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Graduate students explore critical global problems in search of long-term solutions

King Center Graduate Student Research Funding kick-starts novel early-stage research on topics ranging from political polarization to infectious disease.

In Africa, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, schistosomiasis, an acute and chronic disease caused by parasitic worms, is a major problem—an estimated 90 percent of the more than 250 million people requiring treatment for the disease live on the continent.

The worms are often transported by freshwater snails, and snails are increasingly found living on discarded plastic in waterways. Is the plastic waste creating an expanded habitat for snails that are in turn increasing the spread of a serious disease? If so, what can be done about it?

These are the kind of questions Kaitlyn Mitchell hopes to answer through fieldwork supported by the Stanford King Center on Global Development’s Graduate Student Research Funding.

“Anecdotally, we’ve been observing that snails seem to be on the plastic,” Mitchell says. “But nobody has really looked explicitly to test the association.”

For a while, Mitchell had a hard time convincing anyone to help her do so. That’s why the King Center’s commitment to supporting early-stage research by graduate students has been “invaluable,” she says.

With the support of the Graduate Student Research Funding program, Mitchell, a PhD candidate in biology, recently returned from fieldwork in Senegal where she coordinated with chiefs in 15 villages to collect data on snails and trash in their local water sites. Other PhD students in fields ranging from anthropology to sociology are also returning from summer fieldwork.

Pushing Back on Polarization

Adrian Blattner, a PhD candidate in economics, is studying how to reduce affective polarization—people’s dislike of candidates from opposing political parties and the voters who support them, rather than their policy ideas—in Brazil in the lead-up to the country’s municipal elections this fall. He is conducting an experiment that matches people from different political parties for virtual conversations, and then assesses the impact of those conversations on their respective views.

Blattner conducted similar research on 15,000 people in Germany prior to the country’s 2021 federal elections and found significant reductions in affective polarization (including as measured by an incentivized economic interaction in which participants could allocate a fixed budget of 100 Euros between themselves and a person of another political party).

“It’s not that suddenly people come together and agree on policy,” he explains. “It’s that rather they feel less animosity toward the other side.”

Blattner says the King Center has been a “very important hub” for students like him who are studying development economics. The Graduate Student Research Funding, which he has used to hire local researchers in Brazil to help run the baseline survey of participants, can help kick-start projects.

“Without the King Center, I wouldn’t have been able to get my project off the ground,” he says. “I was able to conduct two field trips to Brazil in several months, to meet with policymakers, and to improve my project.”

Understanding Women’s Political Participation

Natalya Rahman, a PhD candidate in political science, used funding from the King Center to conduct an original survey of 750 working women in urban Pakistan, a previously under-studied group. Some of her research is exploring the connection—or lack thereof—between labor force participation and women’s political empowerment in her native Pakistan.

In her survey, Rahman asked women about, among other topics, their work, their daily lives, their childhood, their bargaining power in their households, as well as their political preferences and participation.

Understanding whether women’s work for pay leads to increased political empowerment is important—in part because many development projects are premised on that very idea.

“International organizations disproportionately focus on women’s work as a way to empower women,” Rahman says. “First, we need to understand, is that really true? Second, if labor force participation doesn’t matter, what should we be doing instead?”

“We generally assume that political agency comes with labor force participation,” she says, “but women might be going to the polls and not voting for whom they want to vote for. Figuring out how to measure that is difficult.”

“The exploratory grant lets you do things and think about things that aren’t possible without new data,” she says. “It expands the possibilities of what you can work on.”

Solution-Oriented

The projects King Center-supported graduate students are pursuing may be in their early stages, but they are designed to make change over the long term.

Based in part on her survey and qualitative interviews she conducted in Pakistan for additional research, Rahman believes whether a woman’s mother worked outside the home is more relevant to their own political participation later in life.

If that’s true, she says, “interventions for women’s empowerment should take into consideration their families. We shouldn’t think of them as individual interventions.”

Blattner is also thinking about the broader implications of his affective polarization research.

“On the one hand, we can point to this research as one potential lever to address political polarization,” he says. “At the same time, economists could use the findings to inform policymakers and design constructive interactions that allow people to better address stereotypes [in other contexts].”

After her quantitative fieldwork this summer, Mitchell plans to return to Senegal in the fall to survey villagers about their perception of the plastic in the water.

“If we identify snails as using plastic as habitat and if that could increase the risk of schistosomiasis, we want to think about what are the next steps for reducing the amount of trash,” she explains. “That’s about governance, and social norms, and perceptions.”

In most of the villages she is studying, there is no infrastructure for waste management, so “if we want to intervene, it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Bag up your garbage,’” she says.

“Trash is one of the biggest problems of the 21st century,” she adds. “Humans think there’s no longer any use for trash, but animals and microbes don’t see it that way. It’s a novel habitat, and we’re starting to see a lot of organisms that transmit diseases to people take advantage of that very readily.”

The King Center’s support of early-stage research on under-researched issues has been “invaluable,” she says.

“The King Center is open-minded about exploring novel areas,” she explains. “It’s very empowering. They were willing to listen to the idea and not just shut the door.”

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