Notre Dame Justice Labs

YEAR IN REVIEW

Collaborating on Research, Discovering Community Solutions

Social concerns—from child hunger, to human trafficking, to housing shortages, to climate change—foil and frustrate well-meaning interventions, leaving our thorniest problems to fester.

Now, through Notre Dame Justice Labs, the Institute offers a new model of engaged research and problem-based education, rooted in the principles of Catholic social tradition, to address such seemingly intractable problems.

Justice Labs are year-round, time-delimited, interdisciplinary collaborations among Notre Dame faculty, community partners, graduate students, and undergraduates who together conduct research to better understand and address emergent and longstanding social concerns. The labs address challenges identified by the communities themselves, and community partners are involved in every element of the work—from research design, to intervention implementation, to data collection and publication. This collaboration is essential to the labs’ ability to identify cutting-edge, evidence-based solutions.

Highlights in 2024–25 included a range of new projects for the Mass Incarceration Research Lab. First was a collaboration with scholars at the University of Denver’s Social Movement Support Lab to research alternative emergency response and violence intervention programs in the 20 largest cities in the United States. Second, the lab launched a new research collaboration with scholars at Boston College examining the effects of different forms of prison

education programs in Indiana and Massachusetts on civic and social well-being post-release. And finally, with a Notre Dame Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts grant, the lab helped launch the Crime & Justice Working Group. The group is a collaboration among faculty fellows Pam Butler (Gender Studies) and Anna Haskins (Sociology) and Institute postdoctoral research scholar Sam Sokolsky-Tifft and is integrated into the Mass Incarceration Research Lab. The working group of more than 50 includes undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members from schools and colleges across the University of Notre Dame. Joining the faculty and students are practitioners and partners from the South Bend community, all united by a passion to develop collaborative research capable of transforming the criminal justice system in the United States.

Work in the Housing and the Common Good Research Lab included research by economics major Elaine Carroll ’25 on the viability of social impact bonds as a means of generating sustainable funding for low-income and permanent supportive housing—research that involved partnering with organizations in midsize cities from South Bend, Indiana, to Anchorage, Alaska. Meanwhile, in the Just Wage Research Lab, student teams joined Institute faculty to develop training for hospitality workers and unions so they might be able to identify and intervene in potential trafficking situations.

“The Just Wage Research Lab brings to life Catholic social teaching’s emphasis on the dignity of human life reflected in work, participation in economic decision-making, and solidarity, as students and faculty alike see the real-world impact of our research on some of the most vulnerable members of society.”

– DANIEL GRAFF, Professor of the Practice

This research is expanding in the coming year through a new Human Trafficking Research Lab. The lab brings together legal, social scientific, technological, and theological perspectives to address various dimensions of the $150 billion annual trade in children and adults for forced labor or sex. Project teams will address different dimensions of this problem, including whether there are ways to use artificial intelligence to stem child sex trafficking, how Catholic social teaching gives new insight into how to address this exploitation, what role policing and legal interventions might play, and what the best practices are to address needs of survivors.

Through Justice Labs, the Institute is distinguishing itself with an approach to public scholarship that unites the values of Catholic social tradition with results-driven solutions to the most pressing issues in society.