Virtual Discussion

The Shift: Shifting Forward?

01/28 Friday | 4pm

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NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, New_Public, The Social Science Research Council, and The Knight Foundation invite you to a discussion on “Shifting Forward?” in the series, “The Shift,” featuring Mindy Fullilove, Devon Powers, and Erica Charters

“The Shift” explores the social implications of the current shift of public life to digital space in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each episode focuses on one big theme teasing out bigger issues and questions. It features researchers, practitioners, thought leaders, and activists in conversation who observe and comment on this process of shifting.

This particular discussion will focus on what’s to come as we begin to shift, not back into normalcy, but into the new reality that looms ahead. COVID-19 has altered nearly every element of our lives in ways we have never seen before, and the question on everyone’s minds seems to be: what will our future look like? What do we need to keep from the time of collective trauma? And to whom or what can we look to find guidance for mapping out our collective and individual pathways forward?

The conversation will be illustrated live by Jojo Karlin.

Mindy Fullilove is a social psychologist who explores the ties between environment and mental health. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College and her MS and MD degrees from Columbia University. She completed residency at NY Hospital Westchester Division and Montefiore and is board certified in psychiatry. With her colleagues at the Cities Research Group and the University of Orange, Mindy explores the consequences of social fracture for our society and our health and seeks ways to reconnect the broken parts. Prior to joining the New School full-time in 2016, Mindy taught at Columbia University and was a lecturer at Parsons. She has published over 100 scientific papers and eight books, including the highly regarded Urban Restoration Trilogy.

Devon Powers is Associate Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. Her research focuses on consumer culture, cultural circulation, and the future. She is the author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future (2019), Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (2013), and the editor of Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture (2010, with Melissa Aronczyk). Her writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular venues, including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Wired, New Media & Society, and Journal of Consumer Culture.

Erica Charters is a historian of disease, war, and empires.  She is Professor of the Global History of Medicine at the University of Oxford, where she is also Director of Oxford’s Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, and co-Director of Oxford’s Centre for Global History.  She has published on the history of colonial medicine as well as the history of imperial war and its relationship to disease.  Her recent publications include a special journal issue on the history of epidemics in the context of COVID-19 and an article on ‘How epidemics end’.  She is currently coordinating a multi-disciplinary project on ‘How Epidemics End   

Jojo Karlin has been drawing since she was young, but during her graduate studies, she saw new possibilities for using art in her academic notes. Jojo, Digital Scholarship Specialist at NYU Libraries, is interested in ways our impressions of people influence and contribute to our understanding of their ideas. Her visual note-taking is a multimodal process, and instead of writing words exclusively, she draws as she listens, reads, and processes concepts. She won a prize presenting her illustrated dissertation, “Yours Sincerely, Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf’s Poetics of Letter Writing,” at the fourth annual Dissertation Showcase on May 19, 2021, and was recently profiled in IFA Contemporary. She posts notes on Twitter @jojokarlin and Instagram @jojokarlin.

Mona Sloane is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, Faculty at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) and The GovLab, and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is principal investigator on multiple research projects on AI and society, and holds an affiliation with the Tübingen AI Center at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Mona also is the convenor of the IPK Co-Opting AI series and serves as editor of the technology section at Public Books. Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane.

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