Robert J. Chaskin

Robert J. Chaskin is the McCormick Foundation Professor and Deputy Dean for Strategic Initiatives and holds the UNESCO Chair for Inclusive Urbanism at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. He leads the school’s international efforts. Professor Chaskin, along with colleagues at the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), designed an exchange program that serves as a platform for students from both schools to learn from one another. The program focuses on the challenges of urbanization and migration and now also includes students and faculty from Peking University as part of the recently launched Tripartite Collaboration for Advancing Social Work in China. Professor Chaskin has also organized, with colleagues at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai, a program entitled “Poverty, Marginalization, and Challenges to Community Practice in India.” Now in its ninth year, the program combines classwork, seminar discussions, and fieldwork in Mumbai, and includes a reciprocal exchange for students from TISS to study in Chicago. Professor Chaskin's work focuses on the conceptual foundations and principal strategies of contemporary community intervention in the context of urban poverty. In addition to his US-based research, he is conducting a study, with colleagues at TISS, on slum clearance and social housing policy in Mumbai and embarking on work focused on urbanization and migration in China with colleagues at SSA, PolyU, and Peking University. He was recently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where he conducted a study of the civic and political participation of marginalized young people in London, Dublin, and Belfast.