Mentor: Dr. Ryann Manning
Assistant Professor
Project Description
In August 2021, Afghanistan fell to Taliban control as the US and NATO allies withdrew, leaving hundreds of thousands of Afghans at risk of reprisal. Over the course of a few weeks, an extraordinary effort emerged: Thousands of volunteers around the world convened in virtual spaces and collaborated with Afghans on the ground to help people safely evacuate. Together, volunteers and evacuees created an impressive, complex organizing infrastructure that likely saved thousands of lives.
This project examines this case of volunteer organizing during the Afghan crisis to understand a more widespread phenomenon: how ordinary people organize to provide urgent assistance in times of crises. Volunteers and emergent response groups (Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, and Hollingshead 2007) often play a valuable role in disasters and crises (Shepherd and Williams 2014; Twigg and Mosel 2017). There is a critical need to better understand these groups, how they coordinate, how they can operate effectively, and when and how they might cause inadvertent harm. Furthermore, volunteering in these groups comes with emotional, psychological, social, and financial burdens for volunteers, and we need to understand these burdens and how to better support crisis volunteers.
SROP students involved in this project would join an existing team of undergraduate RAs. They would be trained in qualitative research methods, research ethics, and (if needed) NVivo qualitative analysis software. They may assist with one or more of the following activities, depending on their interests and the needs of the project: qualitative coding of interview transcripts using Excel and/or NVivo qualitative analysis software; qualitative coding of archival data such as news articles, blogs, and reports, using Excel and/or NVivo; and writing analytic and theoretical memos based on emerging findings.
Mentorship Statement
I would not be an academic but for the support of many mentors, and I am committed to paying that forward. I never met anyone who was a professor until I started university, and I know how important it is to demystify this career and open doors for talented young people from groups that are under-represented in academia—especially students who are Black, Indigenous, or from other racialized groups. I served as an SROP mentor in 2021; prior to that, I advised undergraduate thesis writers at Harvard University and young researchers in Sierra Leone. Since 2021, I have been working with a team of research assistants at the University of Toronto, many of them newcomers to Canada. I meet regularly with students (usually virtually) to provide guidance and feedback. I try to speak openly about the challenges and benefits of graduate school and an academic career, to help students discover whether this is the right path for them—and help them succeed.