Lori, Schilde Discuss Migration Innovation Incubators
Professors Noora Lori and Kaija Schilde, Co-Directors of the Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, hosted an information session on September 25, 2017 to discuss how they have attempted to bring practical interventions into the classroom.
Lori and Schilde’s Migration Innovation Incubator courses have produced an aid locator app for refugees in Jordan, and an SMS check-in system for unaccompanied minors in Europe. The pair discussed lessons learned from their pilot incubators, and shared ideas about how students can get involved in addressing some of the biggest challenges facing humanity today.
Lori discussed the Urban Refuge app, an aid locator designed to geocode hundreds of international and domestic organizations serving refugees in Jordan including clinics, schools and aid distribution points. The project began in her IR 500 Forced Migration and Human Trafficking class as a collaboration between students with a variety of backgrounds who shared a passion for innovating solutions to the current refugee crisis as well as future crises.
“Working with computer scientists, as a political scientist, is really exciting because it changes the horizon of possibility,” Lori said. “We’re currently working on how to streamline these courses in a way where you would be working directly with computer science students because that’s part of the design process that we didn’t necessarily get the first time around.”
Schilde, who has also taught the IR 500 Forced Migration and Human Trafficking class, worked with her students to produce an SMS check-in system for unaccompanied minors in Europe. She discussed some of the lessons learned on the entrepreneurial side of things from that project as well as from working with the Boston University BuzzLab and Software and Innovation Lab.
“You don’t have hypotheses you’re testing about problems, but you have ideas that are like hypotheses about your solution. You might be wrong — in fact you’re probably wrong — but testing your idea to see whether it works operationally, is like testing a hypothesis,” Schilde said. “Entrepreneurs fail, they want to fail because then they know what they need to do in order to succeed.”
Lori founded the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking in 2015 to foster similar educational initiatives and bring together students, scholars, practitioners and policy-makers to support research, education,and advocacy on the pressing issues of forced migration and human trafficking.