The Mississippi Semester is a semester-long course at Barnard College under the direction of Professor of History Premilla Nadasen. The course welcomes eight students to travel to Mississippi and study child care, welfare, and resistance work through a historical lens.
As a class, we work in partnership with the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and Barnard’s Empirical Reasoning Center to develop quantitative and qualitative reports MLICCI can use to pursue child care policy reform in Mississippi. In the first cycle of the course (spring of 2018), the class developed an index detailing the economic wellbeing of women across the state of Mississippi. You can read more about their findings on the Report page. This year, our class has expanded on this work by producing a qualitative report that will help inform the quantitative indices, as well as highlight personal stories and anecdotes of the women we encountered in Mississippi. We are producing a short film about the 2019 trip to Mississippi, highlighting student voices and the individuals we met there
In the process, we will be sharing updates on this website as we travel to Mississippi and develop empirical and analytical research reports. Written entries detailing our experiences and research can be found in our “Blog Post” section. Photos from the semester can be found in our photo section. This website will eventually include our completed index as well as our final reports.
To learn more about individual members, please visit our class page. Information on the 2018 cohort members can be found here. To read an article about the 2018 class trip to Mississippi, visit Barnard’s website.
Mississippi Semester 