Image
Loading...
Bass Connections Project Team: The Science of Refugee Camps (2024-2025)
In 2024-2025, David Banks and James Moody (Sociology) co-led a Bass Connections team that explored outcomes at refugee camps in order to inform future management structures and practices. Their project was part of a special call for projects exploring topics related to geopolitical conflict and humanitarian crises in the Middle East and beyond. Banks shared his perspective and advice on team leadership with Leila Chelbi during an interview in Spring 2025.
Building Student Engagement Through Real-World Partnerships
For the last 18 years, I have made a point to discuss climate change with my undergraduates in the Focus program and other classes. We have thought about it from political, economic, demographic and regional perspectives. It seems clear that one consequence of climate change will be an increase in the number of refugees. For example, the Syrian refugee crisis was driven by a ten-year drought that pushed farmers into the cities where they expected economic opportunities that did not exist. And, Bangladeshis will be pushed north, away from the coast.
Two years ago, at the World Statistics Congress, the International Statistical Institute (ISI) announced a new program called Data for Good and asked people to submit proposals for projects. I joined with a few others to suggest an initiative to study the data needed for refugee camp management, and the ISI agreed to sponsor that as a project.
When the call for new Bass Connections projects came around, it seemed like an opportunity to advance this work further and to include more students. The Bass Connections funding enabled me to bring in speakers from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other organizations to engage with students.
A team of our students worked with the UNHCR on The Hive, which is a database of databases containing annual reports from all refugee camp managers who receive funding from the UN. The Hive is not ideal, lacking metadata and standardized formats, and the students did a lot to sort that out and (I think) to make the UNHCR see the value of a quantitative perspective in their mission.
We also conducted Zoom interviews with four refugee camp managers. Those were less successful. Camp managers fear that their resources will be reduced, and they have strong incentives to overstate their success. Additionally, outreach from a U.S. college professor is not the best entrée to a camp manager in, say, Jordan. However, I hope that with ISI engagement, such outreach will be more successful going forward – almost every director of a census bureau in the Middle East is a member of the ISI, which provides a much better introduction to camp managers.
At the end of the year, we organized a conference at Duke which included an opening address from the president of the ISI, two speakers from the UNHCR, and a representative from the American Statistical Association (ASA) who spoke about the ASA Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights and the ASA volunteer group Statistics Without Borders. Our student team members had the opportunity to present on the research they had done over the course of the year.
Finally, our students have written a batch of papers that will appear in a special issue of an ASA journal on this topic. Collectively, I hope that these efforts will raise the visibility of refugee issues in the statistical community and encourage more of my colleagues to contribute their expertise.
Finding Opportunities in Research Challenges
There were several challenges. Interviewing camp managers was tricky. Learning about the deficits in The Hive was a challenge but also an opportunity to show the value we could provide. When an ASA editor told me she wanted to do a special issue on refugee camp management, that was another nice opportunity, and it reoriented our academic research towards that goal.
A camp manager is much like a city manager and needs similar official statistics. They need to know census-like data: how many people, the age and gender mix, and so forth. They need public health data: how many people have diabetes, how many are pregnant, etc. All camps that receive UN funding are required by law to educate the children, so they need to collect data on educational programs and progress. Camps have security issues, so the camp managers must track crime statistics. And the on-boarding and off-boarding processes are much like immigration and emigration data collection. The students wrote papers that addressed different aspects of the need that camps have for official statistics, and how those can best be fulfilled.
Digging in on Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary Mentorship
I am an old guy, so I’ve been doing mentorship for a long time. And I’m a statistician, so interdisciplinary collaboration is baked into my career. But teaching in the Bass Connections program introduced me to public policy majors and religious studies majors to a greater degree than usually happens. I think some of them will become durable friendships.
I’d encourage prospective team leaders to think of Bass Connections as an opportunity for collaboration rather than a class. And stay flexible. When we started, we had a fairly traditional course model in mind. What we ended up doing was much more like a series of small group studies, and I think it achieved more than the original plan would have allowed. Also, we had to be flexible because there was absolutely no time bloc when all of the students could meet together, even on weekends.
Ultimately, I am trying to build a social machine that will outlast my career. The students have stopped working on refugee issues, at least through me, but I want to hand this work off to younger volunteers in the ASA and the ISI and connect those volunteers with partners in the UNHCR. We cannot hope to solve the refugee problem-it is vast. But I think statisticians, economists and sociologists have skills that can ameliorate things.
Learn More
- Read more advice from faculty who have led Bass Connections teams.
- Explore additional opportunities for faculty through Bass Connections.
- Browse faculty FAQs.