Young Grant Showcase Highlights Student and Faculty Research from Bangkok to Buenos Aires

On September 30, the John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy held its annual Young Grant Showcase in Morrison. Four students and one faculty member presented research and internship projects funded by Young grants over the past year. The projects spanned four continents and fields from housing policy to climate finance.

Professor Igor Logvinenko, Director of the Young Initiative, opened the event by introducing last year's recipients talk about their exciting research, covering a diverse set of topics:

Housing justice in Bangkok. Samantha Stever-Zeitlin presented "People Driving Housing Justice," a study of how stakeholders assess efforts to address housing insecurity in Bangkok, Thailand. She conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with people who are or were recently housing-insecure, nonprofit staff, and government officials. She also visited slum communities and several organizations' offices. Her research centers on Baan Mankong, Thailand's "Secure Housing" program, which has run since 2003. Stakeholders broadly agreed that the program and grassroots organizing have worked, and that evictions have not. They disagreed about the program's financial viability, about shifting government responsibility onto communities, and about the role of international actors. Stever-Zeitlin concluded that participatory models work, but that housing-insecure residents need a larger role in decision-making to secure lasting change at the systemic level.

The fight over fair use. Nyasha Griffin, who is studying abroad this semester, presented her comparative project on copyright law in Spain and South Africa. Spain has rejected "fair use" exceptions to copyright. In South Africa the question is still contested and now rests with the Constitutional Court. Griffin argues that the difference comes from the relative strength of competing transnational advocacy networks: a creative-industry coalition on one side, and human rights and access-to-knowledge groups on the other. Her fieldwork includes interviews with musicians, industry representatives, rights advocates, and policymakers.

Media and memory in Argentina. Adam Pildal spent the summer at the National Library in Buenos Aires studying how Argentina's two most influential newspapers, Clarín and La Nación, covered the country's reckoning with its military dictatorship. He analyzed 819 articles published around eight turning points between 1983 and 2026. Coverage in both papers moved through distinct phases:

  • a "both sides" framing during the first junta trials
  • more sympathetic treatment of the military during the impunity laws and presidential pardons of the late 1980s and 1990
  • a turn toward victims' experiences after cases reopened under President Néstor Kirchner

Pildal also pointed to a notable blind spot in both papers: their coverage of the Papel Prensa case.

Who gets into elite schools? Professor Diana Ngo of the Economics Department presented faculty grant research, conducted with coauthor Dustan, on Mexico City's exam-based high school admissions system. Students from the highest socioeconomic quartile are placed in elite, university-affiliated schools at five times the rate of those from the lowest quartile: 42 percent versus 8 percent. Students from the lowest quartile are far more likely to be placed in technical schools. Placement test scores account for most of the elite-school gap, more than differences in families' preferences and geography combined. The results suggest that high-stakes testing puts low-income students at a disproportionate disadvantage.

Why good climate projects go unfunded. Angeline Leth spent ten weeks this summer interning at Nobon, a climate-finance platform in Stockholm. She found the placement through her own networking. Much of her work involved a biochar project in Namibia, where invasive bush has spread across roughly 46 million hectares of rangeland. The project works, but it has struggled to attract investment. Leth found that the obstacle was usually documentation rather than merit or capital: certification, verified data, and a legal structure that capital can flow through. She also mapped 22 competitors and built outreach lists for the company's first commercial push. As her final slide put it: "Policy decides what's possible. Infrastructure decides what happens."

Apply for a Young Grant. The event closed with an overview of the next grant cycle from Professor Logvinenko, Assistant Director Priscilla Falter, and Kristin Peace, Social Sciences & Data Literacy Librarian. Young Grants support independent research, unpaid internships, research travel, and conference participation related to world affairs and the global economy. Winter and Summer grants go up to $4,500, and Rolling grants up to $1,500.