Building the United States' first archive to center the political ideas and movement-building of incarcerated individuals.

Angela Davis at her first news conference after being released on bail in February 1972. Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.

Due to the persistent, systemic criminalization of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Queer, and low-income communities, the United States currently holds the highest total number of incarcerated people anywhere in the world. But where there is oppression, there is also resistance — diverse organizers, activists, artists, and other cultural workers have worked tirelessly to elucidate the origins and consequences of the injustices of mass incarceration. Their movements have permanently shifted public discourse around mass incarceration and provide a vision for possible futures beyond the status-quo fixtures of prisons and policing. Now, it is time to center those with the embodied experiences of these struggles.

That is why Incite is proud to announce that the Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1.7 million grant through its Imagining Freedom Initiative to support the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab, a new project devoted to documenting and elevating the lived experiences, political movements, and freedom dreams of incarcerated people, their families, and allies. This three-year grant will enable a first-of-its-kind archive of 200 oral history interviews with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their allies, each highlighting the political ideas, art, and movement building of incarcerated people. For our participants, we will then support and invest in their storytelling practices—whether audio production, visual media or film, writing, music, and beyond—so that they tell their stories on their terms.

“What incarcerated organizers and cultural workers share is a mutual set of practices that refuse the logics of prison and that transform the time and labor that prison attempts to extract into something else,” said David J. Knight, PhD, principal investigator and founding director of the project. “The Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab aims to document this powerful alchemy so that the public better understands the political work and transformative contributions of incarcerated organizers, activists, and artists — what they struggled for, the networks they built, as well as the political art and movements they birthed.”

Incarcerated men at Attica Prison Raising Fists in Unison During Rebellion. Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.

The archive centers the political visions and freedom organizing of incarcerated people by working with five grassroots organizations across the country—in Chicago, across Alabama, New York City, Oakland/San Francisco, and Atlanta. Partner organizations will each offer leadership and guidance on the content, facilitation, and distribution of the oral histories in their specific locales.

While the Movements Lab will be situated at Incite at Columbia University, the archive itself will be accessible for the public through partnerships with archives in these five communities, thereby democratizing the production of and accessibility to knowledge. This hyper local approach will center those with the lived experiences of this work, leaning on their expertise.

“We are honored and grateful for the opportunity to partner and to set this project ablaze with the work and perspectives of Abolitionist movements like ours. We as justice impacted people have been invisibilized. Our work, our stories, our creativity, our rights, our opportunities and much more. This project will serve as a rite of passage for us to the world. It is The Blackprint to Liberation. We must always preserve the journey of liberation, especially of justice-impacted visionaries. No one is free until we all are free!” said Denise Ruben, Co-founder and Deputy Director of Atlanta-based Barred Business, a partner organization of the Movements Lab.

Other social-change partners share the same sentiment. The Movements Lab oral history project is important “if we do not tell our own stories they face the danger of being written out of the historical narrative. We are the ones who are best able to tell our stories,”said Aislinn Pulley, director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center. “Documenting the experiences of survivors provides a deeper insight into how state violence against Black and brown people is waged during the time in which we live which is era of mass incarceration. This documenting pulls back the propaganda of the "war on drugs and hard on crime" mantras and instead reveals the traumatic violence inflicted upon our people."

“By archiving these stories, the Movements Against Mass Incarceration Oral History Project ensures that future generations can learn from the struggles to end mass incarceration, understand the challenges overcome, and continue the fight for justice and equality,” said Romarilyn Ralston, a long-time organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.

Aiyuba Thomas—whose work stands at the intersection of community building and education in marginalized and disenfranchised communities, most recently working as a researcher at the New York University Center for Disability, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Prison Education Program—will serve as Project Manager.

In addition, the project will support Social Change Fellows, who will lead aspects of the oral history work and create works using their own lived experience and material from the archive to speak to the long legacy of resistance against mass incarceration. The project’s first Social Change Fellow is Renaldo Hudson, an educator and community organizer whose work focuses on ending perpetual punishment in Illinois. Renaldo survived 37 years of incarceration, about half of which on death row, in the Illinois Department of Corrections. During that time, he founded groundbreaking programs including the prison-newspaper Stateville Speaks and the Building Block Program, a transformational program run by incarcerated people within the Illinois prison system.

As a Social Change Fellow, Renaldo leads a project focused on the movement to end the death penalty in Illinois as told by those directly impacted by it. That project is a collaboration between Renaldo, the Movements Lab, and the Chicago-based social-change multimedia collective Soapbox Productions and Organizing. “The oral histories of the movements that happened in prison are vitally important because these histories will not be heard if spaces are not created for them to be told,” said Renaldo. “So now that we are able to create these spaces, it’s our duty to enable the telling of these histories from the people who lived in those moments. Our documentary offers a raw and authentic look at the realities of death row from the voices of those who have been directly impacted by its existence, such that we are leading the conversation rather than being passive observers."

Incarcerated mothers visit with their families at a Christmas party at Rikers Island. Photo by Viviane Moos/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

“Working with the Movement Lab, we hope to further demonstrate the power of community organizing amongst a broad and dynamic group of women through a Network Mapping Project,” said Michelle Daniel Jones, a justice impacted collaborator with Women Transcending, a project of The Center for Justice at Columbia University that focuses on the impact of the mass incarceration system on women and girls, emphasizing women's crucial roles in driving change within these systems. One of the Movements Lab’s partner organizations, Women Transcending is conducting an oral history of the creation of the College Program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Michelle along with a group of women in Women Transcending are dedicated to documenting, preserving, and raising up the history of leadership and community organizing efforts of incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and directly impacted women in the context of mass incarceration.

This work reflects Incite’s investment in socially engaged oral history and public history work that uplifts all forms of expertise. The Movements Against Mass Incarceration Lab ensures not just the preservation of the past, but also the continued inspiration and activation of activists and communities of the present and future.

“This is a reflection of our ongoing commitment to socially engaged work that centers expertise where it resides,” said Michael Falco, Incite Executive Director and co-investigator on the project. “The Movements Lab isn’t just a repository that draws these experiences together, it is a project investing deeply in communities to help share their histories on their terms, to build ties across these movements, and to support the telling of these stories through exciting new modes.”

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Logic(s) issue #20: Policy: Seductions & Silences

Since relaunching in 2022 as the first magazine to explore tech from Black, Asian, and queer vantage points, Logic(s) has seen steady growth.

Most immediately apparent, the publication has grown in size—from roughly eleven black-and-white articles per issue to an average of twenty-five full-color pieces, ranging from critical analysis to fashion to poetry. The magazine’s editorial ambit has also broadened, engaging emerging contributors in addition to established voices. Since its relaunch, Logic(s) has brought forward the work of more than fifty contributors, highlighting Black, queer, Dalit, incarcerated, trans, and Indigenous writing on technology from across the globe. Additionally, Logic(s) has grown through partnerships—including a collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union to report on Allegheny County’s family policing systems, the revival of a storied New York City space for Pride Month, and joint stewardship of a home for interdisciplinary work at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center.

Supporting this growth is a dedicated team that has seen over 25 new additions in 2024. Michael Falco, executive director of Incite, illustrates the dimensions of this work: “Building this type of work requires the steadfast commitment of so many community partners, institutions, and, critically, our subscribers. Our goal is to continue growing and to keep finding ways to more fully support our contributors and their growth in their practice.” 

In an ongoing effort to be more expansive and inclusive, this year Logic(s) also launched a Developmental Editor Fellowship that brings on thirteen writers, creators, and technologists in various stages of their careers to develop and edit bold interdisciplinary pieces that fuse fiction, fashion, poetry, and performance arts with critical writing on technology. In addition, Logic(s) is thrilled to unveil an innovative Liberatory Tech Fellowship in collaboration with The Human in Computing and Cognition (THiCC) lab at Penn State University, welcoming a cohort of graduate-level computing and engineering students as THiCC Fellows. In this role, they will serve as technical consultants, deepening the magazine’s capacity to convey specialized knowledge to those most affected by these technical systems. We are also currently raising funds to support a fellowship for Palestinian journalists.

Logic(s) will release its next issue, on medicine and tech, in June 2024. To support this work and receive the magazine’s next issue, subscribe at logicmag.io.

Editorial Fellows

Angela Chen is a journalist, editor, and author. She has been on staff at WIRED, MIT Technology Review, Vox Media’s The Verge, and The Wall Street Journal. Her reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Paris Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Lapham’s Quarterly, National Geographic, and more. She is also the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, which was named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR.

O. F. Cieri is a novelist with a background in anthropology. She has studied at BMCC and Hunter College. Her prior publications can be found on her website, ofcieri.com.

Rezina Habtemariam is a writer and researcher interrogating the technologies that make Black life (im)possible. Habtemariam is currently a project manager with the African Poetry Book Fund, global Black poetics is critical to her work. Habtemariam writes and thinks from Mexico City.

Osahon Ize-Iyamu is a Nigerian writer whose fiction has appeared in avenues like Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. He is a graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop and the Clarion 2023 Workshop (where he was an Octavia Butler scholar), and is a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. You can find him online @osahon4545.

Ra'il I’Nasah Kiam is a writer, artist, digital curator, and independent scholar and researcher. Their work focuses on Black politics and cultural production, the American South, and online misinformation/disinformation.

Jasmine Lewis (she/her) is a multi-intentional artist, scholar, and vanguard of social change who approaches her aspirations in the same way that she perceives the world—kaleidoscopically. In addition to founding the global storytelling collective TALMBAT, since 2019 Jasmine has served various communities through her work in movement-building and advocacy to craft a more equitable and inclusive society. Her mission is to live life authentically and impactfully, beaming a light of possibility to illuminate ways for future generations to blaze their own paths toward liberation.

Puck Lo (she/they) writes and makes films inspired by utopian politics and dystopian science fiction. As research director for Community Justice Exchange, a prison abolitionist organization, they spend their days dreaming up schemes to end state violence. Puck lives in Lenapehoking / Brooklyn, NY. Her latest film project, Unfinished, is a collectively reenacted queer revisionist history of race treason, anti-colonial resistance, fugitivity, and land in the US desert West during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Hannah Lucal is a researcher focused on technology and state surveillance whose work supports organizing efforts to end policing. She is a senior policy advisor with Just Futures Law.

Eliza McCullough is a researcher and writer interested in the intersection of technology, labor, and racial justice. She recently cofounded Digital Thread, a collective that explores the role of technology in political violence via short-form video. She has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Tendai Mutambu is a writer, editor, and exhibition curator based in Barcelona who specializes in contemporary art and artists’ moving image. He has an interest in organizing cultural workers and was a founding member of Dignity and Money Now (DAMN), a New Zealand–based artists’ rights advocacy group.

Muhib Nabulsi is a Palestinian organizer, writer, editor, and filmmaker living between Naarm and Magan-djin in so-called Australia. They’re currently trying to reconceptualize what it means to write/edit/publish in times of ongoing Western state-sponsored genocide.

Ed Ongweso is a Brooklyn-based writer who focuses on technology, finance, and labor and is Logic(s)’ finance editor. He cohosts the This Machine Kills podcast on the political economy of technology.

Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer, translator, and independent researcher based between Paris and Delhi. She works with The Funambulist, a platform that examines the politics of space and bodies.

Data Science Fellow

Ali Alkhatib’s work centers on how machine learning and other algorithmic systems project and inscribe certain politics and power dynamics. Before coming to Logic(s), Ali was interim director at the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco. He studied anthropology and informatics at UC Irvine, and then computer science at Stanford.

Lead Fact-checker

Simi Kadirgamar is a fact-checker with seven years of experience under her belt, including work at the New York Times, The Intercept, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Her eclectic research interests include the political economy of disinformation, political organizing within the world of martial arts, and the national security state in South Asia.

Lead Copy Editor

Sam Smith[1] , a New York City–based manuscript editor, brings to the Logic(s) team nearly a decade’s experience collaborating with scholars, journalists, and activists to bring forward a range of critical works, with a particular focus on technology and society, political theory, and cultural criticism. Their background in organizing and advocacy, including prison abolition and trans-border solidarity initiatives, informs their editorial approach.

Social Media

Bri Griffin is the social media manager for Logic(s). They’re interested in research related to internet culture and digital curation.

Design

raya marie hazell (she/they) is the daughter of multiple diasporas. As an independent artist and freelance designer, her work spans physical, digital, and social space. Through collage, installation, digital design, and ritual performance, raya hosts stories around climate grief, blackness and legibility, critical technological futures, and the political power of collective mourning.

Fact-Checkers

Mattene Toure, Elizabeth Adetiba, Kadal Jesuthasan, Rosemarie Ho, Amber Fatima Rahman, Sophie Hurwitz, Matt Dagher-Marghosian

Copy Editors

Jasmine Butler, Jean Yoon, Nia Abram, Anisha Dutta, Andrea Abi-Karam, Kayla Herrera Daya, Leena Aboutaleb, Dao Tran

Liberatory Tech Fellows

Ankolika De is a second-year PhD candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, advised by Dr. Kelley Cotter. She is interested in designing technologies that can empower historically marginalized communities. More recently, she has been evaluating how fast-changing information infrastructures impact those who use such structures for empowerment. Her work has been accepted in top-tier venues such as CHI, ICA, and journals like New Media and Society. Ankolika was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and is proficient in the Indian classical dance form of Bharatanatyam. She is also a part of Natya—Penn State’s only competitive Indian classical dance team—and is an avid dancer. In her free time, she likes reading, cooking, and traveling. Before coming to Penn State, she completed her undergraduate degree in computer science with a minor in psychology from City University of Hong Kong, advised by Dr. Zhicong Lu. She graduated with first-class honors.

Swapnika Dulam is a second-year master’s student in computer science at Penn State University and a graduate research assistant in the THiCC Lab. She is from India and did her integrated dual degree (BTech + MTech) in computer science and engineering from JNTUHCEH, India. She has four years of industry experience as a full-stack developer and has designed distributed systems with Restful API using Java, Angular, ReactJS, etc. She aims to develop sociotechnical systems to ensure fair treatment of all people, irrespective of race, gender, or religion. She is interested in cognitive science and works with ACT-R cognitive architecture. She believes in sustainable living and has a green thumb. She has a lot of hobbies, including crocheting, baking, playing Kalimba, ceramic wheel-thrown pottery, and more. Her goal is to make the world a better place for future generations.

Sanjana Gautam is a PhD candidate at Penn State University, advised by Dr. Mary Beth Rosson. She has led research projects in the domains of educational technology, responsible AI, crisis response, and social media informatics. Her work focuses on designing AI-based socio-technical systems that are inspired by human behavioral theories. She is driven by the quest to create safe and inclusive spaces for all. Prior to starting her PhD at Penn State University, she completed her bachelor’s in computer science with a minor in economics at Shiv Nadar University, India. She has published at top-tier conferences such as CSCW, CHI, EMNLP, EACL, among others. Outside of work, she enjoys art (Madhubani), dancing (the Indian classical dance forms Bharatnatyam and Kathak), and traveling.

Tianqi Kou is a PhD student in information science at Penn State University working at the intersection of feminist science and technology studies and AI ethics. He is particularly interested in applying a feminist epistemological lens to the study of technology and epistemic values embedded in machine learning research practices and evaluation. Currently, Tianqi is researching the concept of replicability in ML research, focusing on how its conceptualization can be modified to improve scientific communication of ML research, which Tianqi has presented at philosophy of science and data science conferences as an invited speaker. Born and raised in China, Tianqi is also interested in bringing transnational perspectives into thinking about AI ethics, the means of resistance for AI industry labor, as well as LGBTQ+ rights. Prior to his doctoral training, Tianqi received a BS in economics at Harbin Institute of Technology and an MS in statistics and machine learning at Fordham University, and worked in the industry as a machine learning engineer. Outside of work, Tianqi enjoys climbing, filmmaking, and being a parent to his pets Gin, Tonic, and Dionysus.

Mukund Srinath is a PhD student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. He is interested in creating scalable, fair, and trustworthy information retrieval and natural language processing systems. Mukund is currently working on improving the online user privacy landscape by helping users better understand what happens with their data online. Mukund was born and raised in Bengaluru, India. He did his bachelor’s in electrical and electronics engineering and worked as a software engineer for two years. Outside of work, Mukund enjoys reading, hiking, playing squash, and badminton.

Anya Martin is a PhD student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. She is interested in the ways that machine learning methods change research practices and is currently studying the increasing use of machine learning in climate modeling. She previously completed her master’s in computer science with a specialization in machine learning methods at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The collaboration between Columbia University’s Bundles Scholars and Incite will create enhanced funding, mentorship, skill-building, and networking opportunities for program participants.

Apply to the Bundles Scholars Program

Attend the Bundles Scholar Lecture by Literary Agent Kevin O'Connor

The A'Lelia Bundles Community Scholars program at Columbia University today announced that it has partnered with Incite  to offer program participants several new opportunities and enhancements, including greater funding, mentorship, skill-building, and networking.

The Bundles Scholars program gives members of the Upper Manhattan community a three-year affiliation with Columbia and access to campus resources while they work on a project or skill that relates to or benefits their community. Last year, in an effort to  expand its offerings, Bundles Scholars embarked on a program-wide evaluation and surveyed its entire community of scholars, past and present, for suggestions on what would make the program stronger as it enters its 12th year.

Along with the connection to Incite and its resources, program enhancements identified by the scholars will help to expand community-based initiatives, support professional growth for members of the local community participating in the program, and uncover opportunities to support the growth of a scholar’s work after their time in the program.

Additional benefits for current and future scholars will include:

• Access to enhanced financial and administrative support to grow projects, including potential fiscal sponsorship.

• Funding opportunities for developing joint projects with other Bundles Scholars (past and present) as well as with other members of the Columbia community.

• Co-creation and development of skill-building short courses and seminars.

• Participation in the Incite community, which is composed of academics, artists, activists, and other area specialists.

• Dedicated mentorship in the development of a project.

“The A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholars program invites our neighbors to strengthen our scholarly community with diverse perspectives and to share in our resources in ways that bring new voices to the fore. The new partnership with Incite will allow the program to grow and reflects the university’s commitment to bringing together the best minds, to dismantling barriers to success, and to supporting work that enhances life on campus, in our community, and across the globe,” said Interim Provost Dennis Mitchell.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with the Incite institute to bring Columbia’s A’lelia Bundles Community Scholars more resources, mentoring, and opportunities to grow their projects. More than a decade since the program was founded as a way to give community members in Upper Manhattan access to the resources of Columbia University, this collaboration will further empower scholars to make meaningful contributions to their communities and beyond,” said Deb Sack, vice president of operations in the Office of Public Affairs, who leads the office’s work with the scholars through its Government and Community Affairs unit.

“The School of Professional Studies (SPS) has been a proud partner of the A'Lelia Bundles Community Scholars program since its inception in 2013," said Troy Eggers, dean of the Columbia University School of Professional Studies. “We are excited to see what innovations and support that Incite will bring to this important community initiative.”

"Incite is driven by the belief that work confined within the walls of Columbia risks being detached from the lives of the worlds we can transform. Outside our walls, organizers, artists, community leaders, and workers engage issues to transform their worlds, their communities, and their lives. Linking with the Bundles Scholars, and its decade of supporting and welcoming our neighbors, is an exciting way for Incite to continue to engage with alternate sites of knowledge and to help accelerate the work of our local community with the profound administrative and intellectual resources Columbia offers," said Michael Falco, Incite executive director.

Incite, an interdisciplinary institute at Columbia, produces knowledge for public action by joining with people and organizations within and outside the university to rethink our understanding of what knowledge is, how it’s created, and how it can be used. Incite will enhance the ways in which scholars join the Columbia community and connect with the university's intellectual life. The Bundles Scholars program is a joint initiative of Columbia University’s Office of Government and Community Affairs (GCA), Office of the Provost, and School of Professional Studies.

The application period for the next cohort of Bundles Scholars is now open. The deadline to apply is May 13, 2024.

Launching this year, Incite’s Global Change Program (GCP) will further internationalize and develop our mission by partnering with project leaders around the world who are tackling issues ranging from poverty to climate change to unequal access to health care.

Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández

To pilot the program in 2023–2024, Incite awarded its first GCP grant to Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández, a former Obama Foundation Scholar whose organization Re-imagenemos (Reimagining) is fostering the first national-level conversation about inequality in Colombia. Incite’s funding will support the project’s program of eight regional dialogues on inequality, followed by local dialogues in each of Colombia’s 32 departments. Through these dialogues, more than 150 people from different social backgrounds and professional perspectives will work together to build an agenda of community-led initiatives on inequality. With Incite’s support, Re-imagenemos aims to organize seven Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality reaching in excess of 20,000 people.

Dr. Benson-Hernández discussing Re-imagenemos.
Enable captions for English translation.

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A conversation with Dr. Benson-Hernández

Chris Pandza sat down with Dr. Benson-Hernández to learn more about inequality in Colombia, Re-imagenemos, and Benson-Hernández’s ambitious plan for the next year.

Pandza:

Inequality is the primary lens through which your work is focused, but inequality can mean different things in different contexts. What does inequality look like in Colombia?

Benson-Hernández:

Inequality in Colombia looks like two worlds that don't think about each other—that don't ever meet.

For example, there’s spatial segregation. Our cities are distinctly split between rich and poor parts, and most people don't go from one area to one another. Another visual dimension of inequality has to do with skin color. If you look indigenous, or if you are black, you're probably in a more vulnerable situation from a socioeconomic perspective. So inequality also has a color.

Another very key way in which inequality can be seen is across the regions of Colombia—the urban-rural divide. It's very big. A city like Bogotá can be similar in many ways to New York in terms of access to service, infrastructure, and transport. But if you go to a rural area, even if it's 40 minutes away from Bogotá, you will arrive in places where there are only dirt roads where you have to walk for two hours to go to a bank. Where water and energy are not constant throughout the day. We say that we have a lot of countries within the country.

So these call like territorial dimension of inequality is very geographical dimension of inequality is very important. And that at the core of this project that Incite is supporting, which is the territorial dialogues.

Participants at a 2023 Cross-Regional Dialogue On Inequality.

Pandza:

How did inequality become your focus?

Benson-Hernández:

During our presidential elections, I wondered why all the candidates were speaking about a lot of problems that we have, but not the one that I thought was the root cause: inequality. They were openly speaking about corruption, and violence, lack of social expenditure, and education quality, but none of them openly spoke about inequality as a problem.

I think that has to do with the fact that speaking about inequality is more difficult than speaking about poverty in academia, politics, or regular conversations, because inequality implies that there are some people in an unfair position or with unfair privileges. That's difficult to realize, and difficult to make a collective purpose.

And in political terms, we have this very complex reference of Cuba—and especially Venezuela, which did have a redistributive narrative. But because the results have been so difficult for these countries and people have actually become poorer, it's easy to sideline this discourse as utopian, that it's going to lead us to communism.

To create social change, we have to first recognize the issues. We have to be able to say that things are bad. So the purpose was—how can we start talking about inequality as a depoliticized word, but a word that brings people together instead of scaring people or discarding narratives? Once we realize this, how do we create change in our daily lives?

Pandza:

How did that realization lead to founding Re-imagenemos?

Benson-Hernández:

After the elections I wanted to write some pieces about inequality in a national newspaper. But I realized I'm not an expert in every topic, so I invited people to cooperate with me.

I invited a friend who is a PhD in public health and another academic working with land issues. But I realized that our perspectives would be more impactful if we didn't speak from a theoretical, privileged position in which we analyze social reality as a thing that you study. I wanted to think about how we could talk about this as something that we live, not only study.

That’s why I thought of inviting other voices. I originally wanted to speak about 12–15 types of inequality, but when I invited people, they brought in more and more topics—and the list kept increasing. We ended up with these 30 topics of inequality. Others suggested that we should also invite artists. It was like a collective ideation process and then we realized we were 150 people organizing 30 different topics for almost three years.

All the work that we did through these three years was completely informal. We were like a collective, but not really an organization. The full formal organization process came during the Obama Foundation fellowship in which I registered and did everything to formalize what we were doing organically. We're describing ourselves as a community think tank. We want to be recognized as a key—and maybe the only—community think tank in the country.

Pandza:

Your work is actualized through dialogue across sectors and regions. Why dialogue? And in practice, how does Re-imagenemos mobilize dialogue?

Benson-Hernández:

Social dialogue is very worthy in itself, especially in a context like Colombia, in which social dialogue has been silenced by the armed conflict for many years. So this was a country, or is in a way, a country in which if you speak, you can be stigmatized as being a guerrilla activist or a paramilitary activist. Or you can be killed.

Finding a space of rebirth of dialogue is very worthy in itself, but it is not enough. So what material products can we build? From the process of dialogue, we are thinking about four concrete products.

One is what we call the incidents, the social incidents or the advocacy products, which are these columns and social art pieces that we're going to publish on social media.

The second product is a report with policy recommendations. We're going to spend a year talking to hundreds of people throughout the country. And in this exercise, we're going to identify solutions that are happening around the country. We're going to organize all of these in a policy report and then give this report to the Ministry of Equality which was created a couple of months ago. We wanted to give it to governors and mayors and say this is an input we hope you use.

The third product that we want to create is the collaborative research agenda. We are going to pair academics from the big universities that have all their resources and visibility—and that are almost all located in Bogotá—with academics from very small, regional universities so they can come up with research questions and build a research agenda. That starts with the dialogues, but then can last for years of research, analysis, and conversations.

The fourth product is micro grant support for communities to actually replicate and appropriate our project. For example, how if you're a teacher in a school, or you can organize these types of dialogues with students or with students and teachers. Or if you're a social leader, and you want to organize it with your members and the government, or the enterprise that generates jobs in the region.

Pandza:

How do you anticipate GCP will impact your work? I know you’re planning several in-person Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality that will also be broadcast online.

Benson-Hernández:

Without these resources, we would not be doing Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality. GCP will allow us to organize seven events reaching an additional 20,000 people through our online and social media outputs.

We’ll also be able to build or identify a network of people who are working to build equality all throughout the country. In the exercise of inviting people to the conversation and to the events, we're doing a very big work of actor mapping. That's a very concrete output that we expect. And again, this comes to the, goes back to the idea of these dialogues being just like the first seed of something that we want.

We want these discussions to translate into action. Not only improbable dialogues, but also improbable action across sectors.

Pandza:

You mentioned that you include artists in these discussions. Why?

Benson-Hernández:

One of Re-imagenemos’ essential differentials is bringing the arts into the conversation.

When I invite artists to the conversations, and I say we're going to talk about race inequality, they sometimes say, “Oh, I'm not an expert on race inequality. I don't know about those things.” And I always answer that I want them to speak from two perspectives.

First, as people who actually experience these things. Not as a technical concept, but as a lived experience. You are not an expert, but you have eyes, you have feelings, you live in this country, so you do have things to say. That's bringing artists into the social conversation. That's part one.

Second, artists can translate the dialogue that is happening between different forms of language into communication channels that can actually connect more with people, because they appeal to emotion. To aesthetics. To things that actually connect with our capacity of reimagining other realities. They have a potential that words cannot ever reach. So that's what the invitation is. To use their abilities to translate conversations into more relatable languages that people can actually process more.

Pandza:

At Incite, when we think about how we engage with people outside of the university, we talk a lot about extractive work or extractive practices. How does this factor into your work?

Benson-Hernández:

Yeah, that's a great question.

First, we should not call what we do outreach activities—outreach is about asking the questions, coming up with the answers, and then telling others about it. It's a very top-down approach about taking academia outside, and from a hierarchical position.

What we're trying to do is not outreach, but inreach—what we'd call building bridges of communication, of empathy, and of relations of ideation. So for us, the process of communicating with other actors from other sectors starts from a human connection and then we go into connecting ideas and narratives.

But the first step is to say okay, we're two people, and we're talking about an issue. And this implies being cognizant and aware of biases that we have.

We had a conversation on Friday wherein we had people who were social leaders who never went to school. And then we had a PhD researcher who is very well known, not only in Colombia, but internationally as a researcher. I opened the panel with the activists and then the last one to speak was the researcher, because if he would have started, that may have introduced a power relation, an expectation that everyone would speak with the same kind of language as the researcher. We talk a lot about a dialogue between forms of knowledge—acknowledging that there are a lot of forms of knowledge, not only the formal scientific knowledge that we should all value. That they all have contributions to the process of collective knowledge generation.

Participants at a 2023 Cross-Regional Dialogue On Inequality.

Pandza:

Do any other images from that event stick out in your mind?

Benson-Hernández:

There was this point in which one of the speakers told the audience to take a minute to look at this stage because what you're looking at in this moment is special. We are seven people from seven very different backgrounds. With seven very different colors of skin, but we are all sitting here listening to each other and achieving a dialogue from diversity.

It’s something that doesn't happen every day. So I think when he actually called people to notice this, which is the essence of what we've been trying to do in these three years, I thought, okay, we’re doing it.

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The Global Change Program will be seeking new grantees later in 2024. Be the first to know when our applications open by subscribing to our mailing list.

Launching this year, Incite’s Global Change Program will endow change agents around the world with financial and intellectual support. Plus, find out how our first GCP grant recipient is tackling inequality in Colombia with art, dialogue, and the country’s first-ever community think tank.

Participants at a Re-imagenemos event in 2023.

While academic institutions are working to understand the most complex and pressing issues of our time–from climate change, to inequality, to public health, to failing trust in institutions—communities around the world are tackling these very problems with locally cultivated expertise and ingenuity. Though many academic institutions are realizing the value of community partnership, the relationships that underpin these partnerships risk reproducing hierarchy and extraction, rather than fostering collaborations that value multiple forms of expertise, enhancing capacities for both knowledge production and change.

At Incite, we’re experimenting with project models that break down barriers between the academy and worlds where change is made. To do so, we endow change agents with resources and intellectual support, whether through developing innovative public initiatives across the country with Assembling Voices, putting incarcerated writers’ perspectives in the same publications as academics in Logic(s) magazine, or empowering high schoolers to inform their local electorates with MyVote Project.

Launching this year, Incite’s Global Change Program (GCP) will further internationalize and develop our mission by partnering with project leaders around the world who are tackling issues ranging from poverty to climate change to unequal access to health care.

Each year, GCP will award $50,000 in grants to individuals leading campaigns that assemble their communities in service of furthering democracy, equity, and justice. Awardees will receive intellectual support from Incite, including assistance with project design and facilitated collaboration with a center or institute of their preference at Columbia. Through that collaboration, Incite hopes to generate scholarship and foster conversations about global challenges that remain rooted in the work of communities most directly grappling with their effects.

Evan McCormick, a historian and Associate Research Scholar at Incite is developing and leading this program:

This project is about bridging the gap between universities and communities that share in the task of answering urgent questions about the future of our world. By meeting project leaders where they are, with the support and resources they need to advance community-based work, we can actively bring local experience and perspectives into scholarly conversations happening at universities like Columbia.

If you or somebody in your network is interested in learning more about applying to the Global Change Program, reach out to Evan McCormick. Be the first to know when our applications open by subscribing to our mailing list.

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Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández

To pilot the program in 2023–2024, Incite awarded its first GCP grant to Dr. Allison Benson-Hernández, a former Obama Foundation Scholar whose organization Re-imagenemos (Reimagining) is fostering the first national-level conversation about inequality in Colombia. Incite’s funding will support the project’s program of eight regional dialogues on inequality, followed by local dialogues in each of Colombia’s 32 departments. Through these dialogues, more than 150 people from different social backgrounds and professional perspectives will work together to build an agenda of community-led initiatives on inequality. With Incite’s support, Re-imagenemos aims to organize seven Cross-Regional Dialogues On Inequality reaching in excess of 20,000 people.

Chris Pandza sat down with Dr. Benson-Hernández to learn more about inequality in Colombia, Re-imagenemos, and Benson-Hernández’s ambitious plan for the next year.

Find out more >

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)