Program Overview

Introduction to the Policy Across Disciplines Program

The Policy Across Disciplines Program is a collaborative initiative between the John W. McCormack School for Policy and Global Studies (MGS) and the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at UMass Boston. This program aims to contribute to solving the impending threats to democracy through interdisciplinary policy studies.

Program Overview

The program is designed to engage policy and public service studies as lenses through which to conduct interdisciplinary, problem-solving, community-engaged, transnational, and global policy research and programming. It combines the strengths of MGS's advanced policy and public service studies programs with CLA's diverse, disciplinary, liberal studies programs.

Key Components

• The program consists of a two-part initiative:
  • A speaker series hosting scholars and practitioners from cross-disciplinary backgrounds to discuss pressing policy issues.
  • A collaborative grants award program offering seed grants for faculty conducting research on interdisciplinary policy studies topics.

Speaker Series Topics

The speaker series covers a range of topics, including:

• Vaccine and mask mandates and their implications on public health and governance.
• Covid and Crisis Standards of Care.
• Insurrectionism vs Terrorism.
• Democracy, Elections, and Voting in the US post-Trump era.
• Banning Critical Race Theory.
• Withdrawing from Afghanistan and questions of postcolonialism and imperial legacies.
• Police Reform Acts across urban spaces.
• Environmental Policy and Justice.
• Municipal politics and city governing.
• Facebook, fake news, and social media regulation.
• Rolling back Roe vs Wade.

Policy Across Disciplines Grants

• The grants award offers two $5,000 seed grants for MGS and CLA faculty conducting research on interdisciplinary policy studies topics.
• The awards are competitively awarded to collaborative, cross-college research faculty teams who propose innovative, applied, interdisciplinary policy research.

Recent Events

• "Does Democracy Protect Freedom?" Panel Discussion: Co-moderated by Rita "Kiki" (Nkiru) Edozie and Tyson King-Meadows, with panelists including Panayota Gounari, Pamela Nadash, Darren Kew, and Joseph Brown.
• "Is there Public Interest?" by Professor Jon Baskin: A talk tracing the intellectual roots of public interest journalism and analyzing the lessons of pandemic communication.

Collaboration and Impact

The Policy Across Disciplines Program serves as an applied and engaged research and academic platform for troubleshooting and solving critical problems locally, nationally, and globally. It supports faculty research and scholarship as well as student success in liberal arts and policy studies at UMass Boston.