Issue 2 Contributors
Authors
Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her website. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her two newest books on art’s public purpose—The Wave and The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future were published in spring 2013. Prior books include New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development; Community, Culture and Globalization; an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation; Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture; and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the United States and Europe on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She serves as Chief Policy Wonk of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture and President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center. She was named a 2015 Purpose Prize Fellow for her work with the USDAC. She was named one of the YBCA 100 2016.
Elisabeth Farrell is a Project Director at the University of New Hampshire’s Sustainability Institute, where she has worked for over a decade, managing projects and initiatives related to sustainable food systems, culture and sustainability, energy and climate change, and biodiversity. Her work over the years has helped to advance many Institute endeavors, including the book The Sustainable Learning Community: One University’s Journey to the Future (2009) and the University’s undergraduate degree in EcoGastronomy. At present, she devotes much of her time to managing efforts for the Food Solutions New England (FSNE) network. Elisabeth holds a Master of Public Administration degree and graduate certificate in Sustainability Politics and Policy from the University of New Hampshire, a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing and literature from the Bennington College Writing Seminars and a bachelor degree in anthropology from the University of New Hampshire.
Tom Kelly is the Executive Director of the University of New Hampshire’s Sustainability Institute and the University’s Chief Sustainability Officer. Co-editor and co-author of The Sustainable Learning Community: One University’s Journey to the Future (2009), Dr. Kelly has been working in the field of higher education and sustainability for more than twenty years in the US and abroad. Current activities include working with UNH colleagues and many related partners on projects across the university’s curriculum, operations, research and engagement activities; examples include developing regional approaches to sustainable food through Food Solutions New England and energy systems through Climate Solutions New England, incubating sustainability science, and emphasizing the central place of culture in sustainability and sustainability education and pedagogy. In addition to an undergraduate and master’s degree in musical composition and conducting, he holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Joanne Burke is the Thomas W. Haas Professor in Sustainable Food Systems at the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute and Clinical Assistant Professor and Director of the UNH Dietetic Internship. Dr. Burke provides leadership to engage the University community in efforts to advance sustainable agriculture, food choices, nutrition, and economic and social wellbeing on campus and beyond. She is a member of the FSNE Process and Network Teams, and also serves on teams to support state-based food system planning in New Hampshire through the New Hampshire Food Alliance. Her areas of interest focus on community nutrition with an emphasis on food system capacity, food security and food system sustainability, food and nutrition practices, racial equity and social justice, and the integration of research into the dietetics and nutrition curriculum. In 2013, Dr. Burke received the Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group’s prestigious Excellence in Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Award.
Curtis Ogden is a Senior Associate at the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC). Curtis brings to IISC his experience in education, community development and organizing, leadership development, and program design. Much of his work at IISC entails consulting with cross-sector multi-stakeholder efforts to strengthen and transform food, education, economic and civic systems at local, state, regional, and national levels, including: Food Solutions New England, Vermont Farm to Plate Network, Hunts Point Resiliency, National Public Education Support Fund, Cancer Free Economy Network, and Inter-Institutional Network for Food, Agriculture, and Sustainability (INFAS). Through his role at IISC, Curtis provides design and facilitation support to the FSNE Process and Network Teams and is lead facilitator/trainer of the FSNE Network Leadership Institute. In addition to his work at IISC, Curtis is on the Advisory Board of EmbraceRace and a member of the Research Alliance for Regenerative Economics.
Karen Spiller is Principal of KAS Consulting, which provides mission-based consulting with a focus on resource matching and strategic planning for health and equity-focused initiatives. She works with diverse stakeholders, including community residents and businesses, state and local agencies, policy makers, corporations, foundations, community-based organizations, and healthcare providers. Karen serves on the FSNE Process and Network Teams, and is FSNE’s Massachusetts Ambassador. She also serves organizations in various roles that include The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts, and Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group.
The Endurance of the Color Line
Soya Jung is senior partner at ChangeLab, a grassroots political lab that explores how US demographic change is affecting racial justice politics, with a strategic focus on Asian American identity. She has been active in the progressive movement for the last twenty years. During the ’90s, she worked as a reporter at the International Examiner, communications and policy staff for the Washington State House Democratic Caucus, and executive director of the Washington Alliance for Immigrant and Refugee Justice. She was the founding chair of the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition, which formed in 1996 to restore food and cash assistance for low-income immigrants and refugees in Washington State. During the 2000s, Soya was the director of grantmaking at the Social Justice Fund, a public foundation supporting progressive organizations in the Northwest, and consulted for various institutions. She also serves as the board chair of Grassroots International, which funds resource rights in the Global South.
Responses to the Inaugural Article on Othering & Belonging
Susan Eaton is director of the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy at the Heller School. At the Sillerman Center, Susan and her colleagues engage funders and their advisors, socially concerned scholars, and nonprofit practitioners to increase and enhance grant making to social justice causes. Susan is an author, most recently of the book Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees and America at Its Best about efforts that welcome and incorporate immigrants into their new communities across the United States. Prior to her appointment at Heller in 2015, Susan was research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Her writing has appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications, including the New York Times, the Sunday Boston Globe Magazine, the Nation, Education Week, Education Next, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Law and Policy Review, Race Poverty and the Environment, and many others. Susan holds a doctorate in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
A Roman Catholic theologian and social ethicist, Alex Mikulich devotes his scholarship and activism to address white privilege and racism in the Catholic Church and society. He is coauthor of The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance (Palgrave, 2013). He coedited and contributed to Interrupting White Privilege: Catholic Theologians Break the Silence (Orbis, 2007), which won the 2008 Theological Book of the Year from the College Theology Society. He is an invited affiliate member of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium. He frequently serves as a keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, and consultant for institutions seeking to develop deeper institutional commitment to racial equity. He is assistant director of the Office of Mission and Ministry and director of the FaithActs Youth Theology Institute at Loyola University New Orleans.
David Clingingsmith is associate professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University. He is an empirical economist whose research focuses on the social aspects of economic behavior. His work uses field and lab experiments as well as observational data. His research publications and writing have appeared in outlets such as Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Economic Journal, and The Journal of Human Resources. Clingingsmith received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University and also holds an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Since his appointment to the Weatherhead School of Management, he has taught Advanced Topics and Writing in Economics; Designing Experiments for Social Science, Policy, and Management; World Economic History; Intermediate Microeconomics; and The Economy in the American Century. In 2009, he received the Explorations Prize from the Economic History Association.
Dennis Parker (@DennisDParker) is director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, leading its efforts in combating discrimination and addressing other issues with a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Parker oversees work to combat the “school-to-prison” pipeline, the profiling of airline passengers subjected to searches and wrongfully placed on watch lists, and the racial bias in the criminal justice system. Prior to joining the ACLU, Parker was the chief of the Civil Rights Bureau in the Office of New York State Attorney General under Eliot Spitzer. He previously spent fourteen years at the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. Parker has also worked with the New York Legal Aid Society. He teaches Race, Poverty, and Constitutional Law at New York Law School. He graduated from Harvard Law School and Middlebury College.
Explicit bigotry goes mainstream: How can we support our children?
Allison Briscoe-Smith completed her internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, at San Francisco General Hospital, where she specialized in child-parent psychotherapy and working with traumatized populations. Throughout her training, her studies focused on child psychopathology and diversity issues. After her postdoctoral work, Dr. Briscoe-Smith was the program director of a mental health program serving children as they entered the Alameda County foster care system. She was a professor of child psychology at Palo Alto University for four years and served as the director of Children’s Hospital Oakland’s Center for the Vulnerable Child for three years. She is now an adjunct professor at the Wright Institute and a consultant to nonprofit organizations seeking to become trauma-informed and culturally accountable. Dr. Briscoe-Smith’s research has focused on trauma/post-traumatic stress disorder and how children understand race. She has worked broadly on these topics and has served many families and schools on matters salient to these issues.
Maureen Costello brings over thirty years of education and publishing experience to her roles as director of Teaching Tolerance and member of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s senior leadership team. Beginning with her years as a history and economics teacher at Staten Island’s Notre Dame Academy High School, Costello has committed her career to fostering the ideals of democracy and citizenship in young people. After leaving the classroom, she directed the Newsweek Education Program, which was dedicated to engaging high school and college students in issues of public concern. Immediately before joining Teaching Tolerance, she oversaw development of the 2010 Census in Schools program for Scholastic Inc., in partnership with the US Census Bureau. Costello is a graduate of the New School University and the New York University Graduate School of Arts & Science.
Subverting Established Views: oppose othering!
Rebecca Podlech was born in East Germany in 1986 and now lives in Berlin. She studied translation, Slavic literature, film, and history in Munich (Germany) and Prague. Her master’s thesis examines women filmmakers in Socialist Czechoslovakia and the subversiveness from within an oppressive patriarchal system. After jobs at law firms, parliament, university, and as a freelance translator, Rebecca now works for different film festivals as an editor and member of selection committees and coordinates the goEast project OPPOSE OTHERING!. Her main areas of interest are performatism, strategies of opposition, resistance in the arts, and transgenerational legacies in central and eastern Europe.
Susie Cagle is an independent journalist and illustrator, and a frequent contributor to ProPublica, the New York Times, the Guardian, and many others. She was previously a 2016 John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford and a technology columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. She is currently working on an illustrated book about boom-and-bust economics in California. Susie’s work has been featured on National Public Radio and in Wired, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, and has been honored with awards from the Online News Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. Susie has a masters in journalism from Columbia University, which still doesn’t offer a cartooning class.
Artists
Sara Rahbar (cover and Responses to the Problem of Othering) is a contemporary mixed media artist, living in New York. Originally from Tehran, her work stems from personal experiences and explores ideas of national belonging. All images of Rahbar’s work are courtesy of the artist and Carbon 12.
Damon Davis (Belonging as a Cultural Right) is a multi-media American artist, musician and filmmaker based in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a founder of Far-Fetched, a St. Louis-based artist collective, and his work, All Hands on Deck, helped shape public perception of the Ferguson Uprising as part of the broader international human rights movemen
Arash Yaghmaian (The Endurance of the Color Line) is a visual artist who focuses on socio-political and cultural issues. He was born in Iran and he lives and works in New York. His personal life experiences in dealing with addiction, war, and migration have taught him to have a deep appreciation and understanding of life. Through his own personal struggles he has learned how to capture images of his subjects with dignity and empathy. His work explores and captures social and cultural realities through visual documentary storytelling and fine art.
Yto Barrada (Explicit bigotry goes mainstream: How can we support our children?) studied history and political science at the Sorbonne and photography in New York. Her work — including photography, film, sculpture, prints and installations, — began by exploring the peculiar situation of her hometown Tangier. Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Witte de With (Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and the 2007 and 2011 Venice Biennale.
Editors
Andrew Grant-Thomas is codirector at EmbraceRace, an online community of parents, teachers, and other caregivers to children. He is also a race and social justice consultant with a wide range of educational, nonprofit, philanthropic, and research institutions. Previously, Andrew has directed work at Proteus Fund, the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, where he was editor-in-chief of its journal, Race/Ethnicity. Andrew earned his BA in Literature from Yale University, his MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Rachelle Galloway-Popotas oversees strategic communications at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley, where she helps amplify the Institute’s work through a variety of tools and projects, including publications, online media, and events. Rachelle oversees the editorial and aesthetics for all the Institute’s publications and multimedia work, and has been the curator and lead on several of the Institute’s projects including the Othering & Belonging Conference and multimedia journal. Rachelle has worked in the nonprofit communications field for almost 20 years. She specializes in developing a communications infrastructure that will support growth and innovation, and being an organizational storyteller, working with organizations to help define and develop their own institutional voice and identity. Rachelle has bachelor degrees in political science and graphic design. Rachelle is a member of the Caddo Nation.
Stephen Menendian is the assistant director and director of research at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Stephen leads and oversees many of the Institute’s projects and burgeoning initiatives, including the Inclusiveness Index and opportunity mapping project. Stephen has also developed and authored several amicus briefs on behalf of the Institute, most recently a social science brief filed on behalf of the University of Texas in Fisher v. Texas.