COVIDCalls

EP #441 - 3.1.2022 - Disasterology w/Samantha Montano

Today I welcome disaster researcher and co-founder of the group Disaster Researchers for Justice Samantha Montano.

Samantha Montano is an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Her first book is: DISASTEROLOGY: Dispatches from The Front Lines of The Climate Crisis comes out this August. She is also author of recent essay: Not All Disasters Are Disasters: Pandemic Categorization and Its Consequences with Amanda Savitt on SSRC Disaster Studies; and co-founder of Disaster Researchers for Justice.

EP #440 - 3.1.2022 - Vaccine Misinformation Interventions

Today I welcome Kimberley Bissell and Jiyoung Lee.

Kim Bissell (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is the Southern Progress Endowed Professor in Magazine Journalism and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. She is also the Director of the college’s research institute, the Institute for Communication and Information Research. She has done research in health and sports communication for more than 20 years and has received external funding for her work in health disparities and children.   Much of her research examines the social effects of media specific to health outcomes in children.  

Jiyoung Lee (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, Department of Journalism and Creative Media. Her research is at the heart of emerging media effects including artificial intelligence and augmented reality on persuasion communication. Specifically, she studies human-computer interaction in the context of medical/risk misinformation, how new media affect polarization, and how media literacy interventions should be designed to engage the public in accurate information about health risks. Her work has appeared in several top communication journals, including Media Psychology, Health Communication, Behaviour & Information Technology, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. 

EP #439 - 3.1.2022 - A Follow Up w/Kathleen Tierney

Today I welcome disaster sociologist and author of Disasters: Sociological Aspects Kathleen Tierney back to COVIDCalls.

Kathleen Tierney is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology and research professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 2003 to 2017, she was director of the university’s Natural Hazards Center. 

She was lead author (with co-authors Michael Lindell and Ronald Perry) of Facing the Unexpected: Disaster Preparedness and Response in the United States (Joseph Henry Press 2001), co-editor (with William Waugh) of Emergency Management: Principles and Practice for Local Governments (ICMA Press, 2007), and author of The Social Roots of Risk (Stanford University Press 2014). Her most recent book, Disasters: Sociological Aspects was published in 2019 by Polity Press.

She has received recognition for her contributions to the study of hazards and disasters, including the Fred Buttel Award for Distinguished Contributions from the Environment and Society section of the American Sociological Association and the Charles Fritz Award from the International Sociological Association’s International Research Committee on Disasters. She has served as a board member and vice president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and has been named an honorary lifetime EERI member—one of only two sociologists to receive that honor.

EP #438 - 2.28.2022 - Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis

Today I welcome Jonathon Catlin and Benjamin Davis to discuss their work Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis.

Jonathon Catlin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. His dissertation is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought, spanning from the rise of fascism to climate change, with a focus on the writings of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and intellectual responses to the Holocaust. He has applied his critical work on the concept of catastrophe in public writings on the pandemic through a series of collaborations with Benjamin Davis published in Public Seminar, as well as an article in Memory Studies that interrogates the "multidirectional" memory politics of the Covid-AIDS analogy in an American context.

Benjamin P. Davis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. His current research brings together human rights and decolonial thinking. It includes the articles "What Could Human Rights Do? A Decolonial Inquiry" (Transmodernity, 2020), “The Promises of Standing Rock” (Humanity, 2021), and "Human Rights and Caribbean Philosophy: Implications for Teaching" (Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2021). Outside of his work on human rights, his research considers the concepts of Édouard Glissant and Simone Weil with a view toward political belonging in the present.

EP #437 - 2.27.2022 - The New York City COVID-19 Oral History, Memory, and Narrative Archive

Today I welcome Ryan Hagen, co-director of the New York City COVID-19 Oral History, Memory, and Narrative Archive project at Columbia University

Dr. Ryan Hagen is a Lecturer in the department of Sociology at Columbia University. He studies risk and the social construction of knowledge, focusing on how people and institutions anticipate future dangers. He is a co-director of the New York City COVID-19 Oral History, Memory, and Narrative Archive project at Columbia University, which since April of 2020 has conducted hundreds of interviews with New Yorkers, tracing their evolving experiences of the pandemic.

EP #436 - 2.27.2022 - Global Hibakusha w/Bo Jacobs

Today I welcome nuclear historian Robert Jacobs, author of Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha.

Robert Jacobs is a Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University. Jacobs is the author of The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010), (also available in a Japanese translation published by Gaifusha in 2013), and the editor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb (2010), and numerous other books and journal articles on nuclear history. Beginning in 2010, Jacobs co-founded the Global Hibakusha Project. The project conducts field research at radiation affected sites and in radiation affected communities around the world. His book based on this research, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha will be published by Yale University Press in 2022.

EP #435 - 2.26.2022 - Long COVID w/patient and advocate Charlie McCone

Today I welcome Long COVID patient and advocate Charlie McCone.

Charlie McCone is a 32 year old long COVID patient and advocate based in San Francisco, CA who was struck with a 'mild case' of the virus in March 2020, and has suffered severe debilitating symptoms ongoing two years now. Prior to illness he was in the prime of his life with no health issues to speak of. He was an active tennis player, cyclist and musician, who biked 10 miles a day and ran 10 miles a week, and worked full-time as a non-profit professional. He is currently on short-term disability, is severely house-bound and relies on his long-term partner as a full-time care-taker. Like many Long Covid patients, he has seen over 50 doctors and health care providers since his illness, and many of Long Covid symptoms remain unexplained and untreated.

EP #434 - 2.25.2022 - Researcher’s Roundtable w/Guest Host Jacob Steere-Williams

EP #433 - 2.25.2022 - Thurka Sangaramoorthy w_Guest Host Adia Benton

Today I talk with anthropologist Thurka Sangaramoorthy.

Thurka Sangaramoorthy is a cultural and medical anthropologist and public health researcher with 22 years of experience conducting community-engaged ethnographic research, including rapid assessments, among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean. Her work is broadly concerned with power and subjectivity in global economies of care. She has worked at this intersection on diverse topics, including global health and migration, HIV/STD, and environmental health disparities. She is the author of two books: Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research (Routledge, 2020) and Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers, 2014), and has two books in press: She’s Positive: The Extraordinary Lives of Black Women Living with HIV (Aevo, 2022) and Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Dr. Sangaramoorthy is Co-Chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Members Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee and a Board member of the Society for Medical Anthropology; she serves as Associate Editor of Public Health Reports, Editorial Board Member of American Anthropologist, and the inaugural Social, Behavioral, and Qualitative Research Section Editor for PLOS Global Public Health. She is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. 

EP #432 - 2.24.2022 - Philsophy and the Pandemic Part II

Today I welcome philosopher and teacher Keith Maggie Brown.

Keith “Maggie” Brown is a Denton-based poet-philosopher, spiritual counselor, and mind-walker. Besides their academic co-publications and intermittent podcasting, Maggie creates aphorisms to encourage their friends on the way to self-actualization. They have directed a few conferences at the University of North Texas in Denton since 1998: the North Texas Heidegger Symposium; Process Studies in Pedagogy; and the UNT Comics, Graphic Novel, and Serial Arts Studies Workshop. Besides being a lifetime member of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, they also are a member in good standing with other philosophy groups like the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy as well as the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. 

Along with mentoring youth who want to practice philosophizing as a way of life, Maggie works to make ancient texts more accessible for 21st-century readers. Among his collaborations are a translation of the Dao De Jing with Prof. LU Wenlong of Dalian University and Greek Natural Philosophy: The Presocratics and Their Importance for Environmental Philosophy with Profs. J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren.  

After completing their M.A. in Philosphy (2016), they now are close to completing their dissertation for the Ph.D. at UNT-Denton: “Untying the [K]nots that Bind: Existential Elucidation and the Transgressive Life.” Maggie’s work focuses on queering academic research and weirding professional philosophy.