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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Ryan Hagen and Rebecca Elliott

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

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

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

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

Read the full paper here.

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

What are the sources of skepticism about climate change and/or mistrust of climate science?

What processes, mechanisms and dynamics are implicated in provoking and prolonging the debate about climate change?

To what extent are these specific to the climate debate, and to what extent are they representative of a broader mistrust in experts?

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

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

• Mike Hulme: Professor of Human Geography at Cambridge University

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

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

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

by Daniel Karell

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

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

Read the full paper here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guests:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panelists

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

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

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

Moderator

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

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

Credit: Financial Times

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

Read it here: How will history remember 2020?