For details on Ron Grele’s memorial on Jan 13, 2024, click here.

Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research

Ronald J. Grele, former director of the Columbia University Oral History Center for Research, former associate professor in the Columbia History Department and past president of the national Oral History Association died peacefully surrounded by family and friends in his New York City home on December 13, 2023.  Beloved by friends, family, students, and colleagues scattered far and wide, Ron shaped the oral history movement in the United States and around the world with his intellectual rigor, passion, and generosity.  Ron served as director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (then called the Oral History Research Office) from 1982-2000. As director, he used his expansive interdisciplinary knowledge and networks around the world to build a field made up of curious fieldworkers, brilliant academics and researchers, activists, and community-based workers from Harlem to Chinatown who helped define and expand the field of oral history for generations. 

As editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Oral History in the crucial years from 1981-1985, Ron engaged hundreds of oral historians in international conferences to write up their fieldwork and encouraged them to try their hands at developing oral history theory in interdisciplinary ways.  Current students still use the IJOH to inspire their own fieldwork and to devise interpretative frames. Ron was president of the OHA from 1987-1988 and took a leadership role in defining ethical standards for the practice of oral history nationally.  He traveled the world to present at oral history conferences and participated in the founding of the International Oral History Association.   In 1994, Columbia held a defining international conference that, for the first time moved international conferences beyond Europe and was inclusive of African, South American, and Latin American participation.

Ron also helped establish the Columbia University Summer Institute in Oral History, a two-week intensive training institute that has drawn thousands of students and scholars interested in oral history for over 27 years.  Through the Columbia History Department, Ron taught the graduate course Oral History Method and Theory to overenrolled classes. When at last the classes became too full, Mary Marshall Clark and Peter Bearman convinced the University to hold a full master’s degree program in Oral History [OHMA] that began in 2008.  Ron taught in OHMA along with close colleagues and leaders in oral history from the 1970s, Alessandro Portelli and Luisa Passerini. The interdisciplinary scholar Ann Cvetkovich, a former Rockefeller fellow with the Center in a Humanities program Ron co-founded in the late 1990s, currently teaches a course in OHMA with Mary Marshall Clark.  Most importantly Ron’s book, Envelopes of Sound, inspired students that they could learn to interpret fieldwork for themselves in their own cultural contexts which at the time was a radical thought and a thoughtful prediction of how oral history would grow.  Ron is a legend even to the students he did not directly teach. One student, learning of his death, wrote:

I can't believe that Ronald left! I am so sad to hear this! I am so lucky that I got chances to meet him at our workshops and see him asking questions seriously with bright eyes. Even though I have never talked to him one on one, I still feel connected with him in some way. His death is like a grandpa's death to me. A grandpa from the family of oral history. I will mourn him in my way and share this sad news with some Chinese colleagues who are influenced by Ronald's works. I am sad. From: Xiaoyan Li, graduate of the Oral History master’s program, 2018.  

Ronald Grele, right center; OHMA student Xiaoyan Li, far right.

Prior to coming to Columbia Ron directed the Oral History Program at UCLA and served as Research Director at the New Jersey Historical Commission and Assistant Director of the Ford Foundation Oral History Project. He began his career in oral history as an interviewer and archivist at the John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, housed at the John F. Kennedy Library. He was awarded a Fulbright teaching appointment at the University of Indonesia and has conducted workshops and seminars on oral history throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Fascinated by the potential of oral history to intervene in production of historical memory, Ron worked with his former student Peter Maguire, author of Facing Death in Cambodia, to train oral historians working at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) taking oral histories of Khmer Rouge atrocities that were not publicly acknowledged for decades.

In addition to being the author of Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (Prager, 1991, second edition), Ron was also editor of International Annual of Oral History: 1990: Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History (Greenwood, 1992).  Ron worked with a group of oral historians in Europe and the United States to document the 1968 revolution. These interviews were the basis of the book A Student Generation in Revolt: An International Oral History (Pantheon Books, 1988). He received his doctorate from Rutgers University and taught at Lafayette College, The California State University at Long Beach, and Kingsborough Community College. Ron served as a consultant on number of oral history projects and museums and historical agencies. He completed projects on the history of the Garrett Corporation in Los Angeles, McKinsey & Company, and the Boston Consulting Group. He has conducted biographical interviews for the Columbia Center for Oral History Research with women graduates of the Columbia Law School including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, along with hundreds of life histories over the years.  He also conducted numerous interviews in his retirement for the Columbia Center’s Rule of Law Project, the Carnegie Corporation Project, and the history of the Atlantic Philanthropies. Ron volunteered to conduct interviews for a community history project documenting the social and cultural history of Harlem. Ron had an abiding devotion to community history projects, and devoted years of volunteer service to the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas. He will be remembered as an oral history enthusiast who inspired thousands of conversations and publications about oral history as an art as well as a discipline, and permanently established oral history education at Columbia University.

The inaugural Pedagogy of Listening Lab cohort.

When thinking about the role of listening in education, we typically conceptualize teachers as speakers and students as listeners. However, scholars in several disciplines have demonstrated that listening can have a much more complicated (and beneficial) role in pedagogy.

Columbia University is home to a number of fields that have cultivated unique approaches to listening-focused pedagogy, such as oral history, narrative medicine, and social work. These centers, despite their proximity, have not been brought together for an interdisciplinary exploration of listening-based pedagogies—until now.

Directed by Liza Zapol, The Pedagogy of Listening: An Interdisciplinary Teaching Lab will bring together faculty, researchers, and students from different disciplines at Columbia University to advance understandings of pedagogies of listening.

In practice, this will include monthly meetings between faculty, fostering oral history exchanges with students and alumni, observing peer teaching, engaging in interdisciplinary discussions, and developing a pedagogical toolkit.

At the core of this lab is an understanding that teaching is an experiment in equality—not in the sense that teachers must forfeit their knowledge or authority, but that teachers can approach teaching from a place of mutuality and transparency. With this understanding, the lab will explore practices of listening that value the knowledge and experience of the learner and contribute to more inclusive teaching practices.

This lab was proposed by Liza Zapol (OHMA), Amy Starecheski (OHMA), Sayantani DasGupta (Narrative Medicine) and Ovita Williams (Social Work) and is supported by a 2023 Office of the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Grant.

"We teach students how to listen, and we model holistic listening in our classes," says Zapol. "This lab is an opportunity for us to interrogate how we teach these skills." In doing so, the lab hopes to transcend traditional modes of instruction by weaving listening into the fabric of teaching—recognizing that listening extends beyond aural and verbal modes of expression. Zapol says the team has begun this work by, "experimenting with how to create a space for listening, where we can exchange stories as educators and as people, and share how we are navigating these challenging times."

Ultimately, the program's goals are outward. "Through listening closely to each other's knowledge and experience, we're crafting new ways to bring these tools to others within the academic sphere," says Zapol. Coming out of the relationships and learnings from this year, the lab hopes to grow course cross-listings at Columbia and host ongoing programming for faculty across disciplines and schools.

To learn more about The Pedagogy of Listening and its inaugural cohort, visit the project’s page.

Oct 2022: New Yorkers from all five boroughs convene at Hey Neighbor NYC—an art project created by 2021–2022 Assembling Voices Fellows Kisha Bari and Jasmin Chang that invites organizers from distinct communities to interact across cultural, geographic, and interest-based silos.

Launched in 2021, our Assembling Voices fellowship provides support for artists, writers, cultural workers, and community practitioners in developing compelling public initiatives that bring communities together and catalyze conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.

Since its inception, Assembling Voices has awarded nine fellows, seeded more than $255K to support their projects, and invested hundreds of hours to ensure the success of our fellows and their community work.

We’re excited and proud to introduce our 2023–2024 Assembling Voices Fellows cohort to you. This group of creatives and thinkers are pushing our work forward, with each thinking deeply about how to use storytelling to advance the needs of communities, whether they’re abolitionist thinkers, a historically Black community in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, or unhoused artists and creatives in San Diego.

“Our mission is to move knowledge to public action. All three of these projects aren’t just thinking deeply about their communities, they are modeling how to move ideas toward collective action,” said Peter Bearman, Director of Incite. “Since the program’s launch three cohorts ago, we have grown so much alongside our fellows, learning from them and supporting their growth however we can.”

The 2023-2024 Assembling Voices Fellows are Sojourners for Justice Press, Nathan Miller, and The San Diego Unhoused Collective.

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Sojourners for Justice Press
New York, NY

Sojourners for Justice Press is an NYC based micro-press devoted to the creation of print-based publications that engage do-it-yourself, black feminist, and abolitionist philosophies. SJP is represented by Assembling Voices Fellow Neta Bomani, a teacher, zine maker, and 1/2 of Sojourners for Justice Press.

Sojourners for Justice Press’ Assembling Voices project, Binding Our Stories: Black DIY Publishing into the Future, aims to create a series of workshops for Black emerging and established publishers, connecting them with alternative techniques and networks, educating them about counter histories within publishing, and culminating in a collective publication and showcase.

In their own time, Neta makes a lot of zines, enjoys collecting retro electronics, and is an avid eBay user.

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Nathan Miller
Chicago, IL

Nathan Miller is an artist and educator working and living in Chicago. His Assembling Voices project, The Whole in Our Parts: The History and Hopes of Altgeld Gardens, will utilize documentary interviews, aerial photography, and portraiture to document the community of Altgeld Gardens, a historically black neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago from both a macro and micro perspective.

Originally constructed for African American veterans returning home from WWII, Altgeld is geographically situated in what's known as the "toxic doughnut" with an expressway to its east, a water treatment facility to its north, a landfill to its south, and buildings of industry to its west. Through photo-based storytelling, Nathan aims to showcase the resident’s experiences of environmental degradation and the important legacies of community activism that preserve the history and hopes of residents.

Nathan is a proud foodie, recently took up city inline skating (and quickly discovered that it's not for the faint of heart), loves trusting God, and spends his down time searching for new music on Spotify and spending time with his lady.

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San Diego Unhoused Collective
San Diego, CA

The San Diego Unhoused Collective is a collaborative of formerly unhoused artists who create innovative art that centers the perspective of the unsheltered.

The Collective is represented by fellows Jason Ritchie and Frank Kensaku Saragosa, San Diego-based artists who have personally experienced homelessness and have since transformed their experiences into innovative writing, film, theater, and digital media. Together, Ritchie and Saragosa create platforms for people who have been unhoused to tell their stories and seek to empower currently and formerly unhoused people by giving them the skills and tools necessary to tell their own stories and create their own art.

Throughout the Assembling Voices fellowship, the pair will produce an experimental theatrical installation, titled “Street Seen,” to raise awareness about the lived experiences of Unhoused peoples and center the voices of those lived experiences, reflecting the collective’s larger goals of producing public storytelling, art, and advocacy to empower the unhoused community.

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Development Funds

In addition to our three fellowship awardees, Assembling Voices is honored to support two additional community projects through our Assembling Voices Project Development Funds. Each practitioner will receive up to $5,000 to develop associated community projects. Our fund recipients are The Out-FM Collective and Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden.

Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden

Jay Grebe represents the Essex Learning Lab and Communal Garden, a Virginia-based community gardening and food sovereignty initiative that provides community programming about reclaiming traditional foodways, culturally responsive education, and community resilience. Incite will provide support as the organization develops a series of workshops presented free of charge aimed at expanding cultural understanding and exchanges between the area’s diverse communities and providing accurate historical frameworks of the Three Rivers. Workshops and presentations will be focused on food sovereignty efforts and foodways as manifested in Black and Indigenous communities, with interactive and hands-on components to encourage community engagement.

The Out-FM Collective

The Out-FM Collective is a multiracial group of queer journalists/activists that produces and hosts the weekly Out-FM program on listener-sponsored, non-commercial WBAI Radio, 99.5 FM and wbai.org. Out-FM seeks to expand and diversify their multi-issue social justice programming particularly covering BIPOC, trans, and youth-led movements. They offer opportunities for community involvement, self-expression (including storytelling and spoken word), and advocacy. Through the Assembling Voices Project Development Fund, Incite will support Out-FM in expanding their programming to a wider audience through the creation of a national podcast.

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We’ll keep you posted on our Assembling Voices Fellows’ initiatives as they develop.

True collaboration is democratic, provocative, and innovative. This belief is at the heart of a new partnership between The Clemente, a Lower East Side Latinx cultural staple for three decades, and Incite, which is dedicated to inspiring action through knowledge and dialogue.

Over the next year, we will leverage the unique strengths of a community-based cultural center and an academic institution to create path-breaking approaches to knowledge production. Through this partnership, Incite will hold studio space within The Clemente. The collaboration will take an interdisciplinary approach that includes joint events, commissioned works, and collaborative research projects that facilitate collaboration between the two institutions and beyond.

“By putting arts and creative practices on the same footing as academic work, we can inspire new ways of understanding,” said Libertad Guerra, Executive Director of The Clemente. “This is an exciting way to imagine together and surface ideas that couldn’t arise in one site alone. Having the support of an academic partner and a connection to an enhanced network of thinkers and creators is deeply meaningful to our work and our continued growth.”

By facilitating inventive forms of collaboration between artists, activists, students, researchers, and others from within and outside our communities, we will support new understandings and practices that advance public action around pressing concerns.

The Clemente x Incite is designed to push against boundaries that isolate and exclude people from each other and from knowledge production.

“This not only deepens our relationship to the wider New York community, but most importantly complements and contributes to the growth of a city institution that’s an essential and growing site of activism and creative output,” said Michael Falco, Incite Executive Director. “Academic institutions need to invest and support expertise in all of the places it resides—it’s the only way to address and begin to solve the intractable problems of our age.”

Bones Jones getting the new space ready.

Jones’ work photographed for Logic(s) magazine.

Logic(s) magazine Designer in Residence Bones Jones will be Incite’s inaugural artist in residence at The Clemente and will cultivate a space that unites Incite and The Clemente. Jones, through his brand House ° Bones, strives to provide a platform and spaces where everyone can find connection and their unique expression.

Through immersive experiences and creative expressions in his work at Logic(s), Bones has pushed readers to think deeply about the implications of our technological dependence.

“I would say I dreamt, but in reality was awake many nights staring into the eyes of my first studio,” Jones said. “This partnership for me is like oil to a fire, and I’m so excited to set a high bar as the first resident, helping build a world between these partners.”

Through this partnership, we will decenter Columbia University’s campus as a primary site of collaboration, public programming, and thought, supporting expertise embedded in communities. Importantly, this collaboration leverages each organization’s strengths, including existing partnerships, funders, and our unique programmatic offerings.

Incite has previously hosted its My Vote Project Community Conversations series at The Clemente, a model for the power of what happens when we conceive, situate, and reimagine academic programs in alternative contexts.

“We believe this is the beginning of an enduring relationship and an exciting model that draws from the arts, education, and activism to develop and sustainably grow new initiatives and transformative ideas,” said Natalia Nakazawa, Studio Program Director at The Clemente.

We’ll keep you updated as this partnership evolves.

The Bronx, NY: History-making work in the South Bronx’s Mott Haven is hidden in plain sight. In community gardens, workplaces, church basements, barber shops, hair salons, and senior centers, on stoops and sidewalks, countless informal historians—or history keepers—keep scrapbooks, tell stories, and teach young people.

Marco Saavedra talking about his experiences as an immigration activist in his family’s South Bronx restaurant, where a banner with his family’s story is posted.

The stories these history keepers hold are as varied as the history of Mott Haven itself: stories of resilience in the face of fires that burned through the neighborhood in the 1970s and 80s; of HIV and AIDS; of Covid-19; of the neighborhood’s global impact on music and art; of organizing community-controlled healthcare; of developing co-operative housing; and of connectedness, creativity, and community.

However, these history keepers work largely outside of humanities institutions, which has limited our knowledge of how humanities work happens in everyday life. It has also limited how their work is resourced, both financially and otherwise—until now.

We are thrilled to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has granted Incite $150,000 in support of Mott Haven History Keepers, a project that aims to support existing history keepers working outside of humanities institutions, expanding what counts as humanities work and who counts as humanities workers. In practice, this project will involve identifying five Mott Haven history keepers, pairing each with an apprentice, and connecting them with intellectual, financial, and archival resources. Incite/Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) and Bronx County Historical Society (BCHS) staff have partnered to make these connections possible.

Mott Haven History Keepers will be directed by Amy Starecheski, a fourth-generation South Bronx resident, director of our OHMA program, past president of the Oral History Association, and co-PI on the NEH-funded, “Diversifying Oral History Practice: A Fellowship Program for Under/Unemployed Oral Historian”. Mott Haven History Keepers builds on Starecheski’s efforts to develop models for non-extractive, fairly compensated, community-led history-making work.

Project team from the Mott Haven Oral History Project, also directed by Starecheski.

“By investing in community members who are already doing the work of caring for, interpreting, and passing on the neighborhood’s history,” Starecheski says, “the National Endowment for the Humanities has shown that they value the expertise and knowledge of all humanities workers, whether they have academic credentials or not.”

BCHS will provide training to fellows and apprentices, as well as the opportunity to archive oral histories and personal collections in the Bronx County Archives. Training will be provided by Pastor Crespo, Jr., research librarian and archivist at BCHS, and Steven Payne, Director of BCHS, founder of the Bronx Aerosol Arts Documentary Project, and oral historian for the Bronx African American History Project and other projects.

“The Bronx County Historical Society looks forward to working closely with Dr. Amy Starecheski and Incite to amplify the ongoing humanities work of local history keepers, who embody the vibrant histories of our Bronx communities.”

Steven Payne
Director, Bronx County Historical Society

Incite and BCHS will work directly with the chosen history keepers to develop training and support that centers their needs and priorities. As desired, Incite and BCHS will also connect fellows with other New York City institutions that could offer pathways to future partnerships. This collaborative work will yield several new public resources, including new collections, finding aids, oral histories, and training opportunities.

As Incite invests in developing new modes of collaboration that integrate and value expertise from outside the academy, we are energized by the opportunity to support Mott Haven History Keepers. Not only will the project deepen and diversify the nation’s cultural and historical record, it will make conceptual and practical contributions to our understanding of collaborative research models.

If you are interested in being one of the history-keepers supported by this project, you can read more here.

• Project flyer (English)

• Project flyer (Español)

Project team

• Amy Starecheski, Project Director
  212-851-4395

• Steven Payne, Director, BCHS
  718-881-8900 ext. 109

• Pastor Crespo Jr., Research Librarian, BCHS
  718-881-8900 ext. 105

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About Incite at Columbia University

Incite is an interdisciplinary social science research institute at Columbia University. Our mission is to create knowledge for public action—to catalyze conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.

About The Bronx County Historical Society

The Bronx County Historical Society (BCHS), founded in 1955, is a non-profit educational and cultural institution chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. BCHS is dedicated to the collection, preservation, documentation, and public interpretation of the history of The Bronx and lower Westchester County from its earliest human habitation by indigenous peoples through the present.

About the National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.

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More news

A recent study publised by Incite and Fordham University in Pediatrics highlights the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of the experiences of autism among girls.

Autism is a lifelong condition, but how it presents in an individual can change—sometimes substantially—over a lifetime. Though understanding sources of variation would be invaluable to clinicians and caretakers alike, what causes these variations is poorly understood.

Longitudinal studies on autism are not new, but have been limited by the types of data used by researchers. Prior studies have relied on validated clinical assessments, which provide rich data but in small, unrepresentative samples with short observational periods.

In a new article in Pediatrics, Christine Fountain, Alix Winter, Keely Cheslack-Postava, and Peter Bearman use administrative data rather than clinical data to examine a much larger and more diverse population of individuals with autism. Using data from the California Department of Developmental Services (DDS) in conjunction with birth records and census data, the authors mapped assessments of over 70,000 individuals to several typical patterns of development.

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Communication (left) and social (right) trajectories as identified by the authors (click to expand).

More specifically, the authors examined the development of communicative and social functioning in these individuals using annual DDS evaluations. Using group-based latent trajectory modeling, the authors identified six communication trajectories and seven social trajectories.

The authors found that although most individuals diagnosed with autism show improvement in social and communicative functioning as they age, not all do.

By connecting these evaluations with birth records and census data, the authors were able to consider a number of individual and community characteristics that may influence functioning—for example, maternal education level, race and ethnicity, population density, and neighborhood inequality. In doing so, the authors found that children from families with more socioeconomic resources tend to exhibit more improvement. Moreover, the authors also found disparities in development by race and ethnicity, which may signify inequities in resource access.

Though most individuals showed improvement over time, the authors also identified a small group (5%) that experienced decline in social functioning as they entered adulthood. Those in this group are more likely to be female, have white mothers with a high school diploma, and live in zip codes with more inequality, lower median home values, and lower population density.

Christine Fountain (Fordham University) says that more work is needed to understand the reasons for this adolescent decline pattern and what can be done to prevent it. “Adolescence can be a difficult period for autistic persons, with particular challenges for girls,” notes Fountain, citing complex social interactions, stresses and the onset of psychiatric conditions that can lead to a real or perceived decline in social skills. In any case, Fountain says that, “the socioeconomic status of disparities associated with this and other patterns suggest that some children’s needs are systematically unmet, even in a state that pays for developmental services.”

Alix Winter (Incite at Columbia University) hopes that researchers will build upon this work, “by digging further into girls’ experiences of autism, especially in light of our finding that female sex is associated with a decline in social functioning in adolescence, and into the mechanisms behind the racial and ethnic disparities we show in social and communication trajectories.”

To read the full article, click here.

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More news

Harlem high school students conducting fieldwork as part of our My Streetscape Summer School program.

My Streetscape Summer School is an interdisciplinary education program on urban technology and trust organized by Incite’s Trust Collaboratory and Columbia Engineering’s Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3).

The summer school invites high school students from Harlem and the surrounding area to learn and conduct research alongside Columbia University scholars. Participating students gain insight into the methods, strategies, and data used by engineers and social scientists who seek to understand how technology impacts livability, safety, and inclusivity in New York City.

This summer we welcomed our inaugural cohort, who spent six weeks in intensive training in the social sciences, humanities, and arts. Instructors included Ari Galper, Jack LaViolette, Amy Weissenbach, Madi Whitman, Hannah Pullen-Blasnik, Gil Eyal, Taylor Brenden Alarcon, and Cristian Capotescu.

PhD student Jack LaViolette provides training to My Streetscape Summer school students.

Throughout their time at Columbia, students learned how to conduct interviews, gather ethnographic observations, launch surveys, work with public data sets, and create photovoice stories that examine the influence of technology on Harlem’s urban landscape and explored challenging questions surrounding interactions between security, privacy, and trust.

On August 15, our students presented their findings at the Center for Smart Streetscape (CS3) to an enthusiastic audience and presented an impressive 69-page research report to the community. 

What’s next?

We’re organizing the My Streetscape Photovoice Exhibit to present students’ artistic photovoice collection on the topic of urban technology and trust. Join us for the opening night on September 27, 5-8 PM, at The Forum for a public dialogue with teachers, students, parents, researchers, local organizers, and the wider community. Food will be served.

The exhibit will be free and open to the public from September 27 until October 31, 2023.

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More news

Last week we learned that journalist, oral historian, and Columbia alumnus Jeffrey H. Brodsky passed away on July 26, 2023, at age 49 after battling Parkinson’s disease for the past decade. As we receive the news of his passing, our community is reflecting on his many important and enduring contributions to oral history at Columbia University and beyond.

We first met Jeff when he joined the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program at Columbia as part of its inaugural cohort. Jeff’s contributions, both through his own practice and the support of others’, would shape the OHMA program for years to come. Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and Co-Founder of the Oral History Master of Arts Program, reflects on Jeff’s time at Columbia:

Jeff and I had spent several months talking about what he might focus on for his thesis, bouncing ideas around. He was determined to find a thesis idea that was original and unique. One day while crossing campus I heard Jeff yell out as he ran towards me, “I found it, I found my thesis topic! I am going to interview politicians about their first campaigns!” I realized in the moment how brilliant it was, because it would capture the process of ‘becoming,’ the essence of what we do as oral historians. 

For his thesis, Jeff conducted over 80 oral history interviews in which politicians recounted their first political races. Those interviewed included Governor Mike Dukakis, Senator George McGovern, Civil Rights advocate Jesse Jackson, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield. The finished historical retrospective was published as a multi-page feature in The Washington Post and on NPR.

Mary Marshall Clark continues:

Jeff was a truly talented interviewer, able to open up dialogues that politicians and journalists rarely spoke about. Jeff represents the curiosity and creativity of OHMA students, as well as the fortitude to follow through on their dreams.

As part of his Oral History master's thesis, Jeff Brodsky interviewed White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson, US Senator Ron Wyden, and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffet.

After graduating from OHMA, Jeff continued to capture and preserve critical memories of leaders in politics, journalism, and business. Expanding and internationalizing his thesis work, he interviewed a dozen world leaders about their formative political experiences and campaign memories. In 2012, Chief Executive magazine commissioned him to interview executives on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. He also conducted extensive interviews with Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Kann, the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, and television news veterans Sam Donaldson of ABC and Bob Schieffer of CBS.

Jeff’s work will become available through the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Collection at the Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC). Kimberly Springer, Curator for the Oral History Archives at Columbia, comments on the impact of this collection:

The Jeff Brodsky Oral History Collection will be monumental not only in the scope and access he was able to achieve with his narrators in creating primary source materials, but also in demonstrating the range of considerations for oral history as a dynamic methodology. OHAC is incredibly grateful that the Brodsky family and Jeff took into consideration the archival and preservation aspects of his contribution to the field.

Jeff and his family have also supported the work of OHMA students through the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Announced in November of 2015, this award is given to one or more students annually whose thesis makes an important contribution to knowledge and most exemplifies the rigor, creativity, and ethical integrity that OHMA teaches its students. To more fully acknowledge the depth and breadth of excellence in OHMA theses, in 2022 the Brodsky family generously decided to expand the award and extend the funding for five additional years, allowing us to honor several students and their work each year.

2022 Brodsky Award winner courtney scott’s I Am Your Nanny’/I am [not] your [m]other. Through film, poetry, collage, photography, and edited audio, Scott explores the experiences of career nannies working in New York City

In the eight years it has been awarded, the Brodsky Award has allowed us to amplify work that, like Jeff's, pushes the field in new directions, from using AI to analyze oral history collections to writing speculative oral histories of the future. The Brodsky family's vision in creating this award has significantly deepened our practice of oral history, and we are grateful for the opportunity they have created.

Amy Starecheski, Director of the Oral History Master of Arts Program

As we reflect on Jeff’s legacy at Columbia and beyond, we invite you to engage with his work and on the work that his legacy has inspired and enabled.

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The Brodsky family asks that donations in Jeff’s name be made to:

Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications
P.O. Box 4114
Manchester, NH 03108

Since 2022, Incite has partnered with MyVote Project to develop new, youth-led voter engagement models.

MyVote Project is a national, nonpartisan organization promoting civic engagement and voter participation among young people and voters of all ages. Powered by a network of more than 250 student volunteers, MyVote Project combines old-school community outreach with social media, virtual meetings, and a website that makes local policies and policymakers searchable by postal code. In partnership with Incite, MyVote Project is experimenting with new models of local voter engagement.

Over the last year, Incite and MyVote Project have piloted two Community Conversations in New York City, where youth volunteers engaged local leaders, artists, activists, advocates, faith groups, organizations, and the general public in discussions about local issues. Findings from these conversations will help shape the content on MyVote Project's innovative website.

Working at a local level, these models of community outreach are based on the theory of change that young people can shape their futures by constructing the issues considered societally relevant. At the core of this partnership is an idea central to many of Incite's projects—listening to each other's stories and understanding one another's worldviews are critical to human and community development and, so, to a democratic society.

We are thrilled to announce that Mellon Foundation has granted $50,000 to expand our partnership with MyVote Project. This contribution will enable us to continue to refine, develop, and share models that we hope to implement across the country.

Our activities will build on our June Community Conversations event focused on the lasting impacts of Covid-19 on life in New York. In small groups, local high school students led participants through discussions about the impact of Covid-19 on education, performing arts, healthcare, and small business. With food, music, and appearances from local performers, this event sought to move critical conversations beyond boardrooms and classrooms and create an open and welcoming place to discuss local politics.

Through Mellon support, we're also working to partner with other colleges, develop a paid internship program for students, and assess findings from past and future Community Conversations. Incite will contribute experience in survey and interview research to better understand participants' experiences and drive continuous improvement.

“We are very excited to continue developing the Community Conversations model in partnership with Incite at Columbia University,” said MVP co-founder Gita Stulberg. "We see this work as a critical piece to making MyVote Project a place for young people to learn how to construct a polity in which they and their respective communities can see themselves.”

New York, 7/25/2023 – Logic(s) Magazine, the first black, queer and Asian publication dedicated to exploring the intersection of technology and social impact, is excited to announce its newly appointed Managing Editor, along with several other roles including a new Creative Director, Critical Infrastructure Editor, and Lead Fiction Editor, among others. 

In addition, Issue 20 of Logic(s) will be centered around global tech policy in partnership with Safiya Noble and the team at the UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice. The next issue is expected to be released in September 2023. 

The first issue of the relaunched Logic(s), supa dupa skies: move slow and heal things, published in June, lays the groundwork for our approach moving forward: a magazine featuring visual essays, poetry, reporting from incarcerated people, fashion, fiction and more. 

As the new Managing Editor, Dr. Sucheta Ghoshal will work with Editor in Chief Khadijah Abdurahman to further the magazine’s goal of highlighting undercovered tech stories. She will also collaborate with Michael Falco, Incite Executive Director, to expand the magazine’s operations and public impact. Sucheta is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington where she runs a research lab called Inquilab that focuses on cultivating community-centered critiques of culture, economy, and politics of technology while simultaneously designing and developing technologies of resistance and accountability with communities otherwise affected by the hegemonic practices of tech. As a researcher and a community organizer, Sucheta has been embedded in grassroots social movements in the US South and the Pacific Northwest for the past decade, and in the Global South for longer. 

Claire Zuo, the production editor for Logic(s), now takes on the additional role of Creative Director. The role includes both commissioning visual pieces and thinking more broadly about the magazine as a visual artifact, and will continue to collaborate alongside Logic(s) designer Justin Carder. 

Joining our team of a half dozen fact checkers, copyeditors, designers, and administrators includes: 

Ra’il Inasah Kiam joins as the newly appointed Critical Infrastructure Editor. 

Erin X. Wong (they/she) is the Fiction Editor for our upcoming issue, after contributing as a fact-checker and copyeditor for supa dupa skies. 

Ed Ongweso, who wrote the fiction piece The Circle in supa dupa skies, will serve as Finance Editor.

Bones Jones of House ° Bones will continue as Designer in Residence for issues 20 and 21.  

By amplifying the voices of trailblazers, innovators, and change-makers, this growing team will cultivate a vibrant platform that inspires readers to harness the power of technology in creating a brighter and more inclusive tomorrow.

About Logic(s) Magazine:

Logic(s) is a groundbreaking publication dedicated to exploring the intersection of technology and social impact from a black, queer, and asian perspective. Our mission is to inspire and empower individuals and organizations to leverage technology for the betterment of society. 

Contact: Jun Harada | jun@signal.org | 312-282-9444 (mobile)

Over the past months, you may have noticed our new look and feel. This change isn’t just aesthetic—it reflects an important evolution in our organization.

We are pleased to announce that the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University has merged with The American Assembly (TAA) to become Incite, an official institute at Columbia University.

Incite integrates the research and outreach missions of both organizations, formalizing a long-standing intellectual and administrative relationship between TAA and Columbia University that dates back to President Eisenhower’s founding of TAA in 1950.

Announcement of The American Assembly in TIME Magazine, October 1950.

TAA was envisioned as a forum where leaders, professionals, and experts would come together to discuss and address the increasingly complicated social and political problems of the mid-twentieth century. TAA met its mission by hosting over 1,000 such American Assemblies. INCITE was founded in 2012 to advance new forms of interdisciplinary research, eventually integrating the activities of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research and other initiatives.

Since 2019, INCITE and TAA have partnered and grown toward a unified mission: creating knowledge for public action by catalyzing conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies. Central to this mission is the belief that forms of expertise from outside the university are key to understanding the seemingly intractable problems of our age, and new forms of trust and connection are key to addressing them.

Oct 2022: New Yorkers from all five boroughs convene at Hey Neighbor NYC—an art project created by Assembling Voices Fellows Kisha Bari and Jasmin Chang that invites organizers from distinct communities to interact across cultural, geographic, and interest-based silos.

“Incite brings together two powerful strands of Columbia’s rich history: convening that advances discussion and understanding of significant challenges in the world, and unrivaled research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and societal impact,” said Amy Hungerford, Dean and Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences.  “We’re excited to welcome the new Incite into the Arts and Sciences and look forward to all that the merger of these two organizations stands to achieve.”

Remixing tech journalism: Re-launched by Incite in 2023, Logic(s) is the first magazine to explore tech from Black, Asian, and queer vantage points. Read more. Read more.

Other initiatives that have surfaced during the partnership include the Obama Presidency Oral History, the relaunch of Logic(s) magazine, an ongoing partnership with MyVoteProject, and I See My Light Shining with Baldwin for the Arts. Now formally combined, Incite will continue 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.

“This merger brings a leader in citizens’ assemblies with a leader in producing new knowledge,” said Craig Calhoun, Chair of the Board of Trustees for the American Assembly. “The two organizations have been partners for four years and working as one will now ensure both that academic research reaches citizens and that such research isn’t isolated from the perspectives, understandings and knowledge that exist in communities throughout this country and across the world.”

“This merger is presents yet another opportunity for the University to fulfill its Fourth Purpose mission of affecting the world positively by bringing together academic scholarship and practical solutions to real problems,” said former Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who was a trustee of The American Assembly.

The merged organization will be led by Peter Bearman, who founded INCITE in 2012 and has served as President of the American Assembly since 2019.

“For much of its 70-year history, The American Assembly was at the vanguard of convening expertise to address the nation’s increasingly complicated social and political problems,” said Bearman. “This merger is a fulfillment of our commitment to recapture this cornerstone of The American Assembly’s work, but to attune this work to be more inclusive and groundbreaking in our approach.”

Food, music, and local politics: Through our partnership with MyVote Project, we’re re-imagining what local voter engagement could look like—and we’re taking cues from young New Yorkers. Read more.

Click here to learn more about our initiatives throughout the 2023–2024 academic year as we continue to expand our reach within Columbia University and beyond.

Sunday, June 25th, was a quiet and uneventful night in New York’s East Village—at least at the street level. Around 9:00 PM, small groups began to gather on a stretch of East 4th Street between Cooper Square and Second Avenue. After locating a nondescript door (this took some teamwork) and passing down several flights of stairs, guests found themselves in a markedly different world.

The scene: an open concrete pit, an above-ground swimming pool, a disco ball, a rope swing, seats from a passenger jet, and a model in red emerging from behind plastic sheeting—all vibrating with music and lit in purples and blues.

This was the world of Whimsical Magic, described by its invitation as “a visual feast of imaginative design, provocation, and fusions of multimedia delight.” Part fashion show and part theater, Whimsical Magic was produced by fashion designer Bones Jones (House°Bones) and Maurice Ivy in support of Logic(s) magazine.

Some of the night’s whimsy came from the venue itself. Now known as Ella Funt, the space at 82 West 4th Street was an early bastion of drag and queer entertainment. Known in the 1950s and 1960s as Club 82, performers were men dressed as women, and wait staff were women dressed as men. Marking the end of Pride Month, Whimsical Magic was considered by its producers an awakening of this storied space.

“Queer Black Infiltration” by Bones Jones for Logic(s).

The show featured Bones’ Spring/Summer ‘23 collection, which was recently photographed for the inaugural issue of Logic(s)—the first magazine to explore tech from Black, Asian, and queer vantage points. In an accompanying interview with Editor-in-Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Bones discusses relationships between aesthetics, tech, attribution, and Black queer kinship.

Bones’ work finds good company in the magazine’s latest issue, “supa dupa skies: move slow and heal things.” Pushing the bounds of tech journalism beyond product reviews and doomsday speculation, this issue critically engages with topics including surveillance via digital prison mail, the role of caste in Silicon Valley, and the link between plantation labor and modern computing. It also pushes boundaries in form, mixing long-form essays and interviews with fiction, Tezhip (the Turkish art of illumination), poetry, and fashion.

Whimsical Magic presented an expansion of Bones’ Spring/Summer collection to the fashion, art, academic, tech and LGBTQ+ communities of New York. Over the course of two hours, the event delivered on its promise to celebrate, delight, and provoke.

Rather than having a clear start, unexpected and delightful vignettes (including an impromptu marshmallow roast with a blow torch) mounted in intensity until the crowd was transfixed on the action happening center-stage. But center-stage, as guests soon learned, was a suggestion at best. Models emerged from behind plastic sheets, and, instead of returning after a catwalk, subverted expectations by dipping in and out of the crowd. Stanchions separating the crowd from the performance were taken down and refashioned into garments.

Attendees received copies of the first-ever issue of Logic(s).

As did its beginning, Whimsical Magic’s end blended into the rest of the night. The crowd lingered and celebrated before filtering back to the world above, bringing with them copies of Logic(s), renewed joy, and a little bit of magic.

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Logic(s) is now available for subscription. To find out more, click here.

To shop Bones’ work, click here.

Special thanks to Reginald Robson for technical production and artists Christine Shepard, Viper, Mimi Tao, and Beau Jangless for their contributions.

Local politics affect many aspects of everyday life, including education, transportation, and public safety. However, participation in local politics is often low. Through our partnership with MyVote Project, we’re re-imagining what local voter engagement could look like—and we’re taking cues from young New Yorkers.

MyVote Project is a national, nonpartisan organization promoting civic engagement and voter participation among young people and voters of all ages. Powered by a network of more than 250 student volunteers, MyVote Project combines old-school community outreach with social media, virtual meetings, and a website that makes local policies and policymakers searchable by postal code. In partnership with Incite, MyVote Project is experimenting with new models of local voter engagement.

On June 17, MyVote Project and Incite hosted an event at The Clemente in New York with music, food, and appearances from local leaders, entertainers, and artists. By taking conversations out of classrooms and boardrooms, our Community Conversations series aims to create a more open and welcoming space for discussing the local issues that matter most.

The second in a series, this event focused on the lasting impacts of Covid-19 on life in New York. In small groups, local high school students led participants through discussions about the impact of Covid-19 on education, performing arts, healthcare, and small business.

Those with expertise and lived experience helped with the discussions, including psychotherapist and parent coach Hannah Lavan, community engagement specialist Paulette Spencer, and fashion designer Bones Jones.

Before parting ways, all participants met as a larger group to discuss their findings. Insights from Community Conversations will shape MyVote Project’s website and form a basis for further experimentation. It’s our hope that the models we develop through this partnership can be implemented nationally.

For more information on our partnership with MyVote Project, click here.

“Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don't Know How to Talk About It” by Jon Mooallem for the New York Times Magazine. Photos by Ashley Gilbertson.

In March 2020, while supply chains and borders ground to a halt, our team of sociologists, oral historians, and anthropologists at Incite and the Oral History Archives at Columbia stepped into action, documenting New York City’s experience of the pandemic.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and The Board of Trustees of the American Assembly, The NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project is composed of longitudinal interviews with hundreds of New Yorkers. As an interdisciplinary effort combining oral history and sociology, the result of this work is a rich, composite picture of the evolving struggle against Covid-19.

A crisis of this scale highlights structural fault-lines in our society, the strength and resilience of our communities, and transformations that we are only beginning to understand. The work of documenting this period will enable generations of researchers, health workers and advocates, historians, artists, and policymakers to learn from listening to and watching New Yorkers talk about how we made it through this extended crisis.

Launching a project of this scale is challenging and was made even more complex by the unfolding pandemic. Procedures we now take for granted, such as conducting interviews over Zoom, had not yet been formalized. The team drew from past rapid-response experience (for example, the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project) to develop strategies for conducting research in this new crisis.

Fragments of the Project have recently become available in a cover story by Jon Mooallem for NYT Magazine. In this stunning multimedia essay, Moollaem previews the archive—the voices that compose it, the researchers who produced it, and what we stand to gain from looking back on the beginnings of the pandemic (an activity Mooallem invites us to feel our resistance to).

This work wouldn’t have been possible without the team at Incite, including the administrators, project coordinators, and student workers who dedicated the resources and expertise needed to complete a project of this scale. Congratulations to the team, including:

• Peter Bearman, Project Director

• Nyssa Chow, Co-Director

• Mary Marshall Clark, Co-Director

• Ryan Hagen, Co-Director

• Denise Milstein, Co-Director

• Amy Starecheski, Co-Director

We are thrilled about the national conversation this work has already sparked and we look forward to releasing the archive in its entirety in late 2024 through the Oral History Archives at Columbia. We’ll notify you through our newsletter when the collection is available.

The next stage of the project includes securing support to build a comprehensive website to enhance public access to the material. If you’re interested in supporting this work or learning more, contact Michael Falco at mf2727@columbia.edu.

How does where you live impact your ability to access mental healthcare? This question isn’t as easy to answer as you might imagine.

Typically, the most accurate snapshots of mental healthcare access have been at the county level. County-level data, however, can obscure access disparities and complexities, especially in large, diverse counties like Kings County (Brooklyn) or Los Angeles County (Los Angeles). As a result, how access varies by neighborhood is not readily understood.

Inciter and seventh-year doctoral student Daniel Tadmon is working to change that.

As part of his doctoral dissertation, Tadmon has aggregated nearly one hundred disparate data sources to create a high-resolution snapshot of mental healthcare access in the US. Factoring in the distribution of patients and services, the transportation networks connecting them, as well as competition dynamics triggered by demand, Tadmon is now able to measure access at a fine-grained, neighborhood level.

His novel dataset is already enabling new insights.

A snippet from Tadmon’s work mapping therapist access in Brooklyn, New York. Even in provider-dense Brooklyn, there are measurable disparities in mental health care access.

Immediate findings underscore how county-level data offers insufficient fidelity to examine access. “We’ve long known that there are access gaps between urban and rural counties,” says Tadmon, “but with granular data, computational analysis can now show that large disparities often also exist between different neighborhoods within the same city.”

This insight is just a beginning—mental healthcare access is complex and multi-layered, explains Tadmon. This work addresses only a foundational element of access: whether or not someone can reach a provider with availability. With this foundation, additional components of access can be layered in, including affordability, insurance coverage, stigma, and discrimination. The resultant spatial-social framework can be used to examine the barriers individuals face when seeking care.

Tadmon’s hope is that his work can be used to better understand how mental healthcare access (or lack thereof) serves to reproduce social disadvantages. According to Tadmon, this work offers a doorway into understanding how the people who are faced with social circumstances that trigger mental illness are the same people facing the greatest barriers to treatment. Moreover, findings stemming out of his research have potential to inform policy affecting mental healthcare access.

In February, Columbia’s Data Science Institute awarded Tadmon, Peter Bearman, and Mark Olfson with a $75,000 grant as part of its Seed Funds Program. This funding will enable Tadmon to further develop his work and keep the dataset updated.

We’ll keep you posted on published research stemming from this project.

For more information, contact Chris Pandza.