Migration Summit addresses education and workforce development in displacement

“Refugees can change the world with access to education,” says Alnarjes Harba, a refugee from Syria who recently shared her story at the 2022 Migration Summit — a first-of-its-kind, global convening to address the challenges that displaced communities face in accessing education and employment.

At the age of 13, Harba was displaced to Lebanon, where she graduated at the top of her high school class. But because of her refugee status, she recalls, no university in her host country would accept her. Today, Harba is a researcher in health-care architecture. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern New Hampshire University, where she was part of the Global Education Movement, a program providing refugees with pathways to higher education and work.

Like many of the Migration Summit’s participants, Harba shared her story to call attention not only to the barriers to refugee education, but also to the opportunities to create more education-to-employment pathways like MIT Refugee Action Hub’s (ReACT) certificate programs for displaced learners.

Organized by MIT ReACT, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), Na’amal, Karam Foundation, and Paper Airplanes, the Migration Summit sought to center the voices and experiences of those most directly impacted by displacement — both in narratives about the crisis and in the search for solutions. Themed “Education and Workforce Development in Displacement,” this year’s summit welcomed more than 900 attendees from over 30 countries, to a total of 40 interactive virtual sessions led by displaced learners, educators, and activists working to support communities in displacement.

Sessions highlighted the experiences of refugees, migrants, and displaced learners, as well as current efforts across the education and workforce development landscape, ranging from pK-12 initiatives to post-secondary programs, workforce training to entrepreneurship opportunities.

Overcoming barriers to access

The vision for the Migration Summit developed, in part, out of the need to raise more awareness about the long-standing global displacement crisis. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 82.4 million people worldwide today are forcibly displaced, a figure that doesn’t include the estimated 12 million people who have fled their homes in Ukraine since February.

“Refugees not only leave their countries; they leave behind a thousand memories, their friends, their families,” says Mondiant Dogon, a human rights activist, refugee ambassador, and author who gave the Migration Summit’s opening keynote address. “Education is the most important thing that can happen to refugees. In that way, we can leave behind the refugee camps and build our own independent future.”

Yet, as the stories of the summit’s participants highlight, many in displacement have lost their livelihoods or had their education disrupted — only to face further challenges when trying to access education or find work in their new places of residence. Obstacles range from legal restrictions, language and cultural barriers, and unaffordable costs to lack of verifiable credentials. UNHCR estimates that only 5 percent of refugees have access to higher education, compared to the global average of 39 percent.

“There is another problem related to forced displacement — dehumanization of migrants,” says Lina Sergie Attar, the founder and CEO of Karam Foundation. “They are unjustly positioned as enemies, as a threat.”

But as Blein Alem, an MIT ReACT alum and refugee from Eritrea, explains, “No one chooses to be a refugee — it just occurs. Whether by conflict, war, human rights violations, just because you have refugee status does not mean that you are not willing to make a change in your life and access to education and work.” Several participants, including Alem, shared that, even with a degree in hand, their refugee status limited their ability to work in their new countries of residence.

Displaced communities face complex and structural challenges in accessing education and workforce development opportunities. Because of the varying and vast effects of displacement, efforts to address these challenges range in scale and focus and differ across sectors. As Lorraine Charles, co-founder and director of Na’amal, noted in the Migration Summit’s closing session, many organizations find themselves working in silos, or even competing with each other for funding and other resources. As a result, solution-making has been fragmented, with persistent gaps between different sectors that are, in fact, working toward the same goals.

Imagining a modular, digital, collaborative approach

A key takeaway from the month’s discussions, then, is the need to rethink the response to refugee education and workforce challenges. During the session, “From Intentions to Impact: Decolonizing Refugee Response,” participants emphasized the systemic nature of these challenges. Yet formal responses, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, have been largely inadequate — in some instances even oppressing the communities they’re meant to support, explains Sana Mustafa, director of partnership and engagement for Asylum Access.

“We have the opportunity to rethink how we are handling the situation,” Mustafa says, calling for more efforts to include refugees in the design and development of solutions.

Presenters also agreed that educational institutions, particularly universities, could play a vital role in providing more pathways for refugees and displaced learners. Key to this is rethinking the structure of education itself, including its delivery.

“The challenge right now is that degrees are monolithic,” says Sanjay Sarma, vice president for MIT Open Learning, who gave the keynote address on “Pathways to Education, Livelihood, and Hope.” “They’re like those gigantic rocks at Stonehenge or in other megalithic sites. What we need is a much more granular version of education: bricks. Bricks were invented several thousand years ago, but we don’t really have that yet formally and extensively in education.”

“There is no way we can accommodate thousands and thousands of refugees face-to-face,” says Shai Reshef, the founder and president of University of the People. “The only path is a digital one.”

Ultimately, explains Demetri Fadel of Karam Foundation, “We really need to think about how to create a vision of education as a right for every person all around the world.”

Underlying many of the Migration Summit’s conclusions is the awareness that there is still much work to be done. However, as the summit’s co-chair Lana Cook said in her closing remarks, “This was not a convening of despair, but one about what we can build together.”

The summit’s organizers are currently putting together a public report of the key findings that have emerged from the month’s conversations, including recommendations for thematic working groups and future Migration Summit activities.

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The physics of gut and brain health

Since he was young, Chih-Wei Joshua Liu ’22 always knew he wanted to be a “physician-scientist,” pursuing research at the intersection of basic science and medicine. 

“Growing up, I wanted to do work that concretely helps people,” says Liu. “I also wanted to further our understanding of the universe. Physics describes how nature behaves. From equations, we can derive behavior. In biology and medicine, this behavior is extremely complex. I’ve always wondered how these sciences combine: If we can put nature’s beautiful complexity in the language of mathematics, then the world makes sense.”

As the son of a physician and a computational biologist, he was exposed early on to a life in research. His family moved from Taipei to Dallas, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area before returning to Taiwan during his high school years, when his father joined the faculty at Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes.

He competed in the Biology Olympiad while at the National Experimental High School, an international school run by the Taiwanese government for foreign-raised children of Hsinchu Science Park employees. Hsinchu Science Park centers on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which was founded by MIT Corporation board member Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53, ME ’55.

“People at my high school think of MIT as a place where you can make a difference in the world,” Liu says. Drawn to the Institute, both Liu and his twin brother, Chih-Lun Julian, applied to MIT. His brother was then more interested in computational linguistics, while he was drawn to biochemistry and computational biology.

“Much of the most important research in condensates has been at MIT,” he says. “I started going to a biomolecular condensate journal club in my first semester as a freshman and realized that, to really understand condensates, I needed statistical thermodynamics. I was disappointed to learn I couldn’t get very far without physics.”

Having struggled with high school physics, he was apprehensive about the Institute's physics General Institute Requirements (GIRs). “When I took 8.01 with Professor Kiyoshi Masui, I realized that MIT physics — especially the world-famous TEAL [Technology-Enhanced Active Learning] format used for 8.01 and 8.02 — is quite different from multiple-choice AP physics.”

With a strong grasp of Newtonian mechanics, he pushed himself to take the more challenging follow-up class, 8.022 (Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism). From there, he surprised himself by declaring his major as physics.

“The physics GIRs pushed me to branch out academically. I TA'd 8.01 my sophomore year and enjoyed helping other students develop skills and interests in physics.”

He shifted away from biomolecular condensates and pursued research in other areas of biophysics, beginning with work on an experimental evolution approach to engineering microbiome therapeutics with Professor Jeff Gore.

“A long-standing goal in medicine is the ability to tailor microbes to patients’ specific metabolic needs; outside microbes with potentially useful functions don’t usually survive when inserted into patients’ microbiomes,” he says. “We evolved bacteria isolated from the human gut to degrade the compound that causes kidney stones. I found this project exciting because we used mathematical modeling to control the evolutionary trajectory of bacteria in the lab, as well as to engineer something that could have real medical applications.”

In 2020, he began working with Professor Nikta Fakhri on machine-learning approaches for measuring entropy production in biological systems.

“Physicists believe time irreversibility is a key property of life; biological processes irrevocably increase the entropy of the universe,” he says. “However, it’s difficult to actually measure irreversibility. We are using a new machine-learning algorithm to do exactly this. Rho GTPases are a conserved cell-division regulator in almost all animals, including humans and the starfish we use experimentally. Using our neural network, we have quantitatively measured the arrow of time in this crucial biological system; Rho is implicated in cancer, among other diseases.”

He presented this work at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society, and plans to soon submit a joint first-author manuscript for review.

Supporting mental wellness

“I know a lot of people who have struggled with mental health issues,” he says. “MIT is a pretty stressful place, and a lot of people struggle when they get here. This is an issue I really wanted to get involved in.”

This drew him to the pressing problems of mental health on and off campus.

During the pandemic, he joined the MIT Wellbeing Ambassadors to distribute Covid-19 guidelines and personal protective equipment to students remaining on campus during the pandemic. As president of Active Minds and Peer Ears, he led the merger of MIT’s two mental-wellness peer-education groups, and worked with MIT’s Office of Student Wellbeing and clinicians at Student Mental Health and Counseling Services to provide undergraduate students and organizations with active listening training.

Last summer, as a PKG Social Impact Intern at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Psychiatry, he used instant smartphone surveys to track time use in people with schizophrenia-spectrum and bipolar-spectrum disorders. By analyzing the data, he saw the emergence of the effects of race and socioeconomic status on functioning in people with severe mental illnesses, which he is writing about for the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

“I hope my work will help future psychiatrists address racial and socioeconomic inequities in caring for people with severe mental illnesses,” he says.

In his second project for MGH, he used instant smartphone surveys to track hallucinations and metacognitive processes in people with schizophrenia. “Analyzing this data, we were able to substantiate a connection between metacognitive errors and hallucinations in people with schizophrenia,” he says. That manuscript will be submitted in June.

For his own method of stress release, in his first year he shared his love of post-hardcore punk rock with a 2 a.m. show on WMBR, until he realized it didn’t work with his schedule. He is president of MIT’s Society of Physics Students, which organizes events for Course 8 undergraduates such as study breaks, movie nights, and the annual PRISM research conference. He has served on the Physics Values Committee, a departmental committee of faculty, staff, and students working together to improve underrepresented-student recruitment to MIT physics, and to support more inclusive faculty advising.

He was also community service chair and associate member educator at his fraternity, Phi Kappa Theta. As community service chair, he sourced 12,000 face masks from the Taiwanese government during the 2020 U.S. mask shortage and organized a fundraiser to purchase these masks and donate them to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It has been one of my defining experiences at MIT,” he says.

Liu is also an avid hiker and likes to visit area tide pools to study marine invertebrates.

Next stop: Research and MD-PhD

He is applying to MD-PhD programs to pursue research at the intersection of biostatistics and statistical mechanics. In the meantime, he will continue his research in Fakhri’s group, studying recently identified “non-reciprocal” phases of matter in drug-resistant bacteria.

As a future physician-physicist, Liu hopes to apply the mathematical techniques he picked up in his physics classes to help those struggling with mental health issues.

“I hope to apply fundamental physics to the pressing problems of human health,” he says. “Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has recently proven its potential in fundamental biology. I believe the same theoretical framework might be just as insightful in translational medicine.”

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Helping dairy farmers raise healthy cows

Dairy farmers around the world have an information problem. To get the most accurate measurements of cow health and milk quality, many have to ship milk samples to labs or wait for a technician to come to the farm to collect milk samples from each cow.

Now Labby, a startup founded by two MIT alumni, is helping farmers get a clearer picture of their cows’ health with a device that can test milk from individual cows in less than 10 seconds.

Labby’s device sits at the front of an analytics platform that can help farmers detect diseases before they spread to the rest of the herd. Down the line, it could also give veterinarians historical health data on specific animals, help dairy farmers identify best practices, and allow farmers to increase transparency with consumers.

“Everyone understands the power of data to improve health,” says Labby CEO Julia Somerdin SDM ’13, who cofounded the company with former MIT Media Lab postdoc Anshuman Das. “It’s just like how home care and [data collection devices] for humans have transformed health care.”

Somerdin and Das didn’t expect to spend the last five years learning about cows, but their time at MIT helped them identify dairy farming as an area where their technology could make a big impact.

Somerdin had worked in systems engineering and technical product development for 15 years when she decided to come to MIT for her master’s degree in systems design and management in 2013.

“I reached a point where I knew I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what that was,” Somerdin recalls. “I decided to go back to school to recharge myself and get some ideas.”

Somerdin’s company sponsored her education at MIT, and she describes herself as a full-time employee, full-time student, and full-time volunteer during her time on campus. She volunteered for programs including MIT-CHIEF and took several entrepreneurship courses, including a Media Lab course where she met Das.

“I wanted to start a mission-driven startup,” Somerdin says. “I wasn't interested in making another app. We have enough apps in life.”

The conventional process for monitoring cow health and milk quality is time consuming and expensive. As a result, Somerdin says most farmers only run some tests once a month. The lack of monitoring can lead to the spread of diseases like mastitis, a painful infection that also lowers milk quality.

“Mastitis is the most common and costly disease in dairy farming,” Somerdin says. “Mastitis is contagious and hard to detect, so it very easily spreads to the rest of the herd.”

Labby’s scanner uses a technology called mobile spectroscopy, which can get information on milk composition such as milk fat, protein, and somatic cell count (SCC). Higher SCC levels indicate mastitis or an infection that farmers can treat before it spreads or worsens.

Labby has been working with farms in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts since 2019, although the pandemic slowed down the company’s plans to scale. Labby also sells its devices to universities and companies interested in studying the data it is collecting.

“Everyone wants more data, especially at the individual cow level, but that’s been really hard to get up until now,” Somerdin says.

This spring, three MIT graduate students will spend a week on Labby’s partner farms in Pennsylvania as part of company-sponsored research with the goal of improving the design of the product and making it more practical for farms around the world.

Down the line, Labby wants its platform to help with community-building in the dairy farming industry.

“We’re a hardware company, but we see data as the key to our solution,” Somerdin says. “We want to become a milk quality certification platform, which will improve confidence in the industry and for the consumer. In the industry, farmers can better maintain animal health and buyers will know they’re picking up milk from the highest quality farms with good milk. And for the consumer, increased transparency allows farmers to communicate with the public and prove they’re treating their animals well.”

For Somerdin, all of Labby’s work comes down to one simple belief.

“We believe happy cows get you better milk, and better milk leads to happy customers,” Somerdin says. “There’s a harmony between the animal and the human. It’s all connected.”

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Making the case for “fake lawyering”

Most people wouldn’t put the words “MIT” and “lawyer” in the same sentence. In fact, only 1,393 alumni — about 1 percent — are lawyers, according to the MIT Alumni Association. But a contingent of MIT undergraduates is steadily earning a reputation for its prowess in “fake lawyering.” That’s how head coach Brian Pilchik describes the premise of the MIT Mock Trial program, which consists of a group of about 30 students that competes against other colleges around the United States in simulated courtroom trials. Each season culminates in the spring with a national competition run by the American Mock Trial Association (AMTA) — a sort of mock trial “March Madness” where roughly 600 teams vie for the coveted championship title.

This year, for the first time since the program’s inception, the MIT A team went undefeated in the AMTA regional tournament. MIT A was also the only team all year that beat Harvard University, which went on to win the national title. In addition, MIT advanced two teams, MIT A and B, to the second round of the competition, the national championship qualifier in New York — another first for the program. And the students won 12 awards for their individual performances as attorneys and witnesses — the most MIT has ever snagged at the AMTA competition.  

“I was completely blown away,” says Pilchik, a co-founder of the team who is a trial attorney at the Public Defender Division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. “I don’t think I could have anticipated that starting a brand new program in 2015 — and going through an entire pandemic with them and not being able to practice in a way we wanted to — that coming out of that we would be stronger than ever.”

Learning to litigate

In the fall, AMTA releases a fictional criminal or civil case that college mock trial teams work on throughout the year, always set in a mythical 51st U.S. state called Midlands. The cases are lengthy and detailed, with made-up witness affidavits, text messages, photos, and other relevant materials. “It’s really fun,” says Diego Colín, a senior and physics major who is co-president of MIT Mock Trial. “It’s like a big logic puzzle that’s 200 pages long that you have to dissect with your teammates, and you get into really heated arguments about these people that don’t exist.”

This year, AMTA crafted a criminal case: Chuggie’s Bar in Midlands burns down and the defendant — who owns the bar — is charged with aggravated arson. The prosecution’s theory is that the financially strapped owner torched Chuggie’s to collect the insurance money. The defense has some flexibility in how to proceed; they can argue, for example, that it was an electrical fire or that someone else set it.

The students practiced for at least two hours at each twice-weekly practice — and invested many more hours on their own — to prepare for roles as attorneys or witnesses. Pilchik and two MIT Mock Trial alumni coaches, Lia Hsu-Rodriguez ’21 and Zachary Bogorad ’19, helped them analyze the case and work on everything from objections, crosses, and redirects to vocal intonation, body language, and where to stand in the courtroom.

Throughout the fall, the program fielded teams at about a dozen college mock trial competitions around the country. These tournaments are intense; typically, each team competes in four trials, which last about three hours each. Real-life attorneys and judges preside over the trials, awarding votes (called ballots) to the winning teams.

Acting the part

“Mock trial is time-consuming, but it’s a journey that’s absolutely worth it,” says Colín. “It allows you skill-wise to become a standout, in the way you engage in public speaking and in arguments in general. It teaches you how to argue, not only to get your points out there, but to do it persuasively.”

Claire Southard, a first-year student who plans to major in computation and cognition, agrees. And joining the mock trial community has paid off in another way: It helped her adjust to MIT last fall, when she felt utterly uprooted from her home in Missouri. “It is so tight-knit, but in a way that’s so very welcoming to outside people to come join that community. I instantly felt like I belonged. I always left our practices in a better mood, even if something stressful was going on with school,” Southard says.

For those with an interest in theater, Mock Trial provides an opportunity to act in multiple roles; a typical case has a dozen or so witnesses. The AMTA affidavits provide some inkling of their characters, but there’s room for creative license. “The backstory is normally very much up to the student, so that can be kind of fun to come up with a persona for yourself that fits in with the facts of the case,” explains junior Emily Tess, a business management major and MIT Mock Trial co-president. For one of the witnesses she portrayed this year, she took inspiration from the character Mona Lisa Vito in the movie “My Cousin Vinny,” speaking with a thick Brooklyn accent, chomping on gum, and gesticulating liberally.

“The thing that is so special about mock trial is that, although it involves law and people always think about the attorney side, it’s also 50 percent witnessing — acting,” says Pilchik. Mock offers students who are already actors, or want to try acting, an alternative to joining a student drama group or the Theater Arts program.

Fake lawyering, MIT style

The Mock Trial program’s trajectory from a fledgling program seven years ago to a serious competitor among schools that perform at the highest level — such as Tufts, Harvard, and Stanford universities, and the University of California at Los Angeles — has caught people’s attention, Tess says. “We’re really building a name for ourselves in this national community, and people are starting to recognize us for being successful.” She’s noticed that MIT is no longer being cast as an underdog in the mock trial podcasts she listens to.

Part of that success may lie in the particular strengths MIT students bring to the table — or the fake courtroom, as it were. Over the years, Pilchik has observed two areas in which they excel. One is their grasp of the rules of evidence, which restrict evidence that attorneys can bring forward. The rules are numbered, and students have to memorize all of them and cite them to object in the trial. “I’ve taught objections at lots of schools, and MIT students are very good at understanding how these restrictions and pieces of logic fit together,” he says.

Another is absorbing complex vocabulary, and technical or scientific concepts, which students playing expert witnesses need to be able to explain during a trial. “If we’re in a round against another school, and an MIT student has an opportunity to get up in front of a whiteboard and show that the other student is missing something or wrong about the math, that’s always fun!” Pilchik says.

Given their recent, unprecedented success in the AMTA tournament, Pilchik and the students are bullish about the future of MIT’s Mock Trial program. In addition to the teams’ stellar performances taking home a slew of individual awards, beating Harvard this year was a sort of public bellwether, as well as the “internal validation our program needs,” says Colín.

“We have a lot of accumulated knowledge across all of our members, and that’s never going to leave as long as we keep getting new people and they are mentored by our leaders. Our knowledge base is only going to keep growing, and our baseline for how new members start is going to keep getting higher and higher. So I can’t picture us going down from where we are. We can only go up.”

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Making data visualization more accessible for blind and low-vision individuals

Data visualizations on the web are largely inaccessible for blind and low-vision individuals who use screen readers, an assistive technology that reads on-screen elements as text-to-speech. This excludes millions of people from the opportunity to probe and interpret insights that are often presented through charts, such as election results, health statistics, and economic indicators. 

When a designer attempts to make a visualization accessible, best practices call for including a few sentences of text that describe the chart and a link to the underlying data table — a far cry from the rich reading experience available to sighted users.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere is striving to create screen-reader-friendly data visualizations that offer a similarly rich experience. They prototyped several visualization structures that provide text descriptions at varying levels of detail, enabling a screen-reader user to drill down from high-level data to more detailed information using just a few keystrokes.

The MIT team embarked on an iterative co-design process with collaborator Daniel Hajas, a researcher at University College London who works with the Global Disability Innovation Hub and lost his sight at age 16. They collaborated to develop prototypes and ran a detailed user study with blind and low-vision individuals to gather feedback.

“Researchers might see some connections between problems and be aware of potential solutions, but very often they miss it by a little bit. Insights from people who have the lived experience of a certain specific, measurable problem are really important for a lot of disability-related solutions. I think we found a really nice fit,” says Hajas.

They created a framework to help designers think systematically about how to develop accessible visualizations. In the future, they plan to use their prototypes and design framework to build a user-friendly tool that could convert visualizations into accessible formats.

MIT collaborators include co-lead authors and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) graduate students Jonathan Zong, Crystal Lee, and Alan Lundgard, as well as JiWoong Jang, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University who worked on this project during MIT’s Summer Research Program (MSRP), and senior author Arvind Satyanarayan, assistant professor of computer science who leads the Visualization Group in CSAIL. The research paper, which will be presented at the Eurographics Conference on Visualization, won a best paper honorable mention award.

“Push what is possible”

The researchers defined three design dimensions as key to making accessible visualizations: structure, navigation, and description. Structure involves arranging the information into a hierarchy. Navigation refers to how the user moves through different levels of detail. Description is how the information is spoken, including how much information is conveyed.

Using these design dimensions, they developed several visualization prototypes that emphasized ease-of-navigation for screen-reader users. One prototype, known as multiview, enabled individuals to use the up and down arrows to navigate between different levels of information (like the chart title as the top level, the legend as the second level, etc.), and the right and left arrow keys to cycle through information on the same level (such as adjacent scatterplots). Another prototype, known as target, included the same arrow key navigation but also a drop-down menu of key chart locations so the user could quickly jump to an area of interest.

“Our goal is not just to work within existing standards to make them serviceable. We really set out to do grounded speculation and imagine where we can push what is possible with these existing standards. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to refitting tools that were designed for images,” says Zong.

They tested these prototypes and an accessible data table, the existing best practice for accessible visualizations, with 13 blind and visually impaired screen-reader users. They asked users to rate each tool on several criteria, including how easy it was to learn and how easy it was to locate data or answer questions.

“One thing I thought was really interesting was how much people were constantly testing their own hypotheses or trying to make specific patterns as they moved through the visualization. The implication for navigation is that you want to be able to orient yourself within the visualization so you know where the limits are,” says Lee. “Can you accurately and easily know where the walls are in the room you are exploring?”

Improved insights

Users said both prototypes enabled them to more rapidly identify patterns in the data. Scrolling from a high level to deeper levels of information helped them gain insights more easily than when browsing the data table, they said. They also enjoyed faster navigation using the menu in the target prototype.

But the data table got top marks for ease of use.

“I expected people to be disappointed with the everyday tools when compared to the new prototypes, but they still clung to the data table a bit, likely because of their familiarity with it. That shows that principles like familiarity, learnability, and usability still matter. No matter how ‘good’ our new invention is, if it is not easy enough to learn, people might stick with an older version,” Hajas says.

Drawing on these insights, the researchers are refining the prototypes and using them to build a software package that can be used with existing design tools to give visualizations an accessible, navigable structure.

They also want to explore multimodal solutions. Some study participants used different devices together, like screen readers and braille displays, or data sonification tools that convey information using non-speech audio. How these tools can complement each other when applied to a visualization is still an open question, Zong says.

In the long-run, they hope their work might lead to careful rethinking of web accessibility standards.

“There is no one-size-fits-all solution for accessibility. While existing standards don’t presume that, they only offer simple approaches, like data tables and alt text. One of the key benefits of our research contribution is that we are proposing a framework — different preferences and data representations are situated at different points in this design space,” says Lundgard.

“We have been working hard toward reducing the inequities that screen-reader users face when extracting information from online data visualizations for the past few years. So, we are really appreciative of this work and the knowledge that it adds to the existing literature,” says Ather Sharif, a graduate student who researches accessibility and visualization in the labs of professors Jacob Wobbrock and Katharina Reinecke at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Washington at Seattle, and who was not involved with this work.

“I like to think of it as a movement where we’re all finally coming together and improving the experiences of a demographic that has been largely ignored, especially when presenting data through visualizations. Kudos to Jonathan, Arvind, and their team for this insightful and timely work! I am looking forward to what’s next,” adds Sharif, who is lead author of several recent papers related to accessible data visualizations.

Amy Bower, a senior scientist in the Department of Physical Oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who suffers from a degenerative retinal disease and uses a screen reader extensively in her work as a researcher and also for basic living tasks, found the researchers’ explanations of the importance of co-design to be powerful and compelling.  

“As a blind scientist, I’m constantly searching for effective tools that will allow me to access the information conveyed in data visualizations. The layered approach taken by these researchers, which provides the option to get the ‘big picture’ from the data as well as drill down into the data points themselves, allows the user to choose how they want to explore the data,” says Bower, who also was not involved with this work. “I think the ability to freely explore the data is necessary not just to learn the ‘story’ that the data are telling, but to allow a blind researcher such as myself to formulate the next questions that need to be tackled to advance understanding in any field of study.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.  

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When politics is local in the Middle East

As the old adage has it, all politics is local. That might seem a quaint idea in an age of social media and global connectivity. And yet, as a study co-led by an MIT political scientist finds, it may describe Middle East politics more accurately than many people realize.

More specifically, sectarian identity in the Muslim world — especially the split between the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam — is often described as a transnational matter, in which people understand themselves as being part of a large divide spanning the Middle East and North Africa regions.

But an on-the-ground survey of Shiite Muslims (those who are Shia) engaged in a massive annual pilgrimage to the Iraqi city of Karbala reveals something different: Sectarian identity is often intertwined with domestic politics and shaped in connection with local social interactions.

“We found a different type of sectarian identity that definitely was not focused as much on the transnational dimension,” says Professor Fotini Christia, who directed the study.

Among other things, Muslim sectarian identity for participants in the study is not a doctrinal matter, emerging from religious study. Moreover, it also appears that men and women often develop sectarian identities in differing ways.

“It seems that it’s actually local politics seeping into an interpretation of the faith or of sectarian identity, rather than the other way around, with religion affecting people’s engagement,” Christia says. “There is also a gender dimension to this that has been overlooked.”

The paper, “Evidence on the Nature of Sectarian Animosity: The Shia Case,” is published today in Nature Human Behavior. The authors are Christia, who directs the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center; Elizabeth Dekeyser PhD ’19, a postdoc at the Institute for Adanced Study in Toulouse, France; and Dean Knox PhD ’17, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Research on the road to Karbala

To conduct the study, the scholars designed a survey of Shiite pilgrims walking to Karbala for the holy day of Arba’een — a collective mourning ritual at the shrine of Imam Husayn, one of the prophet Muhammad’s grandsons. This annual pilgrimage, banned under Saddam Hussein, is now one of the largest such annual events in the world, attracting Shia from many places.

Indeed, the structure of the pilgrimage helped the researchers conduct the study. The road from Najaf to Karbala, a 50-mile stretch that is the most heavily traveled part of the pilgrimage, features service tents organized around the areas people are from. That structure allowed Christia, working on the ground in Iraq with a local research team, to develop a sophisticated survey of a geographically diverse group of over 4,000 people in the Shia sect. About 60 percent of the participants were from Iraq, and 40 percent were from Iran; the survey was split roughly evenly by gender.

Overall, the Shia represent only about 20 percent of Muslims globally; they are predominant in Iran, but a minority in almost every other largely Muslim country and have received relatively less attention from social scientists and other scholars.

“When we think about the Muslim world there is a lot more focus on the Sunni side,” Christia says. “It felt like a big missing piece to have not engaged the Shia population in this kind of research.”

Due to the complexities of conducting research in Iran, she adds, “This is really a chance to engage a religious population from Iran that we could never access in Iran.”

All told, as the scholars state in the paper, the survey results show that sectarian animosity “is linked to economic deprivation, political disillusionment, lack of out-group contact, and a sect-based view of domestic politics.” Rather than representing a transnational, pan-Muslim view of social solidarity, sectarianism seems to operate a bit more like ethno-nationalism, derived from local experiences and bringing itself to bear on national political issues.

The survey data show, for instance, that an increase of household wealth leads to a modest decline in sectarian animosity, while greater disillusionment with democratic government leads to an increase in sectarian animosity. And women in Shia-dominated areas, with less across-sect social contact, have more sectarian animosity. In each case, domestic economic and political factors influence variation in sectarianism more than transnational matters do.

“One reason that it’s so hard to study the origins and correlates of animosity is because the concepts involved are intrinsically hard to quantify,” Knox says. “We take these issues seriously and validate our measures in numerous ways. For example, we quantify animosity through multiple approaches, including experiments, and we measure out-group contact with everything from self-reported information to smartphone-based location tracking. Ultimately, we’re able to use a variety of data sources to test the observable implications of existing theories about how and why individuals hold this animosity.”

The gender split and lived experience

At the same time, the survey results also yield some distinctive gender differences. Among Iraqi women, for instance, individuals who are more religious tend to be more sectarian, but men who are more religious tend to be less sectarian. Why? The scholars suggest that while Shiite doctrine discourages sectarianism, the social activities of religious practice abet it, by bringing people from only one sect together. For men who already work outside the home and have other means of socialization, this may have little impact on their world views. But for women for whom sectarian religious gatherings are a primary form of socialization, practicing religion more actively can thus increase sectarian views.

Similarly, the connection between democratic disillusion and sectarianism in the survey is primarily driven by women (in contrast to the public image of young Muslim men driving sectarian conflict). The researchers hypothesize that this, too, comes from the greater opportunities for men to absorb varying views in the public sphere, while the more limited socialization opportunities for women reinforce sectarian views.

“Providing a full, nuanced analysis of the divergent ways that men and women understand sectarianism is critical,” Dekeyser says. “For behaviors and beliefs that are heavily influenced by socialization, like intergroup relations, ignoring the entirely different lived experiences across genders can both fail to examine critical variation in beliefs, and lead to incorrect social and political conclusions.”

And the fact that lived experience itself is largely localized, for most people, in turn means their views are grounded in those concerns. After all, Christia observes, consider that even people engaged in the Karbala pilgrimage, an international event, organize themselves according to their places of origin.

“Even at this event which is transnational, because there are Shia from all over the place, even there, it’s in a way a celebration of their local identity,” Christia says.

All told, the close study of sectarian animosity, rather than a reliance on received notions about it, is necessary for fully understanding the views of people around the Muslim world.

“So many other places where politics are problematic and we [the U.S.] have been engaged in the Middle East, like Iraq or Syria or Lebanon or Yemen, have this sectarian dimension,” Christia says. “We need to think about religion and politics, and how this really manifests itself. … The fact that there is this [political] dimension to it, more than this transnational religious dimension, is an important takeaway.”

Support for the study was provided, in part, by MIT and Princeton University.

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A passion for science and music

In the quiet hall outside of Hayden Library, Zoe Levitt’s soft, musical voice fills the room. The acoustics are perfect for amplifying her words and her innate passion for geology. Or, more specifically, paleomagnetism — using magnetism to study the geological history of the Earth — which is the focus of her senior thesis.

“The question is, when did plate tectonics actually start?” Levitt explains, her hands moving in rhythm with her words. “Was it intermittent? Or was it continuous?”

As a senior in Course 12 (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, or EAPS), it seems like Levitt is on track to head off to graduate school and further her geological pursuits elsewhere. But she’s not. Levitt’s time at MIT has been filled with unexpected surprises, including choosing geology as her major in the first place. Now that she’s finished, she’s settled on an entirely different field: songwriting.

“I really have loved studying geology,” she explains. “But right now, I really feel the need to pursue music.”

Levitt grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no stranger to the people of MIT and their passion. When she arrived at MIT, she had been thinking of majoring in math or engineering. But she was persuaded to major in geology after signing up for a Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP) to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

“I really applied for the trip just because I wanted to get out of Boston and go see somewhere else,” she laughs, confessing that the idea of just going to restaurants or other places in the area seemed too boring. The trip also coincided with the 2017 eclipse, so between that, hiking, and learning about geology with experts, Levitt was sold.

She did geology research the summer after her first year, working with a postdoc in Kristin Bergmann’s lab, where they looked at 1.8-billion-year-old rocks to try to understand the oxygen environment at the time of their creation. She did her first field work trip to Michigan, and then in the fall returned to Yellowstone on the FPOP trip, this time as a teaching assistant.

“I think EAPS is really special in that you get to go on these trips into the field with professors and really get to know them and get to know their expertise,” she says. One of her favorite EAPS moments was a trip in January 2020. The field cook had brought a guitar and Levitt brought her mandolin, and together they jammed around the campfire while everyone chatted.

Music has long been a part of Levitt’s life. Her father bought her a Baby Taylor guitar for her sixth birthday, and she switched to mandolin as her primary instrument a few years later. She grew up in the bluegrass scene, attending festivals with her father.

“I was always really driven by the melodies of compositions, but I never really paid attention to the words,” she explains. “I was going through a pretty tough time and ended up starting to write songs to process what was happening.”

In spring 2020, Levitt was ready to take a serious step into songwriting, so she reached out to Celia Woodsmith, a Grammy Award-nominated musician. Woodsmith, like many musicians whose plans were disrupted by the pandemic, agreed to lessons.

Levitt’s songwriting first began as a way for her to process her emotions and experiences as a sexual assault survivor. She has since shared her songs to raise awareness, including recording two songs about her experience as a survivor for National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Contest and performing an autobiographical piece in the 2022 MIT monologues. She also performed at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center’s Walk for Change and recorded a song for the Cambridge Women’s Center’s video commemorating their 50th anniversary.

“I hope that sharing my songs can bring healing to others as it has for me,” she says.

Since then, Levitt has been using her “curiosity and a passion for discovery” from her time in EAPS to explore new topics in her music, such as mental health struggles, historical narratives, and satirical songs. Her song “We Flattened the Curve”, comments satirically on the U.S. Covid-19 response using mathematical observations. Levitt, who in addition to majoring in geology is minoring in both music and math, jokes that she’s “already putting that math degree to some good use!”

Even though Levitt officially graduated in the spring, she isn’t done with MIT just yet. She was awarded an Eloranta Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which she’ll be using to further her musical pursuits. This fall she hopes to travel to Nepal to collaborate with local musicians on a project recording and transcribing traditional music. 

And she isn’t done with geology, either. She’ll be spending six weeks doing fieldwork with EAPS Professor Oliver Jagoutz in the Himalayas in July. 

“I haven't made it out to the field since [2020] so I'm really excited to get back out there,” she says. “In the fall I'll be focusing on sharing my music for the time being, and then see what happens from there.”

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