COVIDCalls

EP #94 - Social Sciences in the Pandemic - Alexa Dietrich

Today, I talk about the big questions of social science research with Alexa Dietrich of the SSRC!

 

Alexa S. Dietrich is program director for the SSRCouncil’s Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean, the Scholarly Borderlands initiative, and codirector of the Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And assoc prof anthropology wagner college. She is trained in medical anthropology and epidemiology, earning both a PhD and MPH from Emory University. Her interests lie at the intersections of culture and health, technology and the natural environment, and the application of qualitative and quantitative research methods. She conducted community action research over seven years in the northern pharmaceutical corridor of Puerto Rico, published in the monograph The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (NYU Press, 2013), winner of the Julian Steward Award for the best book in environmental anthropology in 2015.

EP#93 - Pandemic Communication Ecologies - Brian Houston & Jim Whittington

EP #92 - Choreography/COVID-19 with David Brick & Ishmael Houston-Jones

Today, I talk about choreography, dance, creativity and the pandemic with David Brick and Ishmael Houston-Jones.

 

David Brick co-founded Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater with Amy Smith and Andrew Simonet in 1993. Over the next two decades, these three co-founders created over forty dances as Headlong, performing nationally and internationally. In 2008, David co-founded the Headlong Performance Institute, a training program for creating experimental performance.

David collaborates broadly in creating performance, participatory events, and community. His experience of growing up as a hearing member of a Deaf family continually influences David’s understanding of human bodies as active manifestations of culture. His recent work includes a residency at Dance Place in Washington DC to work on Island of Signs—a performance that explored growing up in a family with two languages, one that was shared and one that was not. He shared this residence with Carolyn Brick, his 78-year old Deaf mother who attended nearby Gallaudet University and was featured in a 1959 documentary about her experience there.

 

Ishmael Houston-Jones is choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which concentrated on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now. As an author Houston-Jones' essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His first book, FAT and other stories, was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.

EP #91 - COVID-19 and Homelessness - Carl Falconer and Dawn Gilman

Today, I talk about homelessness and the pandemic with Carl Falconer and Dawn Gilman.

 

Carl Falconer, a native of South Dakota, is an eight-year U.S. Army veteran. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology and a Master's Degree in Public Administration from the University of North Florida. Falconer has worked with persons experiencing homelessness and mental illness in the Jacksonville, Florida area since 1994, from street outreach, to emergency shelter, to housing programs, most recently as a Regional Director with Lutheran Services Florida Health Systems, which manages behavioral health care for people facing poverty, in Northeast and North Central Florida. Since late 2018, he has served as President and CEO of the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance (MDHA), the Federally designated lead agency of Dallas and Collin Counties’ homeless response system. Notably, he has already led the system in reversing a multi-year trend of rising homelessness. His D-ONE Plan plots the course to ending homelessness in Dallas.

 

Dawn Gilman joined the Changing Homelessness team in 2007 and has served as CEO since 2009. Under Mrs. Gilman’s leadership, Changing Homelessness has grown from a single employee into an agency employing more than 33 staff members. This growth has increased both capacity and funding to end homelessness in northeast Florida. The agency currently has a $6.4 million budget with approximately $4 million as pass through to sub-grantees. This funding provides housing, case management, prevention, and other supportive services to end homelessness. The community has seen an 80% decrease in Veterans Homelessness, 57% in chronic homelessness, and a 30% decrease in overall homelessness from 2009 to 2018.

EP #90 - COVID-19, Disasters, & Infrastructure - Marccus Hendricks

Today, I talk about infrastructure, justice and the pandemic with Marccus D. Hendricks UMD

 

Marccus D. Hendricks is an assistant professor of urban studies and planning in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and a faculty affiliate with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. His primary research interests include infrastructure planning and management, social vulnerability to disaster, environmental justice, sustainable development, public health and the built environment, and participatory action research.

 

He has also participated in a congressional briefing entitled "Addressing the Impact of Climate Change on Public Health and Natural Disasters" and research has been published in several journals including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Infrastructure Systems, Risk Analysis, Landscape Journal, and Sustainable Cities and Society.

EP #89 - Disaster STS Researchers‘ Roundtable - Tim Schutz, Prerna Srigyan, Maka Suarez, and Pedro de la Torre III

Today, I talk to four rising researchers who bring science, technology, and society analysis to bear on COVID-19.  Tim Schutz, Prerna Srigyan, Maka Suarez, and Pedro de la Torre III.

 

Pedro de la Torre III is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and an Adjunct Instructor in the Humanities Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research focuses on competing relations to place and history, as well as current and future land use, in contaminated spaces. He explored these issues ethnographically in my dissertation, “Unmaking Wastelands: Inheriting Waste, War, and Futures at the Hanford Site.” Pedro recently completed a PhD program in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

 

Tim Schütz is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Together with Kim Fortun, Scott G. Knowles and Jason Ludwig, he co-developed the project Quotidian Anthropocenes. He is also a member of the design group for the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE).  In the COVID project, he focuses on a critical analysis of existing civic data tools to track the impact of the pandemic. Most recently, he began examining activist data archives responding to the Taiwanese company Formosa Plastics, currently expanding its operations in Louisiana's “Cancer Alley.”

 

Prerna Srigyan is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine. She studied Environment & Development at Ambedkar University Delhi and Chemistry from the University of Delhi. Since 2017, she has worked as a Researcher in The Asthma Files (TAF) project (also hosted by PECE) where she continues to develop her Master's research on science and advocacy around Delhi's air pollution. Her research interests are transnational science networks, science pedagogy and politics of collaboration. In the COVID project, she listens to understand how transnational STS collaborations work in practice. 

 

Maka Suarez is co-founder of Kaleidos-Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography and assistant professor at the University of Cuenca in southern Ecuador. She is currently working on the design of a cross-disciplinary digital platform that combines ethnographic material with data analysis called EthnoData. The plan is to continue to expand this platform and include COVID19 related issues this year.

EP#87 - Data Politics and COVID-19 - Denice Ross and Allison Plyer

Today, I talk with Denice Ross and Allison Plyer.

 

Denice Ross is a Director at the National Conference on Citizenship and a Fellow at Georgetown’s Beeck Center. Her recent focus is on data quality and the 2020 Census and she also provides strategic support for the State Chief Data Officer Network. Denice comes to this work from New America, where she studied the power of networks to advance progress on big challenges. As a Presidential Innovation Fellow (2014-5), she co-founded the White House Police Data Initiative to increase transparency and accountability and worked with the Department of Energy to improve community resilience in disaster-impacted areas. Earlier, she served as Director of Enterprise Information for the City of New Orleans, establishing their open data initiative, now recognized as one of the most successful in the country. Prior to government, Denice co-directed The Data Center of Southeast Louisiana, a non-profit data intermediary. She brought a data-driven approach to numerous post-Katrina community planning initiatives and co-founded the first new childcare center after the storm.

 

Allison Plyer is the Chief Demographer for The Data Center of Southeast Louisiana. Dr. Plyer is co-author of The New Orleans Prosperity Index which examines the extent to which economic outcomes have improved for black New Orleanians since the end of the Civil Rights era. She is also author of The New Orleans Index series, developed in collaboration with Brookings to analyze the state of the recovery post-Katrina and later to track the region’s progress toward prosperity. She served as an editor for the Brookings Institution Press volume entitled “Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita.” Allison is an international expert in post–Katrina demographics and disaster recovery trends and frequently provides commentary on recovery and development to media such as NPR, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and USA Today. Allison received her Doctorate in Science from Tulane University and has an MBA in marketing and organizational behavior from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. 

EP#88 - Mapping the Pandemic - Yanni Loukissas and Jer Thorp

Today, I talk with Jer Thorp and Yanni Loukissas about Mapping and COVID-19.

 

Yanni Alexander Loukissas is Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where he directs the Local Data Design Lab. His new book, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), is addressed to a growing audience of practitioners who want to work with unfamiliar sources both effectively and ethically. He is also the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of The DigitalSTS Handbook (Princeton, 2019). He has taught at Cornell, MIT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Originally trained as an architect at Cornell, he subsequently attended MIT, where he received a Master of Science and a PhD in Design and Computation. He completed postdoctoral work at the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society.

 

Jer Thorp is an artist, writer and teacher living in New York City. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times' first Data Artist in Residence, is a National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer is one of the world's foremost data artists, and is a leading voice for the ethical use of big data.

Jer’s data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including most recently in New York’s Times Square, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, at the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and at the National Seoul Museum in Korea. 

Jer is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and an alumnus of the World Economic Foundation’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation. He is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and is the Co-Founder of The Office for Creative Research.

Jer’s book 'Living in Data’ is out Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the spring of 2020.

EP #86 - COVID-19 in the UK - Jose Torero

Today, I talk COVID-19 in the UK with Jose Torero.

 

Professor José L. Torero is Professor Civil Engineering and Head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London. He works in the fields of fire safety, combustion, environmental remediation and sanitation where he specializes in complex environments such as developing nations, complex urban environments, novel architectures, critical infrastructure, aircraft and spacecraft. José is a Chartered Engineer (UK), a Registered Professional Engineer in Queensland, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK), the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences (Australia) among other honors.  He has been part of the World Trade Center collapse investigation, the Organization of American States Human Rights investigation of Ayotzinapa, Mexico, the Chilean investigation of the San Miguel prison fire and currently, he is serving in the Grenfell Public Inquiry. And he is a co-author!  New Materials: Towards a History of Consistency. Lever 2020.

EP #84 - How Do We Talk about Disasters? - Ksenia Chmutina and Jason von Meding

Today, I talk about the language we use to discuss disaster and why it matters with Disasters Deconstructed podcast co-hosts
Ksenia Chmutina and Jason von Meding.

 

Dr Jason von Meding is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida and a founding faculty member of the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER). Before moving to the U.S. he spent 6 years at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he established the Disaster and Development Research Group, and
worked with communities in the Aisa-Pacific region using participatory methods to study disaster risk. In the past 5 years he has developed a focus on communicating science to non-academic audiences, writing for blogs, magazines and newspapers, creating video content and through the Disasters: Deconstructed podcast.

 

Dr Ksenia Chmutina a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable and Resilient Urbanism at the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University, UK. She’s originally from Russia, and before
moving to the UK, she lived in China, where she got her Masters. Her research explores the processes of
disaster risk creation and politics of disasters, especially under the pressures of neoliberalism, urbanisation and climate change. Ksenia uses her work to draw attention to the fact that disasters are not natural. Ksenia is a co-author of a textbook ‘Disaster Risk Reduction for the Built Environment’ (Wiley, 2017) and a co-host of a podcast ‘Disasters: Deconstructed’.