Reflections on home and place as I depart for a year at Stanford — Last Saturday, I cycled from Ithaca to Chittenango and back, my last ride before moving to California for a year-long fellowship at CASBS. Three years into my time at Cornell, I reflected on what it means to be a guest, a newcomer, and eventually a local. As I climbed, the…

Marking what we have lost and what might be next — Last Month, Ed Yong asked in The Atlantic why American society and government could not or would not acknowledge the magnitude & urgency of nearly a million lives lost to COVID. How many parents, siblings, children, are no longer with us? …

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…