by Peter Bearman to provide infrastructure for empirical social science research.
In 2012, INCITE was launched, incorporating research, education, and training initiatives from several programs. The following year, INCITE partnered with the Columbia University Libraries in overseeing the Columbia Center for Oral History, with INCITE taking responsibility for the center’s research, education, and outreach activities, under the heading CCOHR (Columbia Center for Oral History Research).
From 2012-2023, by leveraging the ideas and empirical tools of the social and human sciences, INCITE conceived and conducted collaborative research, projects, and programs to generate knowledge, promote just and equitable societies, and enrich our intellectual environment. It brought together scholars from across disciplines, specializing in methods from traditional quantitative analyses, to computational textual analysis, to oral history, and bringing new insights to topics as various as labor migration, autism prevalence, and the Obama presidency.
The American Assembly
In founding The American Assembly, Dwight Eisenhower envisioned a forum where leaders, professionals and experts would come together to discuss and address the increasingly complicated social and political problems of the mid-twentieth century. Calling for educational institutions to take on a more active role, Eisenhower believed such work was crucial to protecting the fundamental pillars of America's democratic system. As such, the Assembly fostered and informed public-policy discussions through convenings, research, and reports on topics ranging from prison reform, to nuclear disarmament, to space exploration.
In April 2019, Peter Bearman—still serving as director of INCITE—was appointed president of The Assembly. This presented an opportunity to imagine different models of assembly, less insulated from expertise that lies outside centers of power, and more reflective of American ideals of diversity and democracy. The Assembly sought to develop new programs, fellowships, and events that forge sustained connections with communities, think critically about how trust in institutions and communities emerges or diminishes, and create more substantial avenues for these communities to inform and affect the institutional decisions that impact them.
By combining these two entities, Incite seeks to put forth new models for producing knowledge and activating them in the world.
In 2023, The American Assembly dissolved and joined INCITE to form Incite Institute at Columbia University. By combining these two entities, Incite puts forth new models for producing knowledge and activating them in the world.