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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other initiatives that have surfaced during the partnership include the Obama Presidency Oral History, the relaunch of Logic(s) magazine, an ongoing partnership with MyVoteProject, and I See My Light Shining with Baldwin for the Arts. Now formally combined, Incite will continue to facilitate inventive forms of communication and collaboration between students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To shop Bones’ work, click here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Peter Bearman, Project Director

• Nyssa Chow, Co-Director

• Mary Marshall Clark, Co-Director

• Ryan Hagen, Co-Director

• Denise Milstein, Co-Director

• Amy Starecheski, Co-Director

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

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

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

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

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

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

His novel dataset is already enabling new insights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information, contact Chris Pandza.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About our partnership with Logic(s)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About INCITE

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

About MyVote Project

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

Media Contact: media@myvoteproject.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Natalie Diaz

• Eve Ewing

• Denice Frohman

• Caleb Gayle

• Robin Coste Lewis

• April Reign

• Carolina De Robertis

• Ellery Washington

• Renee Watson

• Jenna Wortham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT: 

Emerson Collective

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

Baldwin For The Arts

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

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research

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

Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics

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

Oral History Archives at Columbia University Libraries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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