COVIDCalls

EP #164 -11.06.2020 - Loss & Hope: The COVID-19 Election

Today we have a special COVIDCalls discussion about the pandemic, the election, and the path ahead with some very special guests: Sharrelle Barber, Billy Fleming, Cynthia Rivas, Olivia Troye, Fiana Tulip, & Kristin Urquiza.

 

EP #163 - 11.04.2020 - Election Recap!

Today I will speak with Andrew Revkin!

Previously he was strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism at National Geographic Society. Through 2017 he was senior reporter for climate change at the independent investigative newsroom ProPublica. He was a reporter for The New York Times from 1995 through 2009. In 2007, he created the Dot Earth environmental blog for The Times. The blog moved to the Opinion Pages in 2010 and ran through 2016. He is also a performing songwriter and was a frequent accompanist of Pete Seeger.  He is now director of the new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

EP #162 - 11.03.2020 - Election Day 2020!

Today we have an election day discussion about voting with Yajaira Ayala, Kora Fortun, and Sharrona Pearl.

EP #161 - 11.02.2020 - Election Preview

Today we have an election eve COVIDCalls discussion with Darien Williams, Rich Frankel, and Colleen Hagerty.

Richard E. Frankel is currently Associate Professor of modern German history and the Sagrera Family Memorial/BORSF Endowed Professor in History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His research interests center on nationalism, antisemitism, immigration, and political culture. His first book was Bismarck’s Shadow: The Crisis of German Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898-1945 with Berg Publishers. His latest book, States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism uses German history—particularly the period of the Third Reich—to help us better understand the current situation in Trump’s America. Frankel is now seeking to understand antisemitism from an even broader, global perspective. He is currently at work on a new book-length project tentatively titled Globalizing Hate: The Impact of Globalization on Modern Antisemitism in Germany and the United States, 1880-1914.

Colleen Hagerty is a freelance journalist telling narrative stories through video, print, and social mediums. Much of her work reflects how global communities are reckoning with our changing climate, social dynamics, technologies, and politics. You can find her bylines across BBC News outputs and on Vox, High Country News, US News & World Report, Business Insider, and others. She also has a weekly newsletter about disasters.

Darien Alexander Williams is completing a PhD in urban planning at MIT, where he focuses on disaster recovery, community organizing, Black communities, and religious minorities. He is currently working on a few projects, including on Floridian hurricane recovery, natural gas pipeline explosions, and nonstate religious organization-led planning. Darien previously worked for the Southeast & Caribbean Disaster Resilience Partnership and the Hurricane Matthew Disaster Recovery and Resilience Initiative.

And Versha Sharma senior correspondent, writer/editor at NowThis!

 

EP #160 - 10.30.2020 - COVID-19 and the Postal Service

Today we have a discussion of COVID-19 and the postal service with Ryan Ellis and Richard John.

Ryan Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern. Ryan’s research and teaching focuses on topics related to communication law and policy, infrastructure politics, and cybersecurity. He is the author of Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things: The Politics of Infrastructure Security (MIT Press, 2020) and the editor (with Vivek Mohan) of Rewired: Cybersecurity Governance (Wiley, 2019).

Richard R. John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development.  He teaches and advises graduate students in Columbia’s Ph.D. program in communications, and is member of the core faculty of the Columbia history department, where he teaches courses on the history of capitalism and the history of communications.  His publications include many essays, eight edited books, and two monographs: Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).

EP #159 - 10.29.2020 - Researchers' Roundtable

Today we have a researchers’ roundtable with Angie Mejia, Chandi Katoch, and Jorge Benavides Rawson.

Jorge Benavides-Rawson is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the George Washington University and a Visiting Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS). His dissertation research examines the interaction of public health policy-makers, scientists, and the media as coproducers of international and global policies for epidemics and pandemics. To trace the coproduction of pandemics, Jorge is conducting multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, comparing diverse forms of knowledge production about Zika and Covid-19 in various locations of the United States and his home country of Costa Rica. Jorge holds an MA (2015) in Medical Anthropology from the George Washington University.

Chandi Katoch is a senior at the University of Minnesota Rochester studying health sciences. She is pursuing medical school with the intent to work as a physician in emergency medicine. She currently works in a group home healthcare setting and is an Emergency Medical Technician. She is a board member of The Village Community Garden and Learning Center in Rochester, MN where she researches resiliency in diverse growers. She is also researching mental health in Black Indigenous People Of Color women pursuing STEM careers.

Angie Mejia, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Civic Engagement Scholar at the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester.  Her research uses participatory methods and cross-community collaborations to study emotional health inequities in historically marginalized and socio-politically dispossessed communities. Her work has appeared in several academic journals, including Theory in Action, Action Research, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies. Website: angiemejia.com.

EP #158 - 10.28.2020 - COVID-19 and the Digital Divide

Today we will talk about COVID-19 and the digital divide with Blair Levin.

Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. He serves as the executive director of Gig.U: The Next Generation Network Innovation Project, an initiative of three dozen leading research university communities seeking to support educational and economic development by accelerating the deployment of next generation networks.

Previously, he worked with the Communications & Society Program with the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, following his departure in 2010 from the Federal Communications Commission where he oversaw the development of a National Broadband Plan.

Levin served as chief of staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt from December 1993 through October 1997. During that period he oversaw, among other matters, the implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act, the first spectrum auctions, the development of digital television standards and the commission's Internet initiative.

EP #157 - 10.27.2020 - Life in Quarantine

Today we will talk about life in quarantine with Areum Jeong, Yeonsil Kang, and Hilde Van den Bulck

Areum Jeong is an Assistant Professor in Humanities at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute (in Chengdu, China) where she teaches English Composition, K-pop, Korean Film, and New Media. Her research takes a transnational approach to Korean and Korean American film, literature, theater and performance, and her current book project, Beyond the Sewol: Performing Transnational Acts of Activism in South Korea and the Diaspora, explores how performance documents death, loss, and memory in South Korea and diasporic communities.

Yeonsil Kang is a currently a visiting assistant professor at Drexel University’s history department. She is interested in understanding the intersections of the environment, science/technology, and disasters especially in East Asia. She is working on a project, Mineral Time, Bodily Time: Asbestos, Slow Disaster, and Toxic Politics in South Korea which explores the history and politics of asbestos, the environmental hazard that shaped environmental health policies in South Korea.

Hilde Van den Bulck (Ph.D.) is Professor of Communication Studies and Head of the Department of Communication at Drexel University (US). She recently completed a project on the privacy and trust implications of the use of third party trackers on platforms of public and commercial media and is currently analyzing the role of PBS as most trusted US institution in a post-trust, post-truth era. In the field of media culture, she studies the role of mediated communication in celebrity culture, with a focus on celebrity activism. Together with Drexel Professor Alexander Jenkins, she is currently analyzing the role of different media in the activism of sports celebrities, comparing the cases of Smith and Carlos 1968 Black Power with Colin Kaepernick’s BLM work.

EP #156 - 10.26.2020 - Journaling COVID-19

Today we will talk about the Pandemic Journaling Project with Kate Mason and Sarah Willen.

Katherine A. Mason, PhD is a medical anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University.  She is Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic (Stanford, 2016), draws on fieldwork in southeastern China to explore the professionalization and the ethics of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic. Dr. Mason is currently developing a multi-sited ethnographic study of perinatal mood disorders in the U.S. and China. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, U.S. Fulbright program, and Association for Asian Studies.

Sarah S. Willen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute. A medical and sociocultural anthropologist, she is author or editor of four books and five special issues. Her book, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) was awarded the 2019 Yonathan Shapiro Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies from the Association for Israel Studies. She is also a former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  She is Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project. 

EP #155 - 10.23.2020 - High School Students and the Pandemic

Today we will talk about the experience of high school students living in the midst of a pandemic with Jazmil Castillo, Andrea Velez Padilla, Sydney Reid,  Shoshi Satran, and Tess Wolf.

I have a co-host today, one listeners of COVIDCalls know well: Shivani Patel.  She is a second-year student at Drexel University studying Finance and Economics. She is also a production assistant here at COVIDCalls, helping with auditing transcripts and connecting with guests. She is also a representative on Drexel’s Student Government, working to voice the concerns of the student body to administration. Thanks Shivani!

My guests today are Jazmil Castillo, Andrea Velez Padilla, Sydney Reid,  Shoshi Satran, and Tess Wolf