The Maxwell School’s Tenth Decade Project will provide start-up funding for four new scholarly endeavors beginning this fall. These new projects will join five original projects funded at the time of the Tenth Decade Project’s inception.

Established in 2014 to mark the Maxwell School’s 90th anniversary and look ahead to its centennial in 2024, the Tenth Decade Project provides seed funding for worthy scholarly projects that have the potential to produce significant external research funding and high-impact publications.

The four newly funded projects, with the amount of their Tenth Decade grants, are:

“Challenges to Sovereignty, Order, and Conflict: Multidisciplinary Working Group” ($25,000). This project, funded for three years, will act as a springboard for research on challenges to sovereignty, order, and conflict, and incubate individual and collaborative projects among both faculty and graduate students in that category. Funding will provide for a seminar series, utilizing a mix of internal and external speakers. Some examples of topics that the group will consider include rebel governance, crime syndicates, global black spots, cyber terrorism, illicit trade, ethno-political violence, civil war, post-conflict reconstruction, and nationalism. The project director is Ryan Griffiths, associate professor of political science.

“The Impact of State Laws and Policies on the Developmental Disability Mortality Disadvantage: Creating a Comprehensive Database to Allow for Multi-Level Analysis” ($33,420). This two-year project intends to collect and consolidate currently scattered state-level data on policies and services for adults with developmental disability. The completed project will result in a comprehensive database of measures of state-level laws, policies, and funding that may affect health and well-being outcomes for adults with developmental disabilities, including mortality risk. In an attempt to better understand the developmental disability mortality disadvantage, it will also lead to a preliminary multi-level analysis of comparative mortality trends for adults with and without developmental disabilities. The completed dataset will be shared with other qualified researchers. The principal investigator is Scott Landes, assistant professor of sociology and a faculty associate of Syracuse University’s Aging Studies Institute.

“The United States and the World Workshop Series” ($15,000). This three-year project includes workshops on the overall theme of American internationalism in the 21st century. The workshops will engage Syracuse University faculty, graduate students, University partners, and leading scholars from around the world, with the goal of producing a research agenda, network of partnering scholars and institutions, and research publications. The project builds on two similar workshops, held in September 2017 and April 2019, focused, respectively, on Sino-American and U.S.–Iranian relations, and on authoritarianism. The project director is Osamah Khalil, associate professor of history.

“Citizenship across Borders: An International Conference” ($16,000). This project will lead to a conference, tentatively scheduled for October 2020, examining concepts of citizenship that transcend disciplinary and national borders; the conference will take place at the Syracuse University Center in Strasbourg, France. It is meant to respond to rapidly shifting notions of citizenship, in the midst of the so-called global refugee crisis and ensuing backlash against immigration. Scholars at the conference will consider the history, politics, and laws of citizenship within and across borders, as well as the national, social, and cultural crises prompted by the movement of people; a resulting edited volume will offer new directions in the scholarship on citizenship. The project director is Carol Faulkner, professor of history.

Since it was created, the Tenth Decade Project has attracted nearly $850,000 in gifts from 267 individual donors, including a lead gift from long-time Maxwell supporters Gerry and Daphna Cramer. For information on giving to the fund, visit Supporting Tenth Decade. 

10/02/19