ANN ARBOR — Identifying an important question and following it to its natural endpoint, wherever that might be, is a key part of academic life. It’s the bedrock of the scientific process. It’s the backbone of academia.

It’s what led Jeffrey Swindle to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), and beyond.

Swindle arrived at U-M in 2012 to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology, and he had a specific research goal in mind.

“I wanted to do international research related to foreign aid projects and their effects on people’s lives, as well as the unexpected cultural consequences of foreign aid” Swindle said. “When I visited Michigan, I found several faculty who were doing similar research.”

Those faculty members included Arland Thornton of ISR’s Population Studies Center, whose work on an idea he termed “developmental idealism” drew Swindle to ISR. Swindle worked with Thornton and other ISR faculty in the Family Demography Group studying international migration from Nepal to other parts of the world, including the Persian Gulf, Europe, and the United States.

“It was a really cool project where we were able to track migrants and interview them each month, even after they had moved,” said Swindle. “The innovative part is that we had a panel dataset of the same people for many years despite them being around the world.” 

From there, Swindle worked to build his own research projects, fleshing out his ideas on studying the effects of foreign aid.

“I wanted to see more broadly how it affects communities, and I was really interested in gender inequalities and projects that focused on that.”

Swindle received funding through ISR’s Next Generation Initiative to travel to Malawi to work on his research. While there, he studied foreign aid projects, how they were constructed, and what effects they had, both economically and culturally in communities throughout Malawi, speaking with community leaders and companies who’d been contracted to fulfill foreign aid objectives.

“I would not have been able to do that project without the money that I received from ISR,” Swindle said. “I went several times and stayed for several months at a time, so I needed to pay for housing. I also had to hire a lot of research assistants who helped me travel to the communities where the foreign aid projects happened.”

Swindle completed his Ph.D. and graduated in the summer of 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. But due to his extensive training in demography at ISR, he was able to land a late opening for a postdoctoral position at the University of Texas-Austin’s Population Research Center. After completing that position, he landed another postdoctoral position at Harvard University, working there as a postdoc for three years. He’s now an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he’s still working on ideas he first formulated at ISR.

“I’m continuing the research I started at ISR on gender inequalities,” he said. “I’m specifically focusing on foreign aid projects that are trying to reduce sexual violence, which gets really complicated because cultural understandings of family and marriage and sex are pretty culturally dependent, so my experience traveling and the networks that I made with people in Malawi have been super crucial as I continue that research.”

It all started with an important question. And it was all made possible through the Next Generation Initiative.

“The experience and funding that came from ISR was irreplaceable.”

Contact: Jon Meerdink ([email protected])