In the spring of 2015, political science professor Audie Klotz invited her Maxwell colleagues Prema Kurien, in sociology, and Jamie Winders, in geography, to join her for a daylong symposium on multiculturalism.

“Audie and Prema and I all do research on questions related to immigration,” recalls Winders, “but it was really the first time the three of us had sat around a table talking about this topic. We really enjoyed that, and we were quite struck by the fact that we’re in this school and have similar interests, but it’s often challenging to get together and engage one another in terms of our own research. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to create a space where people can sit down and talk about their work and find connections across all these methodological and disciplinary divides?’”

That idea is becoming a reality thanks to the Tenth Decade Project, a wave of initiatives leading up to Maxwell’s centennial in 2024 that builds on the School’s legacy of citizenship education. Inspired by the Tenth Decade agenda, Klotz, Kurien, and Winders reached out to anthropologist John Burdick — another Maxwell professor with a longstanding interest in citizenship — and together they began laying the groundwork for a project now known as the Maxwell Citizenship Initiative (MCI).

Unlike the other Tenth Decade projects, the MCI is not focused on a specific citizenship-related topic (such as free speech or labor), nor does it create a new institutional structure that would overlap with Maxwell’s robust research institutes and academic departments. Instead, the MCI aims to identify common interests in citizenship issues among faculty and students throughout the School, and then to provide new avenues and support for sharing ideas and collaborating.

In Winders’ words, the MCI “can be a catalyst for enhancing your own projects, getting feedback, or working with someone else on a joint project. We’re building the capacity for those kinds of connections.”