Undergraduate Fellowship Program

Each semester, in partnership with the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, we hire up to 18 undergraduate research fellows to support faculty-led research projects across multiple disciplines that align with the mission of the Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Democracy (HEARD) Initiative. Students with HEARD fellowships are funded to work with/for faculty (or on independent or community-linked research projects, with faculty mentors) for up to 6 hours per week. HEARD Fellows also attend weekly HEARD Fellows meetings, where you will work on research skills and strategies, learn from each other's work, hear from scholars on campus and beyond, and connect HEARD research to current events. 

Selected HEARD Fellows will be matched with one faculty research project based on interest and skills required for the research. If you are interested in becoming a HEARD fellow, please let us know via this interest form by Friday, May 29th 2026. 

Examples of past and current student placements include:

Cultivating Community Together, supervised by Prof. Edwin Mayorga 

This project is a qualitative and historical study of community and school partnerships in Philadelphia schools past and present. To conduct this study, we, the research project team, are developing a queer intersectional abolitionist framework that brings the lives and experiences of marginalized people, and the transformative possibilities afforded by an abolitionist approach, to the center of educational policy work. More specifically, our emerging framework is a way to document and examine the theories of change and social practices that give shape to school and community partnerships in the shifting educational landscape. The study examines various models of community and school partnerships that aim to strengthen the educational experience for all students in Philadelphia now and in the past. The contemporary component of the study is a set of case studies that represent different models of partnership.

Sanctuary in Policy & Practice, supervised by Prof. Elaine Allard

This study examines what Swarthmore’s 2016 sanctuary declaration looks like in everyday practice and how, if at all, it distinguishes our campus culture from those of other similar campuses that decided not to adopt this designation. The study thus far has examined what sanctuary means to undocumented students as well as how it is enacted by faculty and staff, but it is clear that the answers to these questions change over time, given the changing student population, shifts in immigration policy, and the relative primacy of the issue in both national and local discourse. Student researchers joining the project will continue to explore these questions via interviews, questionnaires, analysis of documents, and other qualitative methods as well as to compile and review relevant scholarly literature. This is an especially interesting time to explore these questions, given current discourses regarding unauthorized migration and immigration policies writ large are certain to become more prominent and influence related activity on campus. (This was in fact the same season in which the sanctuary campus movement developed in 2016.) In addition, student researchers may be asked to provide editorial support for a special issue collaboration on supporting undocumented students in higher education.

Democratizing Exclusion, supervised by Prof. Yi-Hsuan Huang

This is a book project in normative political theory that discusses whether democracies can legitimately limit the political participation of its citizens, even temporarily or partially. Some of these "exclusionary mechanisms" include disinformation regulation, hate speech sanction, anti-democratic party bans. This project takes a comprehensive survey of exclusionary institutions in democracies, and explain when they are legitimate and when they are not. Student researchers will help with collecting exclusionary policies and their implications, including the debates surrounding these policies, across liberal democracies. Those with a philosophy and normative theory training or experience will also help with conceptual fine-tuning and copy-editing.

Politics & Equal Participation Lab, supervised by Prof. Daniel Laurison

The research team on this project has conducted over 250 interviews with Black, white, Asian, Latine, and multiracial poor and working class people across Pennsylvania, aimed at understanding how they think about and engage (or not) with U.S. politics. We are now in the analysis and writing phase; students selected to work on this project will help with qualitative coding of interview transcripts (mostly complete), drafting articles based on these interviews, and getting feedback from past interviewees and community-based researchers about our initial findings. 

The Toxic Schools Project, supervised by Prof. Roseann Liu

In the last few years, a series of high profile headlines chronicled the deteriorated state of Philadelphia school facilities and its effects on people’s health. This ethnographic project — “Toxic Schools” — examines how students, parents, and teachers are organizing to remediate lead and asbestos in Philadelphia schools. Drawing on the science and technology studies literature, we will examine how toxicity and sickness are being mobilized as a mode of entitlement for making claims to educational rights.

"We Keep Us Safe": Civic Self-Protection , Trust, and Technology in U.S. Mutual Aid Networks, supervised by Prof. Emily Paddon Rhoads

This project explores mutual aid and grassroots disaster response efforts in the United States as a potential form of civic self-protection and resilience in contexts of institutional strain, uneven state response, and escalating climate-related emergencies. Drawing on global research into civilian protection practices in conflict zones as well as on the literature on mutual aid and disaster response in both U.S. and international contexts, the study investigates how communities mobilize to address urgent needs when formal systems are inaccessible, delayed, or distrusted. 

Particular attention is given to how trust is built within and between communities, how technology is used to coordinate response and communication, and how groups negotiate questions of legitimacy, risk, and representation. The project asks what it means for communities to “step into the gap,” how these efforts relate to broader questions about democratic practice and inclusion, and in what ways they reflect or diverge from global patterns of local protection.

Postbellum Incarceration in the American South, supervised by Prof. Susie Schwarz

Students will help with the collection of historical imprisonment data from the Jim Crow American South. Students will transcribe data from handwritten prison records. In collective coding sessions as part of my Historical Political Economy Lab, we will then clean out the data together and feed it into the larger Postbellum Incarceration in the American South (PIAS) database.

The Collective Resiliency Lab, supervised by Prof. Sukrit Venkatagiri

Student fellows in HEARD working with Prof. Venkatagiri are addressing the heightened privacy and security risks facing activists and community organizers. Due to the surveillance of law enforcement and other institutions, activists historically and at present have their privacy and security infringed upon through tactics such as doxxing, swatting, etc. Ensuring the security of activists is crucial to protecting not only their freedom of expression, but further their ability to organize without fear of surveillance or repression from the institutions they are in conflict with. To this end, students are conducting a participatory action design with activists; conducting and analyzing qualitative interviews to identify technical applications that they can build to protect user privacy and cybersecurity.