Story in the Public Square

The partisan split on climate change is unmistakable.  Democrats view the climate as one of their top-two national issues.  Republicans tend to worry more about the economic disruption that may result from efforts to reduce carbon emissions.  Dr. Michael Klare argues that for the a-political men and women who lead the U.S. military, the challenge of defending the nation and its interests in an age of climate change is daunting. 

Klare is the Five College Professor Emeritus of Peace and World Security Studies, a joint appointment at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  He serves as the director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College and is the author of fifteen books, including “Resource Wars,” “Blood and Oil,” and “The Race for What’s Left.”  Klare is the defense correspondent for The Nation and has written for Current History, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the New York Times, Scientific American, and Technology Review.

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While the United States contains less than five percent of the planet’s population, it has nearly one-quarter of the world’s prison population.  Elizabeth Hinton traces the politics and policy decisions since President Lyndon’s Johnson’s War on Poverty that created the nation’s reliance on mass incarceration.

Elizabeth Hinton is Professor in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the 20th-century United States.  In her award-winning book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that made the United States home to the largest prison system in world history.  It has received numerous awards, including being named to the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2016.

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In the course of producing “Story in the Public Square” each week, co-hosts Jim Ludes and G. Wayne Miller revel in the chance to sit down with incredibly gifted story-tellers and artists, to hear them describe their craft, and to benefit from their unique perspectives on the world.  Sara Jordenö is all of those things and more. 

Jordenö is a filmmaker, visual artist and researcher whose work intersects art, activism, visual ethnography and cinema.  Born in Sweden, Jordenö is active in Europe and the U.S., working with film, drawing, animation, video and installation.  Jordenö directed the documentary feature film “KIKI” about a youth-led social movement for LGBTQ+ youth of color in New York City, working in in close collaboration with community leader Twiggy Pucci Garcon.  KIKI premiered in the U.S. documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and went on to screen at more than 80 film festivals around the world, earning the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at the Full Frame Documentary Festival and a nomination for the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction award.  Jordenö is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Animation and Video at Rhode Island School of Design, teaching BA, BFA, MA and MFA level courses in documentary and experimental film theory and production, site-specific participatory artistic practices and artistic fieldwork in dialogue with anthropological research methods.

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Climate change is reshaping America’s coast-line—from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico; from Staten Island New York to California.  For most of us, the change is invisible, but Elizabeth Rush tells us that is, in part, because we don’t know what we’re seeing. 

Rush is the author of “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and “Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar.”  Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution.  She served as the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Bates College from 2015 to 2017 and currently teaches creative nonfiction courses at Brown University that carry the environmental sciences and digital technologies into the humanities classroom.  

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It wasn’t so long ago that small and mid-sized American communities were served by multiple news outlets.  Penny Abernathy warns of the expansion of “news deserts,” or areas without dedicated local coverage because of shifting technology and consumer behavior. 

Penelope (Penny) Abernathy is the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina and former executive at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. A journalism professional with more than 30 years of experience as a reporter, editor and senior media business executive, she specializes in preserving quality journalism by helping news organizations succeed economically in the digital environment.  Her research focuses on the implications of the digital revolution for news organizations, the information needs of communities and the emergence of news deserts in the United States.  She authored “The Expanding News Deserts,” a major 2018 report that documents the decline and loss of local news organizations in the U.S., and was the lead co-author of “The Strategic Digital Media Entrepreneur” which explores in-depth the emerging business models of successful media enterprises.

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War stories—whether the stuff of memoir or fictional portrayals of people at war—are mainstays of literature across human history, and today, that extends to film.  Mark Jacobson is both a historian and a veteran who seizes on the power of modern storytelling in film to educate the next generation about the realities of war.

Dr. Jacobson is the John J. McCloy ’16 Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy at Amherst College and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He has over twenty years of experience in the federal government, international organizations, and academia working on some of the most complex and politically sensitive national security issues facing the United States.  Since November 2017, Jacobson has served as a senior policy advisor at Kasowitz Benson Torrres LLC where, as a part of the Government Affairs and Strategic Counsel group, he helps to advise on and resolve complex and politically sensitive issues for clients, as well as representing clients before the U.S. government.  Jacobson was previously appointed as the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense and Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and served in Kabul, Afghanistan as the Deputy NATO Representative and Director of International Affairs at the International Security Assistance Force.

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History, as a subject of study, is more than a linear progression of events—it’s ideas, currents of thought, institutions of learning, social movements, moral awakenings and more.  In a brief, new book, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen traces the history of ideas that shaped the United States from its beginnings. 

Ratner-Rosenhagen is the Merle Curti Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison).  She specializes in U.S. intellectual and cultural history and focuses on the history of philosophy, political and social theory, religion, literature and print culture, the visual arts, and the transatlantic flow of intellectual and cultural movements.  She is the author of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas and has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history.  Along with her academic scholarship and teaching, Ratner-Rosenhagen is the founder of the Intellectual History Group at UW-Madison, an informal, interdisciplinary working group for faculty and graduate students interested in the varieties of intellectual history and history of ideas.

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Many people today can mock appeals for understanding between partisans with the phrase, “can’t we all just get along?” For Dr. Linda Tropp however, understanding the dynamics of inter-group conflict and facilitating positive dialogue has become her life’s work. 

Tropp is a professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Her research focuses on expectations and outcomes of intergroup contact, interpretations of intergroup relationships, and responses to prejudice and disadvantage. Tropp received the 2012 Distinguished Academic Outreach Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for excellence in the application of scientific knowledge to advance the public good.  She has co-authored and edited several books, including “When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact.”

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In a meeting on Capitol Hill 15 years ago, a respected foreign policy analyst said that most national security assessments out of Washington ignored the elephant in the room: the United States and the impact of our domestic politics on the state of the world.  While Tom Nichols wasn’t in the room that day, he brings a rigorous analytical mind steeped in national security to his analysis of the world around us. 

Nichols is a U.S. Naval War College University Professor, and an adjunct professor at both the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and the Harvard Extension School.  He specializes in Russian affairs, nuclear strategy, NATO issues, and is a nationally-known commentator on U.S. politics and national security.  Nichols was a staff member in the United States Senate, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Harvard Kennedy School, and previously taught at Dartmouth, La Salle University, and Georgetown.  He is also a five-time undefeated ‘Jeopardy!’ champion, and was noted in the ‘Jeopardy!’ Hall of Fame after his 1994 appearances as one of the all-time best players of the game.  Nichols is the author of “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.”

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There are some people who believe that they are prepared to critique teachers’ performances because they went to elementary school themselves.  The confidence of what seemed to work for us as individuals fuels a lot of stress for teachers.  The same can be said about parenting.  Nothing saps the confidence of the uninitiated quite like the reality of actually becoming a parent.  KJ Dell’ Antonia however, tells parents to cut themselves some slack. 

Dell’Antonia is a former New York Times reporter, editor and lead blogger of The Times’ “The Motherlode Blog,” and current Times contributor.  She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, “How to be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute” and the forthcoming novel “The Chicken Sisters.”  Dell’Antonia is a graduate of Kansas State University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in business and physical anthropology, and the University of Chicago Law School.  She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and four children.

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