In collaboration with Professor Mark Juergensmeyer, the Reclaim Initiative designed an advanced seminar that brought together university students looking at general, theoretical development issues with field researchers and journalists who were immersed, physically and mentally, in the particular context of Sri Lanka. Through this partnership, undergraduates were linked to applied research being conducted with the aim to help real people.

By being in constant communication with researchers on the ground in Sri Lanka, students gained exposure to current events and problems that had not had time to make it into academic journals, and that often weren't reported by the media

Thirteen hand-picked students met for bi-weekly seminars during the 2005 spring quarter where they discussed articles from the course reader and their own individual research projects. According to their academic specialties, they were each assigned to specific topic areas for their own research and paired with field workers pursuing parallel questions.

"Working in tsunami-affected areas, I sometimes had no access to electronic communications for days at a time," says Paul Lynch, researcher and documentary filmmaker, "but whenever I found access to the internet, the work that the UC team had been doing would be waiting.   I could be confident that while I was immersed in the lives of people in the disaster area, our partners at the University were keeping track of policy developments and current events, and researching the questions we decided were important to our current project."