team

Karen_Jacobsen.JPG

Karen Jacobsen

Principal Investigator

Feinstein International Center

karen.jacobsen@tufts.edu

Karen Jacobsen founded the RIT Project in 2017 in response to rising xenophobia and rhetoric against migrants and refugees in the U.S. and abroad. Her goal was to understand urban integration through the perspectives of refugees, returnees, IDPs and other migrants by asking them to write about their own experiences in the towns where they lived. Her idea was that these local perspectives could give a “ground-up” view of what enables and inhibits integration in towns around the world. Prof. Jacobsen has written, taught and conducted research about migration and displacement for 25 years.

She directs the RIT project at the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security, and is the Henry J. Leir Professor of Global Migration at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy. She was head of the Joint IDP Profiling Service (JIPS) in Geneva from 2013-2014, and as Director of The Alchemy Project from 2000-2005. Prof. Jacobsen received her B.A. from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, her M.A. from Northeastern University, and her PhD in Political Science from MIT. 

Advisory Group

Methods Workshop.JPG

The RIT advisory group provides technical and methodological advice on case studies, facilitates contacts in case site communities, and assist in engaging with policymakers.

Research Assistants

Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti, Global Fellow

Barnabas is a Ph.D. student at Rhodes University, and was previously a Curator and Assistant Researcher at the University of Cape Town's Centre for Curating the Archive. He is a Zimbabwean who moved to Cape Town in November 2008, and has since studied, worked, and lived with fellow migrants from Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Somalia, and Rwanda, among other countries of origin. He is interested in the experiences and treatment of migrants by hosts communities and immigration authorities. Barnabas studied at Midlands State University in Zimbabwe, the University of Cape Town, and the University of Stellenbosch.

Case Researchers

RIT benefits from a diverse range of case study researchers (who conduct academic research on a city) and case report writers (who provide writing on their own personal experiences with integration) in cities and towns around the world. Each of RIT's cases rely on at least one localized individual with a personal history, social presence, and deep contextual knowledge of the community they are describing. These individuals provide both data for the project, and relevance for its findings by connecting RIT to practitioners, refugee and host community leaders, civil society actors, and municipal government representatives.

We would like to acknowledge and thank our many localized refugee contributors around the world who are not listed here to protect their identities.