How can artists contribute to technology policy, and how can artists engage the public in shared knowledge-making about science and technology? Speaking today at the Cornell Department of Communication is Chris Csikszentmihalyi (@csik), Associate Professor in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. Chris was the European…

How can we reach for excellence and the common good when we stand on the shoulders of enduring sin? — How can Christians reach for excellence and the common good in a broken world whose brokenness we are also part of? I often asked myself this question as a postdoc at Princeton University, whose third president was the influential Protestant leader Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). By all counts, Edwards achieved a…

How can junior faculty advance a public mission when it’s not always part of the job? — Many researchers want to do work that makes a difference in the world. That’s sometimes tricky in communities that aren’t sure if engaged research is legitimate work for academics. I saw that first-hand as a PhD student when three of my mentors were denied tenure. Each did life-changing research, published…

What do stories do in the world, and can they move us to behave in pro-social ways? — Speaking today at the Cornell Department of Communication is, Melanie C. Green (@narrprof), a Professor in Communication at the University at Buffalo. Her work has focused on persuasion and belief change. …

How can organizations grow participation in science that protects our world? And how can we design research to study behaviors that matter? — Four days in every February, tens of thousands of people around the world join together in the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). By observing birds and entering “checklists” into the eBird database, people are contributing to the world’s largest biodiversity-related community science project. …

How can researchers overcome stigmas in science toward communities of color? And how can we establish partnerships that are valuable to everyone involved? — Speaking today at the Cornell Communication department is Dr. Robin Stevens (@drrobinstevens), a health communication scholar focused on achieving health equity in African American and Latinx communities in the US. Dr. Stevens uses digital epidemiology to investigate sexual health, mental health and substance use in the context of the digital…

How racism defines which students are seen as creative, and which students are seen as threats — Even as youth creativity flowers online, technologies of play have become caught up in society’s deep divisions, often reinforcing them. How does that happen? Speaking today at the Cornell Department of Communication is Matt Rafalow (@mrafalow), a sociologist, researcher at Google, and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for…

In a crisis, we wrongly think that talk is cheap and action matters most. By improving coordination, slowing down can speed us up. — How would you like to do work that is highly-traumatic, fast-paced, under-resourced, and never ending? That’s the everyday life of people who work at children’s advocacy centers. How does this work shape people’s experience of time, and can slowing down actually help teams work more efficiently?

When 70 people died in her hometown, Dr. Mary Amdur decided to find out why. Her funder? The firm accused of causing it. — In October 1948, a thick, yellow fog descended on Donora Pennsylvania, a small factory town near Pittsburgh. When the haze slid out of homes and hospitals four days later, twenty people were dead and a third of the town was sick. The death toll soon rose to 70. What had…