“My goal is to encourage students to think about stories they already know, things that are personal and close to them, in new ways,” says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, professor of politics and African American studies. “I want to disrupt their assumptions about the causes of events and their meanings, and show how events they think they already understand have ties to other parts of life.”

It's an approach she uses in her seminar “Disaster, Race and American Politics.” In the course, Harris-Lacewell guides students as they ask questions about how race, economics and politics contributed to the nation’s response to Hurricane Katrina. The course exemplifies precisely what political scientists are trained to do: analyze data and use that information to explain what a particular experience means. “There's something very powerful about bringing the scientific method to bear on human behavior,” she says.

For Harris-Lacewell the search for meaning doesn't start with dry, detached analysis. Scholarly work, regardless of the discipline, originates in an intensely personal place. “All intellectuals have a personal connection to their work. You're always writing about yourself,” she explains.

It's within conversations, experiences and relationships, she says, that intellectuals begin to ask questions about the way the world works. For example, it was in her own shocked response to the Katrina disaster, and in her desire to do something to help, that she began to think about what the nation could learn from the event. Similarly, her conversations with friends and family were the starting point for questions about the myth of the “strong black woman,” which she investigates in her latest study, "For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Was Not Enough."

Harris-Lacewell recognizes the personal angle as only the starting point. “Experience is a great place to develop your hypothesis,” she explains. “It's a terrible place to gather data. You must be way beyond personal experience when you start looking for evidence.”

Still, she cherishes the connection between passionate engagement and intellectual curiosity, and is happy to see it thriving at Princeton. “My students tend to see class as a jumping-off point for things they want to do outside in the world,” she says. “They take what they learn and they go out and do remarkable things with the information. They organize conferences, create blogs and take intersession trips.”

It is a kind of fearless engagement Harris-Lacewell enjoys seeing in her students and loves to encourage. “There's only one piece of advice I give students: ‘Make mistakes,’” she says. “Very bright students can sometimes be timid. The only way to find out who you are and what you're made of is to risk failure. So go forth and make a mess.”