Story in the Public Square

Noses—and their ability to detect smell—may not be as celebrated in words and songs as our other human senses—but Saskia Wilson-Brown says scents tell stories, too. 

Wilson-Brown began her career in music video and production design, going on to serve as festival co-director for Los Angeles’ seminal Silver Lake Film Festival, launching the festival’s visionary media arm, MP4Fest, in 2005.  She went on to work as an independent producer and a film distribution strategist, producing events including the Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit, several of Lance Weiler’s DIY Days events, and the TEDActive Innovation Lab.  Wilson-Brown founded The Institute for Art and Olfaction in 2012.  A 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization, the institute is devoted to experimentation and cross-media projects with a focus on scent.  In 2013, she created and launched one of the institute’s flagship programs, The Art and Olfaction Awards, an international, blindly judged awards mechanism for independent and artisan perfumers, and experimental practitioners with scent.  In 2020, she launched the institute’s online division, allowing it to continue its mission to facilitate access to the tools and information of perfumery, while reaching an even wider audience through online education.  In 2019 and 2020, Wilson-Brown was a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London, teaching about scent-making as a creative practice in the MA Fashion program.  She is currently producing a documentary about ownership and historic reconstruction in the field of perfumery, while pursuing a Ph.D. about the relationship between perfume, access and power.  She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her MFA at Central Saint Martin’s College in London.

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Russia’s war in Ukraine has killed thousands while displacing millions of Ukrainians.  For many Western journalists, the war has made it untenable to report from Russia amid a crack-down on independent journalism.  Anton Troianovski has seen Russia up close, reporting there first for The Washington Post and, now, as the bureau chief for The New York Times.

Anton Troianovski has lived in Moscow since January 2018 and has traveled to three Russian-controlled disputed territories, from Crimea to the Kuril Islands, delving into the Kremlin’s geopolitical gamesmanship.  He previously spent nine years at The Wall Street Journal and was based in Berlin from 2013 to 2017 to cover two German elections, two Olympic Games, the Ukraine crisis, migration and populist politics in Europe.  Troianovski began his journalism career as a photographer for the Webster-Kirkwood Times in Missouri.  He was born in Moscow and grew up in Heidelberg, Germany, and in St. Louis.  He holds a degree in social studies from Harvard University, where he wrote a senior thesis on the Kremlin’s push for influence in cyberspace.

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It’s been said that truth is the first casualty of war. As Russia wages its war in Ukraine, Darren Linvill sounds the alarm that social media, which has long had its own problems with the truth, is again a platform for Russian disinformation.

Linvill is a social media forensics expert and Associate Professor at Clemson University.  He investigates data messaging and the impacts of inauthentic behavior on social media networks, exploring the exploitation of trust and social capital in social networks.  He also examines misinformation and disinformation in the context of social media forensics and data monitoring.  He has collaborated with social media companies and government entities to expose fake accounts and counterfeit messaging.  Linvill’s research also examines social media users’ connections with troll farms or robots disguised as other users that disseminate propaganda to promote specific ideas and encourage actions or reactions.  Linvill uses the Social Media Listening Center at Clemson University to access data and monitor and analyze a range of topics including the spread of white supremacy to the influence of foreign states on American conversations.  In 2020, he and colleague Patrick Warren partnered with the Commission on Presidential Debates to monitor social media conversations around the debates and help safeguard the 2020 election.  They have also worked with Twitter and Facebook to suspend hundreds of social media accounts they have attributed to a range of bad actors, including the Russian Internet Research Agency.  Linvill has published many articles on misinformation and has been a contributor to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Inside Higher Ed, The State, CNN, NPR, ABC, NBC, WFAE and others.

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Democratic backsliding isn’t limited to weak governments abroad.  Rachel Kleinfeld warns about the dangers facing American democracy, including the growing acceptance of intimidation and even political violence in some communities.

Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on issues of rule of law, security, and governance in post-conflict countries, fragile states, and states in transition.  Her work bridges comparative and U.S. democracies through her service on the National Task Force on Election Crises and as the former CEO of the Truman National Security Project.  As the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, she spent nearly a decade leading a movement of national security, political, and military leaders working to promote people and policies that strengthen security, stability, rights, and human dignity in America and around the world.  In 2011, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton appointed Kleinfeld to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the secretary of state quarterly, a role she served through 2014.  Kleinfeld has consulted on rule of law reform for the World Bank, the European Union, the OECD, the Open Society Institute, and other institutions, and has briefed multiple government agencies in the United States and abroad.  She is the author of “Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform,” which was chosen by Foreign Affairs magazine as one of the best foreign policy books of 2012.  She has also co-authored “Let There Be Light: Electrifying the Developing World with Markets and Distributed Generation.”

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Traumatic brain injuries can have lifelong impacts on cognitive and psychological function.  Dr. Eve Valera studies these injuries among survivors of domestic violence and says they have serious mental health impacts.

Valera is an associate professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has been studying domestic violence for nearly 25 years and is recognized internationally for her work in understanding the effects of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) sustained from intimate partner violence. Her current work uses a range of methodologies to understand the neural, cognitive, and psychological consequences of such TBIs. She published one of the first studies examining the prevalence TBIs in the context of intimate partner violence and their relationship to cognitive and psychological functioning.  Valera has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Medical School Center of Excellence in Women’s Health and the Rappaport Research Fellowship in Neurology to support her work.  She continues to disseminate her research at through lectures for academics and other justice-involved personnel, at police departments and for front-line staff for intimate partner violence support and shelter, and to women with lived experience.

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Cartoons communicate ideas in ways words cannot.  Canadian artist and humorist John Atkinson shares his unique take on the world through his cartoon series, “Wrong Hands” creations.

Born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, John Atkinson has been writing and drawing his cartoon series, “Wrong Hands,” for over ten years.  After graduating from the University of Ottawa with a degree in fine arts, Atkinson began his comic series for children.  After posting his work for a wider audience, “Wrong Hands,” online, it was quickly embraced by a loyal following worldwide, with nearly eight million fans visiting the site.  In addition to being syndicated on Andrews McMeel’s site GoComics, “Wrong Hands” was featured weekly in TIME magazine for over two years.  In 2018, his incredibly popular series “abridged classics” was expanded into a book and published by HarperCollins.  The book featured dozens of new abridgments and unique illustrations for both domestic and international markets.  “Wrong Hands” has regularly appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and textbooks worldwide, while several of his comics have been featured on major online sites including Upworthy, Bored Panda and Literary Hub, and Atkinson has collaborated with Chanel Paris, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Janis Ian, and the Quevedo Institute of Humour Arts in Madrid, Spain.  He is the author of “Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn’t.”

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A decade ago, social media could be seen as a well-spring of democratic innovation and potential.  Events of the last six years may have changed the public’s perception on that score, but Katie Harbath warns that social media platforms have much more work to do to protect democracy in the United States and around the world.

Harbath is a global leader who works at the intersection of elections, democracy, and tech.  Most recently, she was a public policy director at Facebook where she was credited with building out and leading a global team responsible for managing elections over the course of 10 years.  She played a significant role in building another team of over 30 people that worked to engage governments and elected officials from around the world at the local, regional, and national levels, in using Facebook and Instagram to connect and engage with constituents.  She worked closely with product development teams to deploy civic engagement and election integrity products, including transparency features for political ads, developing and implementing election policies, building teams to support government, political, and advocacy partners, and working with policymakers to shape election regulations online.  Harbath was involved in this work in major elections for every country around the globe, including the United States, India, Brazil, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Philippines, and Mexico.  Before joining Facebook, Harbath held senior strategic digital roles at the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, DCI Group and multiple campaigns.  She sits on the boards of the National Conference on Citizenship, Democracy Works and the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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Tyranny comes in many forms, but its central elements of violence, lost glories, and corruption seem to repeat.  Ruth Ben-Ghiat warns that autocrats have risen frequently from democracy over the last century by relying on a simple playbook that has proved as durable as it is menacing.

Ben-Ghiat is a historian and commentator on fascism, authoritarian leaders, and propaganda and the threats they present to democracies.  She brings historical perspective to her analyses of current events on MSNBC Opinion Columnist and author or editor of six books, with over 100 op-eds and essays in CNN, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.  Her insight into the authoritarian playbook has made her an expert source for television, radio, podcasts, and online events around the globe.  She grew up in Pacific Palisades, California, where many intellectuals who fled Nazism resettled, which sparked her interest in the subject.  Ben-Ghiat teaches History and Italian Studies at New York University and an Advisor to Protect Democracy and her work has been supported by Fulbright, Guggenheim, and other fellowships.  Her books “Fascist Modernities” and “Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema” detail what happens to societies when authoritarian governments take hold and explore the appeal of strongmen to collaborators and followers.

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So much of our modern life is built upon simplifying the complex.  We reduce social interactions to likes and follows on social media and dilute the “news” in our favorite echo chambers.  But Azar Nafisi warns that life is not simple and the complexity found in great literature is ultimately liberating of the mind and essential to the health of our democracy.

Dr. Azar Nafisi is best known as the author of the national bestseller “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books,” a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students.  Born and raised in Iran, she came to the United States to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Afterward, Nafisi returned to Iran and taught English at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil and did not resume teaching until 1987. She taught at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai, and went on to a fellowship at Oxford University, teaching and conducting a series of lectures on culture and the important role of Western literature and culture in Iran after the Revolution in 1979.  Nafisi returned to the United States in 1997—earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran’s intellectuals, youth, and especially young women.  Nafisi was a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, where she taught aesthetics, culture, and literature, and taught courses on the relation between culture and politics.  She also served as Director of The Dialogue Project & Cultural Conversations there.  She has lectured and written extensively in English and Persian on the political implications of literature and culture, as well as the human rights of the Iranian women and girls and the important role they play in the process of change for pluralism and open society in Iran.  She has been consulted on issues related to Iran and human rights both by the policymakers and various human rights organizations across the world.

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America is a study in contrasts: from the pomp and circumstance of a presidential inauguration to the reality of hunger across the land, Maddie McGarvey documents life in the United States as only a photojournalist can.

Maddie McGarvey is a freelance photographer based in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication in 2012 with a degree in Photojournalism, interned at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011, and worked as a staff photographer at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont before returning to the Midwest.  In 2014 she was named an Emerging Talent for Getty Reportage and in 2015, she was selected as one of Magnum’s 30 Photographers under 30. In 2016, she was chosen as one of TIME magazine's 51 Instagram Photographers to follow in the USA and was recognized by Picture of the Year International for her campaign work. She works for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Time, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, AARP, NPR, ESPN and her work has appeared in Mother Jones Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and FiveThirtyEight, among others.

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