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.

Program Manager

Sarah Morehouse

Sarah Morehouse is the Program Manager for the Refugees in Towns (RIT) Project at Tufts University’s Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security. Based in Utica, New York, she also serves as Director of Programs at the Midtown Utica Community Center (MUCC), which supports post-resettlement youth and adult programs for refugees and migrants.

She received her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University and has worked with displaced populations in the United States and abroad, including documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity among internally displaced populations in contested areas of Burma.

Sarah has been part of a variety of research examining the intersections of race, gender, identity, and migration, and she also teaches anthropology at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, where her courses explore globalization and human security.

Research Assistant

Briana McGowan

Brie is a recent Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy graduate of The Fletcher School at Tufts University who studied international legal studies as well as international migration and refugee studies. She graduated with her B.A. in international relations and economics and an Arabic minor from Tufts University. She has worked for various migration nonprofits focused on resettlement and integration of migrants. In addition to her work on the RIT project, she was a Research Assistant for the Leadership in Migration Initiative and contributed as a case author. While at Fletcher, she also served as the Editor-in-Chief of PRAXIS, the Fletcher Journal of Human Security.

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.