Global Ideas Lab

Project Lead: Dr. Maria Ivanova

Modeling a Plastics-Free Future: Systems Thinking and Global Policy Innovation is an initiative of the newly established Plastics Center at Northeastern University. It convenes Northeastern faculty and students alongside international collaborators, including UN delegates and global research leaders, to co-create innovative solutions to plastic pollution. Through two interdisciplinary workshops, the project will map the complex systems of plastic production, consumption, and governance, and explore inclusive pathways for treaty design. This initiative advances the mission of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures by fostering international cooperation, empathy, and mutual understanding through the integration of science, policy, and society in addressing one of today’s most urgent global challenges.

Project Leads: Mai’a Cross and Ryan Morhard

The Space and Biotech Policy Ideas Lab is an interdisciplinary hub advancing the early development of the space-biotechnology ecosystem, where both governments and industry are beginning to explore transformative applications. As part of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures, the Lab advances the Center’s mission by fostering international cooperation, mutual understanding, and policy-oriented analysis around technologies that are rapidly becoming globally significant. We convene experts in biotechnology, astrobiology, AI, space science, economics, and governance to explore how breakthroughs in bio-manufacturing, synthetic biology, and applied astrobiology will accelerate the growth of the space economy and reshape international collaboration. Building on leading scholarship in applied astrobiology and space-biotech cooperation, the Lab develops actionable, accessible policy frameworks that support market development, responsible commercialization, and cross-border partnerships. Through rigorous research, timely conversations, and global public engagement, the Lab positions Northeastern University as a catalyst for shaping the policies, collaborations, and innovation pathways that will define the emerging space-biotech frontier.

Project Lead: Matthew F. Fleming

The Indo-Pacific Minilateral Cooperation Global Ideas Lab at Northeastern University’s Center for International Affairs and World Cultures examines how minilateral cooperation is shaping the global and regional orders. Minilateralism refers to the establishment of smaller partnerships among a limited number of nations, often targeting specific regional or security issues. These arrangements offer more flexible means to align priorities, strategies, and capabilities, while also helping to prevent or manage tensions when bilateral relations are strained. They provide alternative avenues for engagement based on shared interests and values, outside traditional one-on-one diplomacy and larger multilateral forums. Focusing on key minilaterals such as U.S.-ROK-Japan, the QUAD, AUKUS, the U.S.–Japan–Philippines, U.S.-Japan-Australia, Partners in the Blue Pacific, and increased engagement with Southeast Asian and European Indo-Pacific partners, this working group explores how these structures support cooperation efforts in economic security, critical and emerging technologies, freedom of navigation and maritime governance, and people-to-people initiatives. Importantly, this group examines a fundamental puzzle at the heart of minilateral cooperation: how to balance the benefits of flexibility and targeted collaboration with the need to establish sufficient consistency and institutionalization to sustain meaningful contributions to a Free and Open Indo-Pacific over time. In doing so, this group aims to better define the roles, limitations, and potential of regional and global orders increasingly shaped by minilateral cooperation.

Proposer: Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

The current war in Ukraine, the scale of Eastern Orthodoxy’s engagement in geopolitics, and the rise of the Orthodox far right in the United States all raise critical questions about the politics of religious values, just war theories, political claims to religious sites of heritage, and the secular state in relationship to religious institutions, as well as global concerns about human rights and rising moral authoritarianism. Global Orthodoxy and International Politics @ Northeastern fosters a collaborative, cross-disciplinary conversation among faculty in the greater Boston area whose expertise is centered on Orthodox Christianity, geopolitics, Church-State relations, and adjacent interests to engage questions and projects attending to (but not limited to) the Russian-Ukraine War, Orthodox Colonialism and Africa, Orthodoxy and the Global South, and Orthodoxy and the Far Right. Networked faculty members will work together to develop panels for conferences and special journal volumes dedicated to topical interests. To foster interdisciplinary conversations, the lab will generate opportunities for discussion by co-sponsoring, with departments and centers at Northeastern, two visiting lectures by leading experts on Global Orthodoxy and Politics during the Fall of 2024. We also anticipate hosting these scholars in smaller workshop settings with faculty and graduate students from New England who are focused on global religious networks of Orthodoxy and their attendant political movements.  Funding from the Global Ideas Lab will support invited scholars who are at the forefront of these questions to come to the Boston campus for a series of critical and generative conversations.

Proposer: Dr. Gavin Shatkin

Global Urban Asia @ Northeastern seeks funds to build collaboration amongst a growing cluster of faculty whose expertise span East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and share interests in questions of extended urbanization, spatial inequality, and climate justice. They also belong to heavily overlapping academic circles, and this presents opportunities for the development of panels at conferences and joint submissions to journals. This proposal seeks to develop opportunities to convene this group for discussion by working with other units to co-sponsor up to two visiting lectures by prominent experts on Asian urbanism, such as Malini Ranganathan of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Marco Garrido of the University of Chicago during the Spring of 2024. We will also engage these scholars in smaller venues with the emerging cluster of faculty and graduate student Asia-focused urbanists to stimulate discussion about shared interests.

Global Urban Asia @ Northeastern seeks to convene the growing number of faculty and students on the Boston campus studying urban issues in Asia for a series of conversations on the massive transformations attending Asia’s urbanization process.  The historically unprecedented speed and scale of the region’s urbanization raises critical questions of the politics of rights, justice, claims to space, and dispossession that always attend urbanization, as well as global concerns about climate justice.  Global Ideas Lab funds will be used to invite scholars who are at the leading edge of these questions to the Boston campus for a series of critical conversations.

Proposer: Dr. Richard Wamai

A Scoping Review of the Leishmaniases in Kenya: An In-Depth Extension on Vectors and Diagnostics- On November 13, 2023, Kephera Diagnostics (Framingham, MA) and Dr. Richard Wamai submitted a proposal to NIH to develop a new diagnostic for Visceral leishmaniasis  (VL) in East Africa. VL is a neglected tropical disease present in Kenya, and is responsible for significant morbidity and mortality and thus an important influence in the country’s health landscape. The Global Ideas Lab grant will help Dr. Wamai and his team disseminate their work. We plan to share this scoping review extension through publication and a conference. After using this money to do this, we will have contributed further to the literature on leishmaniasis in Kenya. We will use our findings to inform our future research priorities and also share these with influential health leaders in Kenya including our contacts at the Ministry of Health.

The Center’s mission of enriching scholarship on fostering international cooperation, empathy, and understanding is related to this project. Cooperation is crucial to combating leishmaniasis as it often requires a myriad of perspectives from different backgrounds. The project will provide a framework for future cooperation on combating leishmaniasis in Kenya through its aims to provide a more sophisticated understanding on where the gaps in research lie. Finally, disseminating research on leishmaniasis increases the empathy surrounding the people who are ultimately infected. Neglected tropical diseases are termed “neglected” because of the lack of care for the people they affect, and are thus not talked about as widely in both academic literature and popular media. This project will increase communication on this disease and shed more light on the issue of leishmaniasis. It will open up a conversation in the global health neglected diseases space and serve as a resource for promoting intervention cooperation and design.