Professor Cinzia Pica Appointed Visiting Scholar at Harvard University
Starting January 1, 2025, Cinzia Pica, Professor of Human Services, will be working as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Immigration Initiative and Graduate School of Education during her sabbatical for the spring semester.
“One fourth of the children in our schools, in our human services agencies, and in our communities are immigrant origin children,” Pica said. “The IIH supports a number of initiatives and research projects that I’m interested in – belonging and school culture, and how schools affirm and create environments where immigrant origin students may thrive. My research intersects with the aims and goals of the institute.”
Pica will be working with Alessandro Bergamaschi, Professor of Sociology at Université de Lorraine (the University of Lorraine), to complete their upcoming edited book titled Intergroup Contact, Friendships and Prejudice Reduction in Multiethnic Schools and Communities: Psychological, Sociological and Pedagogical Research and Theory.
Their work, which is informed in Intergroup Contact Theory and Intergroup Friendship Theory, focuses on both positive and negative intergroup contact, or interactions between people from different social groups, in European contexts, analyzing the impacts that these interactions and group dynamics have on students.
“Most intergroup friendship research has been, certainly in the last 50 years, conducted by psychologists – mostly social psychologists,” Pica said. “However, the origins of intergroup contact are grounded in sociological research.”
Pica explained that psychological studies of intergroup friendship typically examine intergroup contact without considering the ecological context, including environment, policies, and cultural norms in the places where the contact is occurring.
“Alessandro and I come from different academic backgrounds and have worked well together for several years. Both of us have always worked across disciplines and appreciate how much we learn by doing so. We have been in conversation about intergroup contact and intergroup friendship literature, and we thought, ‘what’s really missing?’” she said. “Why don’t we do a project that brings psychology and sociology in conversation with each other? Why don’t we invite psychologists and sociologists of education to really think about how an increasingly diverse school context or neighborhood context creates these opportunities for contact, both positive and negative, and potentially also intergroup friendships? And let’s ask scholars to contextualize that work within their local and national landscapes.”
In addition to this work, Pica will be an active member of the scholarship community at Harvard, working with other scholars focused on immigration and who are doing work similar to her research with Bergamaschi. The two are currently planning several lectures in both the United States and Europe for the Spring 2025.
“It’s really exciting to be in conversation with people who are researching, writing, and informing my field, people who are so committed to doing work that impacts students, children, families, communities, neighborhoods,” Pica said. “I think the work of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard has always been salient. It is work that impacts policy. At this sociopolitical moment I’m honored to be there, to be thinking with people about how to create infrastructure to support some of our most vulnerable students.”