We are proud to share that Amy Starecheski, Director of our Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA), has been awarded a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.

Each year, this award recognizes the excellence of faculty as teachers and mentors of both undergraduate and graduate students inside and outside of the classroom. This award is an opportunity for the broader Columbia community to recognize Amy as we do—a talented teacher, mentor, and beacon in our community.

You may know Amy from one of her many transformative leadership roles in oral history, including Director of OHMA since 2019 and President of the Oral History Association (OHA) from 2021-2022.

As a leader, Amy has pushed oral history toward social justice, critical inquiry, and action against structural inequality. For example, Amy served as Co-Principal Investigator of an NEH grant to the OHA that aimed to provide fellowships to oral historians from historically marginalized communities and to fund research into the history and structure of the field. Between her organizational leadership, thought leadership, and practice, Amy is deeply respected for her contributions.

Despite her stature in the field, Amy is known to her students as an incredibly generous, dedicated, and inspiring mentor. Her intentionality shines through everything she does as a teacher—from her thoughtful syllabus design, to her creation of a classroom environment that is at once challenging and supportive, to the remarkably thoughtful feedback she provides to each student. Owing to her skill, Amy is regularly asked to teach in settings beyond OHMA.

Amy wears many hats at OHMA, including teaching the program’s fieldwork class, leading the internship program, developing orientation programming, and leading the thesis process. Remarkably, she also personally advises several theses per year. On top of that, Amy serves as the academic advisor for all OHMA students and career advisor for all alumni. Students and alumni find a champion in Amy, who takes care to understand their goals, furthers their growth, and connects them with opportunities.

If you have not had the pleasure of being taught by Amy, we recommend you check out the OHMA events calendar. Under Amy’s leadership, OHMA has developed a robust public programming series that attracts hundreds of attendees per year. Speakers include practitioners, activists, artists, alumni and others from the community Amy has cultivated (and on particularly lucky days, Amy herself).

We congratulate Amy on this well-deserved recognition and thank her for her commitment and inspiration.

Assembling Voices Fellows attend an archiving workshop with Shannon O'Neill, Curator for NYU’s Tamiment-Wagner Collections.

In November 2022, we introduced you to our latest cohort of Assembling Voices Fellows. For refresher on the program:

Assembling Voices is a year-long Fellowship for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, performers, activists, workers, and others with compelling ideas for public initiatives that bring people together around issues of democracy and trust.

Assembling Voices is part of our ongoing effort to facilitate inventive forms of communication and collaboration between students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

To enable our Fellows’ work, we provide them with financial, administrative, and intellectual support. Last month, we invited our Fellows to our office in New York for two days of connection, collaboration, and training.

A central part of this visit was connecting our Fellows to our intellectual network. We collaborated with our Fellows to create a custom workshop schedule, which included sessions with OHMA all-stars Amy Starecheski and Nyssa Chow. We were honored to learn about successful public engagement from the Fellows over shared meals and conversations.

An integral part of this experience was connecting the Fellows to each other. Despite differences in geography, community issues, and methodological approaches, Fellows were energized by learning from each other and finding common ground in their work.

This year’s Assembling Voices cohort poses with Rebecca Feldherr, our program coordinator.

“Being able to exchange ideas on process and experience has helped me reassess and refine my approach to this work,” noted Fellow C. Dìaz. As Fellow Ricia Chansky put it, “[we] not only learned about each others’ projects, but the overlap between them… [which] allowed us to really engage with one another through a shared language of activism and integrated conceptual frameworks that strive to center community voices.”

Fellows Naomi and Mauricio saw this meeting as a jumping off point for future collaboration:

We saw great overlap and points of connection in our work, both philosophically and methodologically, and as a result are now in conversation about ways to collaborate in the long term.

By working with their communities, support at Incite, and each other, our Fellows are furthering new modes of public engagement that advance equity and democracy. We’ll keep you posted on how their work evolves. For more information on the program and our incredible cohort’s work, visit our website.

Want to get involved in Assembling Voices? Next month we’ll start our search for 2023-2024 Fellows by putting out a call for applications—subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to know.

Assembling Voices is also accepting new donors. If you’re interested in supporting our Fellows’ work, send us a note at assembling-voices@columbia.edu.

Marsha P. Johnson hands out flyers in support of queer NYU students.
Photo: Diana Davies / New York Public Library.

Last year we announced our partnership with Emerson Collective and Baldwin for the Arts to support acclaimed author Jacqueline Woodson’s I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of our Elders. This ambitious oral history project seeks to preserve the stories of elders who have shaped America—from Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders to survivors of Stonewall—before they’re lost to history. Though the project’s collection of narrators is diverse in geography and lived experience, each story is united by common themes of identity creation and migration.

Woodson has selected a remarkable cohort of writers to collect these stories in locales across the country. Ten writers will conduct around 30 interviews each—that’s a collection of nearly 300 interviews!

Given its complexity, managing this production is no small feat. Our very own Madeline Alexander, Project Manager, has been working diligently to make this cross-country undertaking possible. Managing all of the project’s elements—including training, budgeting, interview logistics, and transcription—Alexander has successfully brought the project well into its interview phase.

As recordings and transcripts from across the country arrive at her desk, Alexander is already witnessing the project’s potential firsthand. “I See My Light Shining is an homage to the bravery, experiences, and essence of our elders,” Alexander says. She adds:

“We seek to uplift the narrators’ voices by investigating migration throughout the United States as a geographic access point to identity creation. We plan to honor and create accessibility to life stories, because as we have found, each story is a talisman to the understanding of our own histories, identities and connections with each other.”

I See My Light Shining poses important confrontations to issues of authority and representation, which Alexander notes, are central to Incite’s mission: creating knowledge that leads to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.

The experience has also been transformative for the project’s ten writers. Project writer and Stonewall Book Award winner Carolina de Robertis reflects on their experience: "I've been blown away over and over by this work, and look forward to seeing it (and my amazing colleagues' interviews) shared with the world."

We share in Carolina’s sentiment, and look forward to updating you on the project’s progress and public rollout later this year.

Logic(s)—the first Black and Asian queer tech magazine—is set to detonate, remix, and reclaim the tech journalism genre. Logic(s) is now accepting pitches for its inaugural issue, supa dupa skies (move slow and heal things).

Logic(s) is deeply interested in pieces reflecting on a critical caste, abolitionist approach that moves beyond demands for corporate inclusion or police prosecution of hate crimes. The magazine is also looking to receive submissions thoughtfully engaging with the distinctions and connections between caste, race and nationality in the development of new technologies or grassroots campaigns refusing them.

Compensation for successful submissions begins at $1,200 for shorter essays of 1200-1600 words, and $2,000 for longer features of 2000-4000 words and up. Other media will be compensated at the same rate depending on length.

About our partnership with Logic(s)

Logic is a magazine founded in 2016 with the goal of deepening conversations about tech in journalism.

In 2023, Logic is taking an even bigger step in that direction by relaunching as Logic(s) with the help of INCITE at Columbia University. In its new form, Logic(s) will be headed by Xiaowei Wang and J. Khadijah Abdurahman and will become the world's first Black, Asian and queer tech magazine. Logic(s) will critically engage with tech in ways that—simply put—no other publication has been able to.

INCITE has committed to providing administrative and other support to the magazine over the course of three years—with the aim of making Logic(s) a sustainable venture. As INCITE’s mission is to create knowledge for public action, this partnership—which gathers critical knowledge in forms for the public—is an opportunity to meet our mission and develop models for platforming critical knowledge.

New York, New York City, August 8, 2022 –  MyVote Project, is pleased to announce a partnership with INCITE at Columbia University to engage young volunteers in leading nonpartisan community conversations. This new model of voter education builds upon MVPs mission of creating voters who are more informed and engaged at the local level. MVP was founded in 2018 by Sari Kaufman, a survivor of the Parkland, FL school shooting and now a student at Yale, David McAdams, a professor at Duke University and Gita Stulberg, a native New Yorker and experienced community organizer.

According to Gita Stulberg, Executive Director of MVP, “New York City being the most diverse and multicultural city in this country, is the clear and most consequential place for developing this community conversation model which MyVote Project has only started to build. INCITE is our natural partner bringing their expertise in promoting community dialogues and mentoring us through the process of creating this model. It is our hope to replicate this model across the country and have it eventually serve as a vehicle for informing local political platforms on the issues and/or policies that captivate voters and bring them to the polls.”

MyVote Project (MVP) began as a grassroots movement in 2018 linked to escalating gun violence in America, and evolved into a robust, nationwide movement -- largely due to the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, a flood of young volunteers discovered MVP. Overnight, the nascent project blossomed, with hundreds of students signing up to volunteer virtually.

Michael Falco, Executive Director of INCITE says, “MyVote Project first came to our attention during the 2021 NYC primaries and we have continued to watch the youth-led organization grow. When Gita brought this idea to us, it was a natural fit, aligning perfectly with our mission to facilitate innovative forms of communication and create new resources for public understanding.”

The New York Community Trust will support this partnership as it expands into NYC.

For Sari Kaufman, this partnership “is a perfect example of what MyVote Project is all about. It’s an opportunity for our volunteers, under the tutelage of experts, to engage with local communities by talking to voters and learning directly from them what they care about, and what brings them out to vote. Simply put, we want to help communicate to candidates what their constituents care about and we want voters to know who they’re electing and why.”

The first Community Conversation is scheduled to take place on Sunday, September 18th, 2022. Please check MyVoteProject.com for updates.

About INCITE

INCITE brings research to bear on public problems and creates new resources for public understanding, in order to strengthen the forms of trust and deliberation that make democracy work. By facilitating inventive forms of communication and collaboration between researchers, students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy, we seek to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

About MyVote Project

Powered by a network of nearly 300 student volunteers, MyVote Project combines old-school community outreach with digital-themed voter-engagement techniques using social media, virtual convenings, and an interactive website designed to inform, not influence, voters. MVP is countering the wave of misinformation online by serving as a credible, verified source of information taken from respected sources with no partisan, biased opinions or embellishment. MVP is cultivating and nurturing a younger generation of future voters and leaders, who will play a role in strengthening democracy.

Media Contact: media@myvoteproject.com

Will partner with INCITE under new leadership and mission, with continued focus on critical commentary on the role of tech.

In partnership with INCITE, the technology magazine Logic will re-launch in January 2023 as Logic(s), and will transfer leadership to longtime staff member Xiaowei Wang and Director of “We Be Imagining,” J. Khadijah Abdurahman. Wang and Abdurahman expect to produce three issues of the magazine annually, taking it in creative and urgent new directions.

“This will mark the beginning of the first Black and Asian queer tech magazine in existence,” said Abdurahman. “Black, Asian, and queer are not only descriptors of our individual identities but also mark the kind of theoretical and political approaches we hope to infuse the magazine with.”

Logic initially launched following the 2016 US election cycle. Since then, it has released 16 issues and published multiple books, providing a much-needed platform for critical and nuanced longform reflection on technology.

“Our aspiration when we started Logic was to deepen the conversation around technology. We wanted to intervene in a genre that, at the time, was far too deferential to the industry, and often deeply incurious about how 'tech' actually worked," said Ben Tarnoff, one of the magazine’s co-founders along with Moira Weigel. “Five years later, I'm proud to say that we've played a role in making tech criticism less foolish. But magazines inevitably need to evolve past the moment that produced them in order to remain of use. Abdurahman and Wang are the ideal people to lead Logic into its next phase by finding new ways for the magazine to serve the organizers, scholars, artists, and workers who are working to remake technology from below."

Logic(s) will retain the core commitments of the magazine’s founding while laying the groundwork to radically shift both the tech journalism genre and dominant publishing models. The recently published Beacons edition (edited by Abdurahman) was a pilot for what this transition will look like, including a commitment to an interdisciplinary mode which places poetry, visual art, and sci-fi on the same axis as the longform essay. Logic(s) will seek to elevate work that draws on the conceptual frameworks of impoverished and marginalized people; commission stories about the public sector adoption of automated decision-making systems like Medicaid eligibility determination or coordinated housing entry for child welfare; and increase the magazine’s engagement on international issues.

“We already have several stories and themes in mind to address, from Facebook’s installation of submarine cables in Djibouti, to shifts in how mail and other services are delivered by US carceral institutions, to queer organizing for mesh networks in Appalachia,” said Wang. “In the process, we will continue to deepen and broaden the invitation to fields traditionally outside of tech discourse that have a set of methods and tools to think through the social implications of digital technologies and data collections.”

Abdurahman and Wang will serve respectively as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the magazine and will be supported by an editorial or related board of advisors. INCITE has committed to providing administrative and other forms of support for the next three years, to help Logic(s) establish a stable foundation and sustainable path for the future. The project will also receive financial support from UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2I2) and the Omidyar Foundation. Prior to the transition, Khadijah and Xiaowei will work closely with the magazine’s existing staff to prepare to take on the duties of day-to-day production and distribution in the new year.

The new team will build upon the foundational infrastructure and editing that has been a labor of love by a network of people over the past six years, including Aliyah Blackmore, Alex Blasdel, Sarah Burke, Jim Fingal, Jen Kagan, Christa Hartsock, Celine Nguyen, Ben Tarnoff, Max Read, Moira Weigel, and many others.

We are excited to announce that INCITE graduate fellow Daniel Tadmon is the recipient of the 2022 Lindt Fellowship. The Lindt Fellowship is open to GSAS students in Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology. The purpose is to enable exceptionally well-qualified candidates for the PhD to complete the writing of their dissertations during the period of tenure. Named after Gillian Lindt, former Dean of the Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences, it is one of the most prestigious fellowships offered to Columbia graduate students.

Those interested in Daniel’s work can find his most recent publication on trends in outpatient psychotherapy provision here.

Project will equip 10 distinguished writers and storytellers to capture oral histories and artifacts from hundreds of elders from across the country

Jacqueline Woodson. Photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research and the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics is partnering with the Emerson Collective and Baldwin For The Arts to support acclaimed author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Jacqueline Woodson’s new project: I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of our Elders. Through Baldwin For The Arts, a group of talented and award-winning writers will be deployed to conduct oral history interviews with people in various regions of the country, capturing unrecorded memories and life experiences before these stories are lost to history.

“From aging Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders, to survivors of Stonewall, many stories remain untold or beyond the grasp of museums and institutions,” Woodson said. “When these elders pass away, their records and accounts may go with them. Our project seeks to fill these gaps before it’s too late.” 

Woodson will guide the project creatively and has selected the cohort of 10 writers who will collect these histories, which will be housed in the Oral History Archives at Columbia University, one of the largest oral history collections in the world. 

We are pleased to announce this remarkable group of Baldwin-Emerson fellows:

• Natalie Diaz

• Eve Ewing

• Denice Frohman

• Caleb Gayle

• Robin Coste Lewis

• April Reign

• Carolina De Robertis

• Ellery Washington

• Renee Watson

• Jenna Wortham

Each fellow will conduct approximately 30 interviews with people in targeted geographies across the United States, from New York City, to the American Deep South, to the Greenwood District in Tulsa, to Native American reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. 

Those who are interviewed will also have the opportunity to have their family archival records preserved, including “home movie” footage, photographs, letters, and additional ephemera. The product will be an expansive archive of 300 interviews, alongside other media and documents, made available publicly and online, and with the potential to furnish museum exhibitions for visitors of all kinds. 

The project is funded by Emerson Collective, an organization dedicated to creating pathways to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. 

Columbia will serve in a curatorial and advisory capacity, adapting its longstanding expertise in oral history practice to help Woodson bring forth her vision. The work at Columbia will be co-directed by Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and Kimberly Springer, curator of the Oral History Archive.

“Our collection is distinguished for the inclusion of all those who shape our world, not just ‘Great Men.’ We have and continue to build an archive that includes a vast array of histories so that current and future generations learn lessons from our times,” said Springer. “That’s why we’re thrilled to support Jacqueline in a project so consistent with that spirit.”

“We could not be more excited to work with Jacqueline to support her extraordinary vision and the gifted writers she has chosen to carry out the oral histories. The scope of this project is breathtaking. Our world will be better with the collection and sharing of these rich historical stories,” said Clark.

To kick-off the project, the fellows will take part in a series of oral history training sessions that will be led by Columbia’s oral history team, to conclude by mid-April. The interviews will commence shortly after and be complete by December 2022, with the goal of making the project accessible in the libraries and online no later than December 2023.

“We see such great promise in this project, and the partnership with Jacqueline and Columbia,” said Anne Marie Burgoyne, Emerson Collective’s managing director for philanthropy. “It has the potential to produce something lasting, not just in the records and recollections gathered, but in creating a new model for the preservation and inheritance of previously neglected histories.”

ABOUT: 

Emerson Collective

Emerson Collective is an organization dedicated to creating pathways to opportunity so people can live to their full potential. Using a broad range of tools including philanthropy, impact investing and policy solutions to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Emerson Collective is working to renew some of society’s most calcified systems, creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities.

Baldwin For The Arts

Founded by Jacqueline Woodson in 2018, the mission of Baldwin For The Arts is to create a nurturing space for artists of the Global Majority to explore, create, and breathe, free from the distractions and hindrances of everyday life. As a 501c3 non-profit organization, Baldwin endeavors to change the artistic landscape so that it may reflect the world in which we live, challenging this field's history of leaving too many talented Global Majority artists of all ages, genders, and backgrounds unrecognized and unsupported. As a residency exclusively devoted to people of the Global Majority, Baldwin For The Arts is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of artists of all disciplines.

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research

As one of the world’s leading centers for the practice and teaching of oral history, the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) seeks to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, provide public programming, and teach and do research across the disciplines. CCOHR is housed at and administered by the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). 

Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics

Leveraging the ideas and empirical tools of the social and human sciences, INCITE conceives and conducts collaborative research, projects, and programs that generate knowledge, promote just and equitable societies, and enrich our intellectual environment. It administers CCOHR and the Oral History Master of Arts program, the first program of its kind in the United States training students in oral history methods and theory.  

Oral History Archives at Columbia University Libraries

The Oral History Archives was founded by historian and journalist Allan Nevins in 1948 and is credited with launching the establishment of oral history archives internationally. At over 10,000 interviews, the Oral History Archives is one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. The archives are housed at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library in Butler Library at Columbia University and is open to all.

For decades, psychiatrists routinely used both psychotherapy (talk therapy) and medications to treat patients. This is hardly the case anymore, according to a new study led by INCITE graduate fellow Daniel Tadmon.

The switch from talk therapy to medication management has swept psychiatric practices. Researchers analyzing 21 years of data across the U.S found that between 1996 and 2016 the percentage of psychiatrist visits involving psychotherapy had declined by half—dropping to only 21.6 percent of patient visits. By the mid-2010s, over half of U.S. psychiatrists no longer practiced any psychotherapy at all, and that number has likely fallen more since.

The study, published Dec. 8 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, finds that the decline in psychiatrists’ provision of psychotherapy did not affect all patient groups equally. Older, white patients in the Northeast and the West who pay for treatment out of pocket were impacted less by these declines and still retained access to a small class of psychiatrists who saw fewer patients, saw them more often, and were more likely to provide them with psychotherapy. For other patient groups—and in particular for younger, rural, Black or Hispanic patients and those relying on public insurance to pay for care—receiving talk therapy from their psychiatrists has become exceedingly rare.

While declines in American psychiatrists’ practice of psychotherapy were first observed in the 1980s and tracked up to the mid-2000s, little was known about the phenomenon in the period since. “We knew psychiatrists are providing less therapy than before, but we were surprised by the magnitude of the drop and its persistence. Almost all patient groups were impacted, though some much more than others,” said Tadmon.

The declines for some patients were particularly large. Whereas in the mid 1990s, patients diagnosed with a personality disorder would receive psychotherapy from their psychiatrists in 68 percent of visits, this declined to only 17 percent by the mid 2010s. For patients diagnosed with dysthymia (a persistent, less severe form of depression) psychotherapy provision declined from 65 percent to 30 percent. By the 2010s, 53 percent of psychiatrists no longer provided psychotherapy to any of their patients.

One of the main drivers of these trends, the study suggests, is economic. Insurance companies are incentivized for psychotherapy to be provided by counselors, social workers, and other mental health professionals who are compensated at lower rates compared to psychiatrists. From psychiatrists’ own perspective, too, psychotherapy is less financially worthwhile. In the time span of a single psychotherapy session, psychiatrists can have multiple, shorter, medication management visits. “For many psychiatrists, this helps pay their soaring medical school debt,” Tadmon said.

The decline in psychotherapy administered by psychiatrists is worsened by a severe national shortage in psychiatric services. In places with poor access to care and where providers are overwhelmed by demand, psychiatrists are particularly unlikely to practice psychotherapy. By focusing on medication management and leaving talk therapy to other providers, psychiatrists working in lower access areas might feel they can reach more patients in need. These trends are likely to only have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly increased the demand for mental health services.

Psychiatrists have long prided themselves on their mastery of both psychological and pharmacological treatment approaches, addressing “both the mental and physical aspects of psychological problems” according to the American Psychiatric Association’s website. Current official psychiatric guidelines instruct providers to treat many common disorders with a combination of psychotherapy and medications.

Yet, according to senior study author Mark Olfson, professor of psychiatry, medicine, and law and professor of epidemiology at Columbia, the trends reported in the study indicate that in practice, psychiatry is breaking away from psychotherapy—a modality of treatment that used to be emblematic of it. “In response to powerful economic incentives, U.S. psychiatrists have become increasingly focused on medication management,” Olfson said. “This transformation risks leaving unaddressed difficulties that their patients’ have in their personal relationships, families, and work roles.”

Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) and The American Assembly have partnered with Hothouse Solutions, a solutions-oriented media venture dedicated to making climate action accessible to whoever is ready to take on the challenge.

Climate change has historically been ignored as a top issue in the US press. That’s changing amid unprecedented concern about the climate crisis among millions of people. A focus on solutions is more urgent than ever.

Hothouse’s original journalism gives readers a blueprint to enact the climate solutions the world needs—right now, in their own lives. Through stories, from detailing the climate benefit of eating oysters, to a how-to guide on re-careering for the climate, Hothouse aims to show how we can advance solutions in our lives, communities, and political institutions. 

“A pillar of our work at INCITE and the American Assembly is the belief that trust is foundational to our collective capacity to act upon research,” said INCITE director and The American Assembly president Peter Bearman. “We know this is especially true about a topic as fraught as climate change. That’s why we are so pleased to work with and fund Hothouse, whose mission is to lead with trust by invoking curiosity in readers, avoiding reductive narratives, and advancing solutions.”

During the next year, Columbia University will collaborate and support Hothouse in order to help deliver actionable climate coverage wherever readers find their news, serve as a climate desk to supply dedicated climate coverage to other media outlets, and to train and advance early-career journalists in climate solutions journalism.

“The time is right for this approach,” said Hothouse co-founder Michael J. Coren. “Recent research shows that more Americans than ever say they are being harmed ‘right now’ by global warming. By pairing original journalism and rigorous scientific research, Hothouse will experiment with ways to deliver effective stories that illuminate both the personal and systemic behavior changes needed to address climate change through a new digital media venture.”

Hothouse has been attracting new readers and content and has been syndicated in major national publications such as Popular Science. As one reader put it, Hothouse is “a source for fascinating information on climate action—it's not all doom and gloom.”

“Hothouse’s mission of civic engagement embodies our belief that citizens can and do shape the future,” said The American Assembly executive director Michael Falco. “We are excited to partner with Hothouse to watch them grow, and step up to addressing one of the greatest challenges of our time alongside them.”

The Oral History Association has been awarded $825,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan to create a fellowship program for under/unemployed oral historians, with a focus on oral historians from communities that have historically been marginalized in the field.

Amy Starecheski, Director of the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program and 2021-22 President of the OHA, will serve as a Co-Principal Investigator on the grant alongside Louis Kyriakoudes, Director of The Albert Gore Research Center & Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University. The idea for the grant came from work Starecheski did with OHMA students.

OHA will be awarding eleven year-long fellowships of $60,000. Oral historians from communities which have been historically marginalized in the field (such as Indigenous peoples, people of color, people with disabilities, and working class people) are particularly invited to apply. Applicants will be encouraged to propose projects grounded in partnerships with communities and organizations. In addition to the fellowship award, fellows will be provided with mentoring, research funds, training, and a supportive cohort experience. Program details, including application materials will be available at http://www.oralhistory.org/neh 

As a part of this funding series, OHA will also be awarding up to a dozen smaller grants to support research into the history and current dynamics of the field of oral history, with the aim of creating knowledge that can be deployed to create a more equitable and inclusive field.

INCITE and The American Assembly (TAA) are pleased to announce our first cohort of Assembling Voices fellows!

J. Khadijah Abdurahman is the founder of We Be Imagining, an initiative applying the Black radical tradition to developing public interest technology. Through the Assembling Voices fellowship, Khadijah will continue to bridge siloed disciplines and activists, using art, technology, and community networks to combat harmful systems of surveillance, exclusion, and exploitation. Khadijah will organize a series of events in Brownsville, Brooklyn to support political education, organizing, and mutual aid with those most impacted by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (NYC ACS). These events will support a community-designed mural celebrating Black family life and abolition of the Family Regulation System.

Asha Boston, a filmmaker, and storyteller from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, has spent her career exploring and documenting the history of Black neighborhoods struggling to retain their culture and self-sufficiency amid gentrification through her film project, A Time Before Kale. With support from Assembling Voices, she plans to expand on this work through a series of peer-to-peer storytelling workshops that teach residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant to digitally collect, preserve, and archive pictures, oral histories, and artifacts of their life in this neighborhood. By gathering residents in trusted spaces, the workshops also provide sites to coordinate resistance against rising rents, predatory development, and other threats to neighborhood stability.

Through the Winston-Salem Portrait Project, JCKB Studios (artist/organizer Jasmin Chang and photographer/ storyteller Kisha Bari) developed a new model for intercommunity exchange: they brought together activists and leaders from across Winston-Salem to participate in workshops, and placed them into pairs to learn one another’s stories and take portrait photographs of each other, which were then displayed in public art installations around the city. Chang and Bari now seek to expand on that model in New York City, by systematically identifying and connecting community activists and representatives across boroughs and issue spaces, creating pathways through which skills, experiences, and resources may flow.

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These fellows’ initiatives combine mediums to meet audiences where they are, identify community-defined needs, and encourage sustained involvement. Through their use of such interactive, accessible mediums and their reliance on community members and trusted messengers, these programs redefine expertise, deepen understandings of pernicious social problems, and refine strategies for action and resilience. Though the programs are based in New York City, they confront issues of national relevance and offer inspired models to replicate elsewhere.

“With this fellowship, we hoped to expand and reimagine notions of who produces knowledge, how trust is built, and why assembly matters. These remarkable fellows and the initiatives they have proposed bring this ethos to fruition through art, education, dialogue, and activism. We couldn’t be more thrilled to assist them in this work, to learn from them in the process, and to see the impact of these community-centered approaches to addressing social problems,” said Peter Bearman, President of The American Assembly.

“The fellows were selected not only for their respective visions, but for the potential for intracohort learning and collaboration. Each member brings unique skillsets and experiences that become assets to all involved, as they seek to bridge communities, preserve histories, and address injustices and inequities here in New York City,” said Executive Director Michael Falco. 

The fellowship will encourage and facilitate these exchanges through regular seminars, designed around the fellows’ own identified needs, in which they will be able to share their initiatives-in-progress, engage in professional and educational development, and build connections between themselves, their communities and partners, INCITE/TAA, and the institutional resources of Columbia University. 

The fellowship will launch officially on September 1 of this year. Keep an eye on our website or subscribe to our mailing list to stay up to date on these projects as they unfold in the coming months!

by Ryan Hagen and Rebecca Elliott

The latest issue of Sociologica, guest-edited by INCITE-affiliate Ryan Hagen and Rebecca Elliott, thinks critically about the sociology of disasters in light of the Covid pandemic.

In the lead essay, Hagen and Elliott argue that “Sociology After COVID-19” needs to center “disaster” itself as an object of study and theory, and that doing so can productively reframe sociology’s fundamental concerns.

The essay advances two theses. First, while disasters are disruptive, they are not purely so; as they unfold, they enfold continuities such that they are best understood as a part of social reality rather than apart from it. Second, disasters are not pathological deviations from “normal” so much as they are the most salient manifestations of the ways that the normal is in fact pathological.

A more critical approach to disaster, they argue, can lead sociologists to examine more closely the interrelationship between the production of continuities and ruptures in social and economic life, enriching our understanding of core disciplinary concerns about social change, stratification, and inequality.

Read the full paper here.

Over the last three decades, the debate about climate change has involved challenges to the very evidence of change, disagreements about status of models and simulations as scientific evidence, calls for “sound science,” disputes about the contribution of anthropogenic causes, attempts to cast doubt on the integrity and plausibility of forecasts and assessments, and various forms of “solution aversion.”

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 are they representative of a broader mistrust in experts?

What can be done to increase trust in climate science or consensus around appropriate measures or interventions?

Join us for a conversation with these esteemed panelists (Full Bios Here)

• Mike Hulme: Professor of Human Geography at Cambridge University

• Naomi Oreskes: Professor of History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University

• Andrew Revkin: Founding Director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute

• Gil Eyal: Professor of Sociology at Columbia University (moderator)

by Daniel Karell

What are the costs of attempting to migrate internationally for work but being deterred by unexpected changes in states’ policies? This paper—published by Daniel Karell in International Migration, as part of INCITE’s REALM program—builds on recent insights into involuntary immobility, and examines immobility's financial consequences across different levels of household wealth. Drawing on an original panel survey of 70 aspiring Pakistani labor migrants and their heads of household, Karell finds that poorer households more often expect to pay to migrate. They also lose the most in financing overseas employment attempts gone awry.

Karell uses the findings to specify a dynamic of immobility: “capability conversion”, or the process by which migrants’ capability to migrate at one point in time crashes up against unexpected constraints, thereby affecting their future capability to migrate. Capability conversion helps explain how migratory attempts can lead individuals to become more “stuck” over time, and, more generally, helps develop the aspiration‐mobility framework for analyzing (im)mobility.

Read the full paper here.