This October, we are delighted to spotlight FI Advisory Board member Colette Daiute, a Distinguished Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Urban Education at the Graduate Center.
Dr. Daiute is an internationally recognized scholar of human development whose research examines how people use language and other verbal and non-verbal symbol systems to interpret and influence extremely adverse environments of political violence, migration, and economic inequality. Growing out of research in practice, Dr. Daiute has developed dynamic narrative inquiry, a methodology that reveals how individuals, communities, and institutions use stories and other discourses interactively to change situations troubling them. Dr. Daiute’s research also innovatively integrates social, cognitive, and emotional processes via practical uses of language, digital media, and cultural practices. With this understanding of language as activity in the world, Dr. Daiute, her students, and colleagues learn about some surprising developmental processes and outcomes.
Scholarship and Research
Dr. Daiute’s ongoing research projects focus on different uses of storytelling to mediate personal and social change. For example, one study with colleagues in Italian university legal clinics focuses on conflicting values of international human rights judgement and individual asylum seekers’ needs for personal integrity. Another project involves U.S.-based undergraduate humanities and social science students in a workshop to co-author interactive digital narratives, thereby involving students in the means of digital production. A third ongoing project collaborates with higher education and legal professionals who advise undocumented youth. Dr. Daiute is also mentoring Ph.D. students doing important research on dialogic interactions among individuals and social-political systems.
Connection to the Futures Initiative and Other Practices
All of Dr. Daiute’s research occurs with colleagues in education, community, and policy practices designing innovations to support positive human development and social change. This practice-based collaboration is a core tenet of the Futures Initiative. Dr. Daiute’s connection with the Futures Initiative began during the 2017–2018 academic year through an FI Team-Taught course with David Caicedo, a Graduate Center alumnus and now Associate Professor at BMCC. Their course, ‘Undocumented, Illegal, Citizen: The Politics and Psychology of Belonging in the United States,’ integrated her previous research with then-GC Ph.D. student Phil Kreniske (now Assistant Professor at the CUNY School of Public Health) on how college students interpreted the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, alongside Dr. Caicedo’s research on the interaction of individuals’ and communites’ beliefs about immigration policy. Their course occurred during the first Trump Administration, which rescinded the Obama Administration DACA policy and began a sequence of para-policy moves, which Dr. Daiute has studied and recently published on with GC Ph.D. student and FI Fellow-in-Residence, Sham Habteselasse.
Dr. Daiute’s book publications include Narrative Inquiry: A Dynamic Approach (Sage Publications); Human Development and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press); Minority Teachers – Roma in Serbia – Narrate Education Reform (with Tünde Kovacs-Cerovic; published by the University of Belgrade and UNICEF). Her books, numerous articles in scholarly journals, keynote addresses, and research workshops have guided researchers around the world toward context-sensitive, practical, and scientifically rigorous inquiry via the interaction of everyday discourses like personal storytelling and political discourses like curricula and policies. Dr. Daiute is currently Founder, Producer, and occasional interviewer of the How Ideas Travel Podcast exploring how the study of human development has changed over history and geo-political contexts. Among numerous honors, she has been elected as Member of the National Academy of Education, recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Science Award by the Jean Piaget Society, and Fulbright Specialist.
Dr. Daiute teaches Ph.D. courses at the CUNY Graduate Center, including “Narrative inquiry,” “Technology learning and development,” “Discourse theory and analysis,” “Second Year Research Seminar in Critical Psychology”, and she convenes the “Narrating Change Research Group.”
*With acknowledgments from Dr. Daiute to FI Institutional Leadership Specialist Violetta Soboleva and FI Communications Director Katie Williams for their assistance in this FI Spotlight.
