Application open to artists, writers, scholars, journalists, activists, workers, organizers, performers and any other person with a compelling idea for social change. No minimum educational requirement, no minimum years of experience.

We are pleased to announce the Assembling Voices Resident Fellows program at The American Assembly at Columbia University. Fellowships are open to all. Applications are due May 15, 2021. Fellows receive $25,000 to design initiatives that bring people together, promote trust and dialogue, and facilitate public engagement with the problems we face, the opportunities we have, and the institutions that shape our lives.

We are seeking proposals from any person who has an idea to develop public programming that addresses pressing social justice and human rights issues, especially those relevant to Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other historically marginalized groups. Proposed initiatives need to bring people together and give renewed attention to the diversity of expertise that exist outside academic institutions. Initiatives should pioneer creative ways to enhance social life and dialogue through public events. We are especially interested in ideas that use engaging and creative techniques to bring people together. 

In the broadest sense, Assembling Voices intends to break down walls that exclude people from institutions and knowledge production. The knowledge, dialogue and relationships that are fostered through each proposed public initiative will ideally have a lifespan beyond a single event series or multimedia presentation. We expect that Assembling Voices—our fellows and their initiatives—will amplify and engage with the talents, abilities, aspirations, hopes, and needs of the communities that comprise our democracy.

Assembling Voices Resident Fellows will have the creative freedom to conceive and execute public programming as they envision, especially addressing communities and topics that require more attention from and dialogue with academic institutions. Fellows will develop their initiatives alongside Assembly leadership and staff, who will provide support from the initial phases of project conceptualization through the initiative’s public launch.

This program is for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, activists, organizers, performers and for any other person with a compelling idea. We encourage people of all generations and nationalities to apply. Collectives will be considered. Participation has no minimum educational requirement, nor do we require a minimum number of years of experience. If you have questions about eligibility based on your visa or immigration status, please contact Michael Falco (mf2727@columbia.edu).

What are the sources of skepticism about climate change and/or mistrust of climate science? What processes, mechanisms and dynamics are implicated in provoking and prolonging the debate about climate change? To what extent are these specific to the climate debate, and to what extent they are representative of a broader mistrust in experts? What can be done to increase trust in climate science or consensus around appropriate measures or interventions?

We will explore these questions and more with an esteemed panel of social scientists including Paul Edwards, Myanna Lahsen and Peter Weingart. Moderated by Gil Eyal. More information about the panelists is available here.

For those interested in exploring this topic more, a primer featuring concise, accessible and compelling articles from mainstream media outlets is available here.

Join Andy Revkin and guests for an exploration of “Spaceship Earth” – a documentary chronicling the strange and newly-relevant back story of the team of obsessive counterculture entrepreneurs, visionaries and scientists who built and occupied Biosphere 2 – a glass-encased experiment in sustainability in the Arizona desert.

The story resonates afresh as billionaires chart paths to extraterrestrial settlement and strains on the global environment elicit new calls for humans to design an economy that doesn’t overwhelm ecology.

Drawing on more than 700 hours of archival footage, the film’s director, Matt Wolf, has crafted a memorable portrait of an array of characters melding utopian ideals and cultish magnetism in pursuit of a singular dream.

This Earth Institute Sustain What episode is co-sponsored by the Oral History Archives at Columbia, the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory & Empirics (INCITE).

The film, distributed by Neon, was featured at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival just before the pandemic. It is currently streaming on the online video service Hulu. https://neonrated.com/films/spaceship-earth

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Guests:

Matt Wolf | “Spaceship Earth” is the fourth feature-length documentary by Wolf, whose previous works range from “Teenage,” an exploration of how the concept of adolescence only emerged in the 20th century to a portrait of Marion Stokes, a woman who obsessively recorded 70,000 cassette loads of television that would otherwise have been erased from history. http://mattwolf.info/

Arminda Downey-Mavromatis came to know the Biosphere through her work as a writer and deputy editor at The Eye, the magazine of the Columbia Daily Spectator. She graduated with a degree in biochemistry from Barnard College in 2020 and is currently an assistant editor at Chemical & Engineering News. Read her feature story on Columbia University’s tenure managing the faltering desert project in The Eye magazine: http://j.mp/biosphere2story

Benjamin Eckersley is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting and Film Directing at Columbia University School of the Arts. Many of his short and feature film projects relate to the intersection of climate change and ecology.

Andrew Golden is a filmmaker, writer, and journalist pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Screenwriting and Film Directing at Columbia University School of the Arts. Golden has previously worked as a video journalist for Scientific American. https://www.goldenandrew.com/info

Kimberly Springer is Curator for the Oral History Archives at Columbia. Her research, teaching and publishing areas are social movement, cultural studies, born-digital materials, and social media as they intersect with race, gender, and sexuality. Kimberly’s publications include Living for the Revolution, Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Stories of Oprah: the Oprahfication of American Culture (University of Mississippi Press, 2010). She describes her work here: https://vimeo.com/303308306

It is with regret that the Columbia Center for Oral History and INCITE announce we will not hold next year’s Oral History Summer Institute, which we traditionally host on a biennial basis. With the lingering uncertainty of the pandemic, and the strong possibility that we would not be able to convene in person, we feel we would lose too much of the informal interaction and interpersonal connection among peers and faculty that is so important to the institute.

We strongly encourage those who may have been interested in the institute to stay engaged with our programming and look out for the many other workshops and events we will host remotely throughout the year!

by Alix S. Winter, Christine Fountain, Keely Cheslack-Postava, and Peter S. Bearman

Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics, Columbia University
Department of Sociology & Anthropology. Fordham University at Lincoln Center
New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University

Rates of autism diagnosis in the United States have increased dramatically over the past few decades. Historically, rates of diagnosis have been highest among more advantaged social groups – people who are White and of higher socioeconomic status (SES). Newly published research by Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics’ Understanding Autism project shows that rates of autism diagnosis continued to rise through 2018. But the demographics of who was diagnosed changed during the study period.

The authors show that California’s diagnosed autism incidence rate rose from 0.49 per 1,000 3 to 6 year olds in 1998 to 3.49 per 1,000 3 to 6 year olds in 2018—a 612% increase. What was most striking, though, was that, by 2018, long established patterns of autism diagnosis by sociodemographic characteristics had reversed.

In the second half of the study period, for instance, children of Black and Asian mothers were diagnosed with autism at higher rates than children of non-Hispanic White mothers. Indeed, between 1998 and 2018, diagnosed autism incidence rates rose 633% among children of Black mothers, but only 350% among children of non-Hispanic White mothers. Additionally, among children of non-Hispanic White and Asian mothers, children of lower SES mothers were diagnosed at higher rates than children of higher SES mothers. While diagnosed autism incidence rates rose 283% among children of higher SES, non-Hispanic White mothers between 1998 and 2018, autism incidence rates rose 875% among children of lower SES, non-Hispanic White mothers over the same period.

Peter Bearman, co-Principal Investigator on the project, said, “These results suggest that, over the past decade, there has been improved access to diagnosis and services for parents and families with fewer resources.”

Christine Fountain, also co-Principal Investigator on the project, commented, “The unexpected reversal of the socioeconomic gradient for autism, even as diagnoses continued to rise, reveals how important it is to examine how race and economic status shape health and diagnostic patterns over time.”

To conduct the analysis, the authors drew on the birth records of all children born in the state of California from 1992 through 2016 and linked those with autism caseload records from January 1992 through November 2019 from California’s Department of Developmental Services.

Read more in: Winter, Alix S., Christine Fountain, Keely Cheslack-Postava, Peter S. Bearman. 2020. “The social patterning of autism diagnoses reversed in California between 1992 and 2018.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2015762117.

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/11/10/2015762117

What is the reception and impact of a COVID-19 vaccine likely to be like? Is the fate of the vaccine already sealed by the public and political tug-of-war over its rapid approval? Are we likely to see the same fault-lines as with the MMR vaccine, or would a COVID-19 vaccine have the potential to change the debate about vaccination? How will the recent U.S. election change the dynamics of how the vaccine is received?

More generally, under what conditions do people tend to trust vaccines? What has worked in the past when it comes to vaccination campaigns, and could potentially work in the future? Does it help to frame the matter not as individual decision but in relation to one’s network of family and friends? What are, conversely, the sources of resistance to vaccines or of vaccine hesitancy? How should a vaccination campaign be framed and organized?

We explore these questions and more with an esteemed panel of practitioners, communication specialists and social scientists including Amanda Cohn (CDC), Rupali Limaye (Johns Hopkins), James Colgrove (Columbia), Jane Zucker (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene) and Jennifer Reich (University of Colorado).

The pandemic has brought into focus the fraying of relations between experts, policy-makers and relevant publics in liberal democracies. How should social researchers analyze the factors and processes that contribute to this fraying? What insights can be gleaned from comparative analysis, either of liberal democracies, or across the liberal-authoritarian divide? What have we learned about the determinants and nature of trust that can shed light and perhaps guide interventions in the current moment? What are the specific vulnerabilities of different forms of organizing the relations between experts, policy-makers and the public, and how can they be addressed?

We explored these questions and more with an esteemed panel of sociologists specializing in science, knowledge, medicine, public health and expertise including Rogers Brubaker, Stephen Hilgartner, Zeynep Tufekci and Andrew Lakoff. Moderated by Gil Eyal.

More information on the panelists and moderator is available here: http://sawyerseminar.americanassembly...

To help better acquaint people with the core issues at stake, we’ve prepared a short primer, with concise and compelling readings drawn from mainstream media outlets, available here: http://sawyerseminar.americanassembly...

This webinar discussion took place on Wednesday, September 30th, as part of the Challenges and Opportunities in 2020 Election Series.

Panelists

SHERRY GLIED is Dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. From 1989 to 2013, she was professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She also served as assistant secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is the author of Chronic Condition, coauthor of Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the U.S. Since 1950, and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics.

MICHAEL NUTTER was the 98th Mayor of the City of Philadelphia after serving almost 15 years in the Philadelphia City Council. He is a past President of the United States Conference of Mayors. Since leaving public service, Mayor Nutter has remained active in public policy, government, and civic life. He is also the David N. Dinkins Professor of Professional Practice in Urban and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.

DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN is a Democratic campaign consultant and founding partner and principle strategist for Penn, Schoen & Berland. He is the author of multiple books, including The Power of the Vote: Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators, and Promoting Democracy Around the World and Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System.

Moderator

ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO is President of the Academy of Political Science and Editor of Political Science Quarterly. He is also the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

How should modelers communicate the uncertainty inherent in their models without undermining trust? What does it mean to trust a probabilistic forecast? Do models incorporating assumptions about public behavior need to be understood and trusted by the public being modeled? Should modelers try to influence the public and decision-makers or should we be worried that such attempts might backfire and lead to loss of trust? We explored these questions and many more with the help of an esteemed panel of epidemiologists and public health experts. A concise and accessible primer on some of the core tensions around models, policymaking and public sentiment is available here.

Credit: Financial Times

Lilah Raptopoulos of Financial Times Magazine wrote a wonderful piece about INCITE’s NYC Covid-19, Narrative and Memory Project, and what it feels like to be living through history.

Read it here: How will history remember 2020?

This webinar discussion took place on Wednesday, April 29th, as part of the Challenges and Opportunities in 2020 Election Series. In addition to reflecting on the centennial of women's suffrage, panelists discussed women's political leadership, participation, and rights.

Panelists

LIZ ABZUG is the Founder and President of the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, which works to inspire, train, and mentor young women to become leaders in creating positive social and economic change. As a national public affairs and strategic consultant, professor, lobbyist, and candidate for New York City elective office, Ms. Abzug has been a professional involved in many fields including politics, economic and urban development, and human rights. She is daughter of the late Bella Abzug, first Jewish Congresswoman and women’s rights advocate.

GALE A. BREWER is the 27th Borough President of Manhattan. Brewer previously served on the City Council for 12 years. Prior to that, she served as Chief of Staff to Council Member Ruth Messinger, NYC Deputy Public Advocate, Director of the city’s Federal Office, and Executive Director of the Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women. She also served on the staff of Lt. Governor Mary Anne Krupsak, the first women elected statewide in New York in 1974 (under Gov. Hugh Carey) and first served in government in the City Parks Department during the Lindsay administration.

COLINE JENKINS is a municipal legislator, author, and television producer.  She is co-founder and president of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust, a collection of 3,000 objects of women’s suffrage memorabilia. She serves as Vice President of Monumental Women, a non-profit dedicated to erecting the first Central Park statue of real women—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth—in recognition of the centennial of the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. She is great-great granddaughter of American Suffragist and abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

JULIE SUK is dean for master’s programs and professor of Sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a scholar of comparative law and society, with a focus on women in comparative constitutional law. She is most known for her recent work on renewed efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, in light of the theory and practice of gender equality provisions in constitutions around the world. Her dozens of articles and book chapters address the potential and limits of antidiscrimination law as a tool for eradicating social inequality.

Moderator

KATHRYN B. YATRAKIS is Faculty Advisor at Columbia University, Office of the President. She is also adjunct associate professor in urban studies and retired Dean of Academic Affairs, Columbia College.  She serves on the Board of Directors of the Academy of Political Science.

SECOND AVENUE IN MANHATTAN - BRYAN DERBALLA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES - MARCH 30, 2020, “NEW YORK WAS NOT DESIGNED FOR EMPTINESS”

The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest public health crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918. It will not be the last. While disaster research is often retrospective by necessity, providing accounts of past actions and ongoing recoveries, COVID-19 presents an opportunity for social research in the middle of an unfolding crisis. This can give us new insight into risk perception and sensemaking under duress, community and organizational resilience, transformations in social structure, and real time adaptations to severe economic and social disruption. To that effect, we are pleased to announce INCITE has received a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation to capture and archive the evolving, multi-dimensional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on New York City.

The RAPID grant allows us to continue the work we began weeks ago: collecting surveys, interviews, and written testimonials to create a contemporaneous record of the city’s battle with COVID-19 across the epidemic curve. New York is a critical site for understanding the course of this pandemic because it was an early epicenter of the disease in the U.S., because it has a robust municipal emergency management system with deep experience of past disasters health-related and otherwise, and because it is home to one of the nation’s strongest urban healthcare systems. We must rigorously document this emergency to better understand how it is unfolding, to better inform the recovery, and to learn lessons that will aid our fight against the next pandemic. This project does exactly that, by capturing a diversity of perspectives over the course of the pandemic, from its early stages to the time when it inevitably recedes.

If you are interested in contributing to the archive or have questions, please email covid19archive@gmail.com.

A workshop led by Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Center for Oral History Research at Columbia University, on how to plan and conduct oral histories in communities affected by disasters and pandemics. Mary Marshall shared guidance on how to conduct life history interviews in the contexts of crises and disasters, including how interviewers can shield themselves from an overload of trauma, and how they can construct safe environments for narrators to tell their stories. The goal of this workshop is to provide oral historians with resources that have been proven in the field, and useful in a variety of contexts.

CCOHR Director Mary Marshall Clark leads a workshop on how to plan and conduct oral histories in communities affected by disasters and pandemics. Mary Marshall shared guidance on how to conduct life history interviews in the contexts of crises and disasters, including how interviewers can shield themselves from an overload of trauma, and how they can construct safe environments for narrators to tell their stories. The goal of this workshop is to provide oral historians with resources that have been proven in the field, and useful in a variety of contexts.

The workshop took place online through Zoom on Thursday, April 16th.

ARTWORK: JAHMEL REYNOLDS

We Be Imagining is a 10-part multimodal series of public programming that infuses academic discourse with the performance arts in order to foster critical conversations around race, gender, class, disability, and technology. In partnership with community-based organizations in New York City, the series represents an effort to co-create a more inclusive knowledge ecosystem—to expand the parameters of what it means to assemble and of who ought to be heard. Fostering trust in democratic society requires repairing relationships with historically excluded communities and integrating multiple ways of knowing into the reimagining of our institutions.

The series is directed by researcher and curator J. Khadijah Abdurahman, with collaboration and support from The American Assembly and INCITE.

A launch party for the series, in collaboration with the Art Start Portrait Project, will be held on Saturday, February 22nd from 6:30-9:30 p.m. All are welcome!

Dr. Bilesha Weeraratne has published a new paper in Migration Studies based on her research for one of INCITE’s REALM projects. The study looks at how the conduct of informal intermediaries between labor migrants and formal recruitment agents affects what migrants are ultimately promised in terms of wages and incentives. Its findings suggest that better informing potential migrants about the role, formal status, and implications of the involvement of these intermediaries would lead to better wage and incentive negotiations. This approach would contribute toward facilitating orderly, safe, regular, and responsible recruitment for labor migration envisioned by Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration.

Read the abstract here.