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Doing Participatory Research

The Program: The Community Research Internship in Trust and Tech (CRITT) is jointly organized by The Trust Collaboratory and the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) as an interdisciplinary research, training, and career development program for Master’s students in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. The program equips students with the skills, methods, and experience of conducting community-based participatory research on urban technology and trust in underserved neighborhoods like Harlem and other urban areas in New York City. CRITT provides an opportunity for students to gain research and work experience alongside social scientists, civil engineers, data scientists, and members of the local community.

Street corner in an urban area with storefronts, a scooter rider, pedestrians, street signs, and outdoor seating.

The Issue: As modern urban life is transformed by new technologies, there is relatively little empirical research on how urban residents interact with these systems, what elicits skepticism or mistrust, and how to strike the proper balance between safety, privacy, and trust. Students in the CRITT program help investigate how trust in urban technology is won or lost in daily settings and learn about these questions from local residents, businesses, schools, and community organizations. They assist in translating back and forth between academics and local communities to enable residents’ voices to inform the process of ideation, development, and implementation of technology systems in CS3’s testbed in Harlem.

Graduate Student Cohort 2024-25

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A woman with long dark hair with purple highlights, wearing glasses and a sleeveless navy blue dress with white polka dots, standing with arms crossed in front of a brick wall.
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Lucia de la Torre
Journalism

Aanchal Manjua
Sociology

Yongcheng Lu
Sociology