The Young Initiative supports students interested in global politics and economics by funding student research, internships, and conference travel connected to the global political economy.
The Initiative provides grants for research projects and programs developed by students under faculty supervision in addition to a robust schedule of special events and programming. The Young Initiative鈥檚 mission is to participate in envisioning alternatives to the status quo in the Global Political Economy (GPE). To that end, we have a vision of GPE as an interdisciplinary academic enterprise that takes as its focus both structures of exclusion and possibilities of political-economic transformation that are systematically overlooked in traditional academic approaches.
We are advancing our mission by:
- Connecting the Young Initiative to Occidental students and faculty. This includes supporting impactful global research and stimulating campus intellectual conversation in order to give space for all members of our community to contribute to re-imagining our political-economic status quo.
- Expanding our connections to Los Angeles. This is part of the Young Initiative鈥檚 commitment to showing how sub-state actors might improve local policies by engaging with international norms and academic partners.
- Linking our theoretical/practical work to global academic and policy conversations across disciplines, across theoretical-policy divides, and across geographical spaces. A more expansively constituted GPE can more imaginatively approach global/local crises in governance around the world.
Young Initiative programming includes hosting speaking events and workshops on campus and in the community, hosting the Young Podcast, and supporting student and faculty research.
