Her hobby is a little different. Hardesty also runs marathons — and she qualified for the recent 2020 Olympic trials.

Hardesty’s latest paper, published in the Johns Hopkins University Press, began when she noticed articles criticizing women who participated in an online trend of political selfies. Women in the photos would hold up a sign or whiteboard with phrases such as “I don’t need feminism because…” or “Why I don’t need feminism:” and Hardesty wanted to understand the reason for the photos in the first place.

Hardesty found these photos responded to a Duke University project where students were asked to complete the phrase “I need feminism because…” on a whiteboard. The photo series was shared widely online, but the photos in the “anti-feminist” category ultimately received more attention.

Political selfies in the digital age raise some unique challenges. It’s difficult to identify if the photo was staged, for instance, and sometimes it’s unclear whether the subject in the photograph is the person who is originating the statement.

“I think I can say pretty confidently, in part because of the way people react to photos, that people see pictures as being a snapshot of something that’s real,” Hardesty says.

Hardesty’s paper, titled Political Selfies and the Paradox of Giving Voice to Virtual Bodies, also addresses the idea that social media enables images to travel much further than messages can spread in person. We as individuals can publicly display our relation to wider, less specific political movements. Newer technology, including filters and photo editing apps, can also change our perception as well as our relationship with our own bodies.

“It’s interesting to consider how people can inhabit a digital mock-up of themselves,” says Hardesty, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2016. “What does it mean to be an embodied human when people are having so many more interactions not in their flesh and blood bodies?”

Yvonne Smith, now an assistant professor at Syracuse University, was a doctoral student with Hardesty. She saw her dedication to integrating her research into her daily life. “I admire Melissa’s commitment to examining how feminisms play out in everyday practices — like political selfies or foster parenting,” Smith says. “I think her research puts feminist thought to work making sense of phenomena that are central to our profession.”

While Hardesty’s academic projects can take several years, marathons move faster: 2 hours, 44 minutes and 10 seconds to be exact. Completing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in that time made her eligible to try out for the 2020 Olympics.

“I have no shot of making the Olympic team,” Hardesty said with a laugh before the trials, which were held Feb. 29 in Atlanta.

The trials were granted gold status by USA Track and Field; the top three runners from the men’s and women’s categories will go on to Tokyo in 2020.

Hardesty finished 191st out of the 390 women who completed the race, and 361st overall, out 565 runners. She finished in the top 60th percentile, with a time of 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 31 seconds — less than five minutes more than her qualifying time.

Hardesty began running in 2006 for recreational purposes, but she grew more serious about it as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. She has been competing since 2008.

She describes her best races as the ones where she begins the race feeling less than ready but reaches a peak around the 20th mile — just when others may begin to fall in their speed. Her efficient use of energy to maintain a strong pace throughout a race is an essential trait among successful marathon runners.

When the weather gets below 20 degrees, or road conditions are too icy, Hardesty trains indoors on a treadmill. She sticks to a cycle of training, resting between marathons, and then slowly working her way back to a competitive level in the weeks before a race.

If you ask Alana Gunn, an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, Hardesty has always had the dedication of an Olympian.

“She qualified for the Olympic trials one week and got an awesome paper accepted the next!” Gunn says. “That still stands out to me — her ability to support others while also exploring her own diverse talents and ambitions.”

“I looked out my window and could see all of the smoke,” he says, recalling the view from the eighth floor of his building on 22nd Street and Park Avenue. “But we weren’t sure what was going on. I remember e-mailing a friend: ‘There’s some crazy accident at the World Trade Center.’ But then we realized that something was seriously wrong.”

Community Service Society, one of the oldest nonprofit organizations in New York City, closed for the day. Campbell, then the group’s vice president for programs, made the slow trek home and watched the horror unfolding just miles away.

Two days later, Campbell returned to work and received an edict from David Jones, head of the Community Service Society: No New York organization will be relevant if it is not engaged in some way in meeting the community’s needs after 9/11.

“That idea always stayed with me,” Campbell says.  “At first, it was strange: We don’t do that kind of work. His point was that nonprofits have to respond when there is a crisis in the community. He was right.”

The Community Service Society helped new nonprofit organizations distribute millions of dollars during the years that followed. And this post-9/11 work continued to resonate with Campbell even after he became an assistant professor of public administration at Binghamton University in 2005. He is still lending a hand to future and current nonprofit organizations. Campbell has studied and written papers on the formation of disaster-response agencies, using one such organization — Windows of Hope Relief Fund — as a case study.

“I had the unique experience of being in New York on 9/11,” he says. “That experience changed my professional life in unexpected and dramatic ways.”

The collaboration

Shortly after deciding to help new nonprofit groups, Campbell and Community Service Society learned of hospitality-industry professionals who had already raised money for families of Windows on the World employees.

Windows on the World was a restaurant complex on the top floors of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. More than 160 employees and patrons were killed when the first plane hit the tower or during the ensuing collapse of the building.

Campbell and Jones met with Windows on the World owner David Emil and chef Waldy Malouf and learned how they and their co-founder, restaurant owner and chef Tom Valenti, hoped to use the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund to provide financial aid, health insurance and educational help to the families of hospitality-industry workers killed in the World Trade Center attack. The founders of the fund were especially concerned that existing assistance systems would overlook or overwhelm the late workers’ relatives, many of whom were low-income immigrants.

Windows of Hope had already held an Oct. 11, 2001, fundraiser called “Dine Out” in which restaurant owners around the world donated 10 percent of that day’s income. That event, coupled with other donations, netted Windows of Hope more than $6 million. Emil and Malouf admitted needing help using those funds.

“They said, ‘We’re chefs. We have this money and these ideas about how to give it away. But we have no knowledge of social services. We need a partner. Will you work with us?’” Campbell says.  “We had to figure out a way to distribute millions of dollars to families fairly.”

Campbell spent four years working with Windows of Hope, providing guidance to an organization that has now raised more than $22 million.

“It was very satisfying work,” Campbell says.  “I liked the people I worked with. They were really committed.”

The research

In 2005, Campbell, who had previously taught as an adjunct at Columbia University, left the nonprofit world behind so he could teach full time, and he found what he was looking for upstate.

“Binghamton valued my experience as a practitioner and the importance of working in the community,” Campbell says.  “If I had the opportunity to pursue some ideas that interested me, maybe they could shape the world of practice in an important way.”

That opportunity arose when Campbell reflected on his 9/11 work and the formation of so many nonprofit organizations. He learned that more than 250 new nonprofit groups developed after the attacks and generated nearly $700 million in the first two years of operation.

“I didn’t understand it,” he says. “Why are all of these people giving to Windows of Hope? Why do people need to start new organizations? Here was my organization, which had been providing assistance to New Yorkers in need since 1843. Why didn’t David or Waldy come first to Community Service Society or to an existing organization that had a track record? That piqued my interest for the research agenda.”

Campbell’s examination, “Stand by Me: Organization Founding in the Aftermath of Disaster,” was published by The American Review of Public Administration.

In “Stand by Me,” Campbell studies the motivations of the people who created nonprofit organizations and the roles they played after 9/11.  He read tax-exemption applications the groups submitted to the IRS and identified the “defining characteristics” of each. For example, some groups may be geographically based, while others might be affiliated with a fire company or, like Windows of Hope, a 9/11 employer.

“All of the categories represent where people’s passions lie in making a difference in the community,” he says.

But some organizations lacked direction. Campbell pointed to an application from two people in the Midwest who planned to start a nonprofit that would provide foster care for orphans.

“They had no connection to New York City,” he says. “They had no funding source. I think people have a lot of positive energy and they are not sure where to direct it.”

Campbell found that most of the new post-9/11 organizations ceased operation within two years. Once the money was raised, the group disbanded. Those that continued likely had strong ties to the families of victims.

Campbell’s second research project, “Organic and Sustainable: The Emergence, Formalization and Performance of a September 11th Disaster Relief Organization,” examined one such group: Windows of Hope. The case study was published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership last year.

The study was a logical extension of the research; it also gave Campbell an opportunity to reflect on the factors that contributed to the group’s success.

“There was a shared sense of identity among this group of hospitality-industry workers,” he says. “We have to take care of our own: That’s what brought them together. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t been able to bring in resources. If you look at the hospitality industry, it has resources and knows how to leverage them.”

Windows of Hope leaders also understood the need for collaboration and knew when to ask for help, Campbell says. “Their willingness to acknowledge what they did not know and to use Community Service Society allowed them to be responsive quickly,” he says.

The lessons

Campbell’s unique research has drawn praise from nonprofit leaders.

“He builds on his practical experience in the sector and his considerable knowledge of theoretical and managerial issues,” says Susan Chambré, a professor of sociology at Baruch College who has written about nonprofit groups formed in response to the AIDS epidemic. “His study of new organizations responding to 9/11 is the only study I know about that looked at the creation of a new set of nonprofits in response to that event.”

Both “Stand by Me” and “Organic and Sustainable” offer lessons to post-disaster organization founders and advisors, Campbell says. The projects, in particular, can help a new organization get off — or even stay on — the ground by providing some key questions to address.

“What is the life cycle of an organization founded in response to a disaster?” Campbell says. “Are you looking to go out of business after a year, which is fine but unusual? What is it you are trying to accomplish?”

Perhaps most important, Campbell would like to see closer coordination between new groups and the nonprofit infrastructure. The IRS can help make that happen when nonprofit applications are approved, Campbell says, and produce more success stories.

“These organizations need a connection to the existing service-delivery infrastructure,”  he says.  “I want to make sure these people talk to each other.”

Pamela Mischen’s research demonstrates that one program may have failed because the right people weren’t talking.

Traditional scholars of public policy trying to figure out what went wrong with a program might study the legislation behind it, or its funding. But researchers largely have ignored the dynamics inside the agencies that carry out policy, said Mischen, associate professor of public administration at Binghamton University.

That’s a mistake, she said. “Those turn out to be the most important things.”

To understand why policies fail or succeed, it’s essential to learn how people form networks within an organization, or among groups that collaborate, Mischen said. The tools she uses to explore those communication pathways come from complexity theory, a discipline that public-policy scientists haven’t called upon in the past. Mischen looks at service agencies in the same way that other scholars look at ant colonies, hurricanes or human cells.

Complexity theory examines complex systems — networks of interconnected agents that depend on one another. The agents might be ants, meteorological events or proteins. “In an organizational network, those agents are individuals,” Mischen said. In a coalition, they’re organizations. Members of a public-service network perform different tasks toward a common goal, and the work of each member affects the work of all the others.

Also, agents in a complex system share feedback that helps to shape future activity. When a school nurse notices that fewer second-graders are getting sick after their teachers launch a “wash your hands” campaign, she might urge the principal to expand that program to other grades.

Negative feedback discourages change; positive feedback spurs successful innovation, Mischen said. “Somebody is saying, ‘That really worked. I’m going to make the conditions such that you can continue to do that.’”

To learn how a new organization forms network pathways, Mischen worked with two Binghamton colleagues, Kristina Lambright, assistant professor of public administration, and Craig Laramee, assistant professor of bioengineering.

In 2007, they gave a social networking survey to 37 case workers who gathered in Binghamton for a program on self-injury among adolescents. The researchers chose this group in part because they expected that the case workers, who came from throughout Broome County, N.Y., might one day form a coalition.

The survey focused on trust and information flow. Asking each subject about his or her relationship with every other person at the meeting, it tried to determine who trusted whom and why. It also asked whom the subjects turned to for information about their work.

One surprise was that trust didn’t define how the case workers formed information networks. “We started with the assumption that the people they trust would be some of the most important people they would go to for information,” Mischen said.

Instead, the study found that people seek information from: a) the people they communicate with most, regardless of whether they trust them; b) people who have given them information before; and c) people they consider experts, leaders or the most active members of the network, assuming they have access to those people. Trust plays a role only in whether one person considers another an expert.

Among other things, the study suggests that people in an organization seek information from the same sources again and again. “Over time, we build information pathways within networks that are independent of perceived expertise,” Mischen said. “They’re probably there because they’re convenient. That doesn’t bode well for good information sharing.”

The easiest sources of information aren’t necessarily the best ones, and they don’t offer fresh insights. “This is an explanation for why a group of people may not produce good decisions. Information tends to get recycled,” Mischen said.

Mischen’s research helps her advise local organizations in her work as director of Binghamton University’s Center for Applied Community Research and Development. For instance, she is helping the Broome County Youth Bureau transform itself into a network-administering organization. In that capacity, rather than simply redistribute state funds to local organizations, the Youth Bureau will coordinate the work of local agencies and not-for-profits that serve young people.

To help promote better collaboration, the Youth Bureau is conducting a social network analysis of local agencies. “We want to know how networks are communicating,” said Beth Roberts, the Youth Bureau’s executive director. “Once we know that, we can see where the potential challenges, gaps and barriers are.” It’s important to know, for example, whether employees at all the agencies know about the full range of youth recreation programs available in the county, so they can refer young people to the programs that will serve them best.

“Pam’s work in the center has really influenced how the Youth Bureau looks at its mission, and how we are implementing programs in the community,” Roberts said. “We’re looking at things through a different lens.”