Rachel Swaner is the research director at the Center for Justice Innovation. She has led local and national research and evaluation projects related to violence prevention, the commercial sex trade, youth development, and people's experiences with the criminal legal system. Prior to joining the Center, she was a researcher at the Harlem Children’s Zone, where she evaluated social, educational, and health programs for children and youth. She is on the advisory board for the Participatory Budgeting Project. Rachel received her PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and her Bachelor of Science and Master of Public Administration from New York University, and has been teaching at Wagner since 2007.
Though the policymaking process is complex, with a host of actors and competing interests, public policy is traditionally shaped by elected officials, administrative agencies, and organized interest groups. There are many avenues for policies to be informed by the lived experience of members of low-income and marginalized communities; however, their participation is often hidden and/or undervalued. Public servants and policymakers can provide proactive opportunities for communities to assert their own priorities and rights through mechanisms like public planning processes or participatory budgeting. Similarly, marginalized communities can self-organize and even form common cause with broader interests to create more just public policies. In this course, we will explore strategies for initiating participatory policymaking from above (e.g., government/ policymakers initiating participatory approaches to decision-making) and below (e.g., grassroots communities mobilizing to influence policy), and the democratic tradition of challenging traditional power structures. We will also examine the essential concepts of power—what it is, how it is used, how groups and communities can expand and strengthen their political power, and how public officials can share theirs.
This course serves as an introduction to those evaluation tools most commonly used to assess the performance of programs, services, and policies in both the public and private sectors. Topics include needs assessment; explication and assessment of program theory; implementation and process assessment; research design, measurement, and sampling for outcome and impact evaluation; and the ethics of conducting program evaluation. The focus is on critical analysis and understanding of both the underlying programs and their evaluations.
Research is an important part of the policy process: it can inform the development of programs and policies so they are responsive to community needs, it can help us determine what the impacts of these programs and policies are, and it can help us better understand populations or social phenomena. This half-semester course serves as an introduction to how to ethically collect data for research projects, with an in-depth look at focus groups and surveys as data collection tools. We will also learn about issues related to measurement and sampling. Students will create their own focus group protocol and short survey instrument designed to answer a research question of interest to them.
Though the policymaking process is complex, with a host of actors and competing interests, public policy is traditionally shaped by elected officials, administrative agencies, and organized interest groups. There are many avenues for policies to be informed by the lived experience of members of low-income and marginalized communities; however, their participation is often hidden and/or undervalued. Public servants and policymakers can provide proactive opportunities for communities to assert their own priorities and rights through mechanisms like public planning processes or participatory budgeting. Similarly, marginalized communities can self-organize and even form common cause with broader interests to create more just public policies. In this course, we will explore strategies for initiating participatory policymaking from above (e.g., government/ policymakers initiating participatory approaches to decision-making) and below (e.g., grassroots communities mobilizing to influence policy), and the democratic tradition of challenging traditional power structures. We will also examine the essential concepts of power—what it is, how it is used, how groups and communities can expand and strengthen their political power, and how public officials can share theirs.
Though the policymaking process is complex, with a host of actors and competing interests, public policy is traditionally shaped by elected officials, administrative agencies, and organized interest groups. There are many avenues for policies to be informed by the lived experience of members of low-income and marginalized communities; however, their participation is often hidden and/or undervalued. Public servants and policymakers can provide proactive opportunities for communities to assert their own priorities and rights through mechanisms like public planning processes or participatory budgeting. Similarly, marginalized communities can self-organize and even form common cause with broader interests to create more just public policies. In this course, we will explore strategies for initiating participatory policymaking from above (e.g., government/ policymakers initiating participatory approaches to decision-making) and below (e.g., grassroots communities mobilizing to influence policy), and the democratic tradition of challenging traditional power structures. We will also examine the essential concepts of power—what it is, how it is used, how groups and communities can expand and strengthen their political power, and how public officials can share theirs.
Required for doctoral students.
This course prepares the student to do and to evaluate social science research using a variety of research methods. Basic issues regarding the formulation of research questions, research design, and data collection and analysis are addressed. The course material encompasses both quantitative and qualitative methods in the discussion of the basic components of the research process: conceptualization and measurement, sample selection, and causal modeling. In addition to teaching techniques and conventions of doing research, the course also acquaints the student with critical issues in the philosophy of science, ethical questions, and how to write a research proposal.
This course serves as an introduction to those evaluation tools most commonly used to assess the performance of programs, services, and policies in both the public and private sectors. Topics include needs assessment; explication and assessment of program theory; implementation and process assessment; research design, measurement, and sampling for outcome and impact evaluation; and the ethics of conducting program evaluation. The focus is on critical analysis and understanding of both the underlying programs and their evaluations.