This COVID-Calls features Dr. Samantha Montano and Dr. Patrick Roberts.  

Samantha is currently a visiting assistant professor in the emergency management and disaster science program at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She specializes in nonprofit and volunteer involvement in disasters and does public engagement work related to the relationship between emergency management and climate change. 

Patrick is Associate Professor, Center for Public Administration & Policy of Virginia Tech.  He is the author of Disasters and the American State: How Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected.

COVID-Calls 3.20.2020 Samantha Montano & Patrick Roberts--disaster management

Today I speak with Andrew Revkin.  Revkin is a path-breaking environmental journalist.  Previously he was strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism at National Geographic Society. Through 2017 he was senior reporter for climate change at the independent investigative newsroom ProPublica. He was a reporter for The New York Times from 1995 through 2009. In 2007, he created the Dot Earth environmental blog for The Times. The blog moved to the Opinion Pages in 2010 and ran through 2016. He is also a performing songwriter and was a frequent accompanist of Pete Seeger.  He is now director of the new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

COVID-Calls 3.24 Andrew Revkin--science and journalism in the age of climate change and pandemic

Today I talked with Andrew Lakoff about the WHO and about pandemic preparedness in the USA.  It was a wide-ranging conversation.

Andrew Lakoff is professor of Sociology and is joint appointed in the department of Communication at the University of Southern California.  His areas of interest include globalization processes, the history of the human sciences, contemporary social theory, and risk society.  He is the author of co-author of many books.  His most recent book is Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (2017). Lakoff's next book, co-authored with Stephen J. Collier, is entitled The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems Security and the Birth of American Biopolitics.

COVID-Calls 4.1.2020 Andrew Lakoff--the World Health Organization and pandemic preparedness

Today was a wide-ranging discussion with the extraordinary disaster research leader Lori Peek.

Lori Peek is professor of sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Her first book is called Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11.  Her co-authored book with Alice Fothergill is titled Children of Katrina.  After Hurricane  Katrina, she was part of a 12 member collective that studied displaced persons after Katrina. The book that resulted is: Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora.

COVID-Calls 4.9.2020 Lori Peek--vulnerable populations, disaster research frontiers

My guest today is the one and only sociologist of disaster Kathleen Tierney.  Our wide-ranging discussion touches on the many ways that disasters reveal society as it is, and what it can be.

Kathleen served as the director of the Natural Hazards Center from 2003 until 2016, and previously served as the director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware. During her career she has studied a wide range of disasters, including earthquakes in the U. S., Japan, and Haiti; major hurricanes such as Hugo, Andrew, and Katrina; technological disasters, and the terrorist attacks of September 11.  She is most recently author of Disasters a Sociological Approach, and also The Social Roots of Risk.  She was the senior author of Facing the Unexpected: Emergency Preparedness and Response in the United States and co-editor of Emergency Management: Principles and Practice for Local Government. 

Tierney has served as a member of the National Academies Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences, the Panel on Strategies and Methods for Climate-Related Decision Support, and the Panel on Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change.

COVIDCalls 4.21.2020 KathleenTierney--What do disasters reveal about society?

My guests today are historians who see patterns play in epidemics that stretch out across time--they are thinking about the implications of history for our time.

David Barnes teaches the history of medicine and public health in the Department of History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  At Penn, he is director of the interdisciplinary Health & Societies major, and he also teaches in the MPH program.  He is the author of The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France and The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs.  He also has a project on the Lazaretto quarantine station (1801-1895) on the Delaware River outside Philadelphia—the oldest surviving quarantine station in the Western Hemisphere (and the sixth oldest in the world).  He is also involved in the campaign to restore and preserve this unparalleled historic site.

Michael Yudell is Professor and Chair of the Department of Community Health and Prevention at Drexel.  He is an awarding-winning historian and ethicist of public health whose work focuses on the history and ethics of genomics, the history of the race concept, and the history and ethics of autism research. Yudell also directs the Program in Public Health Ethics and History at the Dornsife School of Public Health. He is the author of Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century Yudell is also the author, with Rob DeSalle, of Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future.

COVIDCalls 4.23.2020 David Barnes & Michael Yudell--pandemics in history & public health today

Today we discuss "essential workers," housework, care work, labor activism, and the possibility for just futures in the wake of the pandemic.

Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies at UCSB.  Her many research interests include the home as workplace, the valuing of women’s labors, the connection between public and private, the ways that state policy reinforces inequality, and the failure of welfare reform. She has combined scholarship with activism in working with trade unionists, disability rights activists, senior advocates, and others to improve in-home care. She has engaged in participatory action research as part of the Women’s Economic Justice Project. Author of (among many works)Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (co-authored with Jennifer Klein). And Intimate Labors: Care, Sex, and Domestic Work, ed. with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas.

Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher, and is professor emerita of Hofstra University. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.
She is the author of many books, including Wages Against Housework, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.

Juliana Feliciano Reyes is a journalist covering work and labor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She previously worked as a reporter and editor for Technical.ly, a local tech news site, and her stories have appeared in WIRED and The Washington Post. A native of Northern New Jersey and Manila, Philippines, she’s a three-time Philadelphia News Award winner and has served on the board of the Asian American Journalists Association Philadelphia chapter since 2012.

COVIDCalls 5.1.2020 Eileen Boris, Silvia Federici, Juliana Feliciano Reyes--labor & COVID-19

Dr. Esther Chernak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, and the Drexel University College of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication (CPHRC) at Drexel.

James Kendra is a Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration and Director of the Disaster Research Center. Previously he was coordinator of the Emergency Administration and Planning Program in the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas. His research interests focus on individual and organizational responses to risk, improvisation and creativity during crisis, post-disaster shelter and housing, and planning for behavioral health services.  Dr. Kendra has participated in several quick response disaster reconnaissance trips, including the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, 2003 Midwest tornadoes, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Ike in 2008, as well as documenting maritime relief efforts in the US following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11

COVIDCalls 5.5.2020 Esther Chernak & James Kendra--is our disaster system built to fail?

The skies are clearer and greenhouse gas emissions are down in the midst of this pandemic, but that is temporary--climate change will still be with us when the pandemic ends. How are the two connected, and how can we face both disasters with justice for vulnerable populations, and creative economic solutions?  Great discussion today on these topics with Daniel Zarrilli.

Daniel A. Zarrilli, is Chief Climate Policy Advisor & OneNYC Director NYC Office of the Mayor.

Under Daniel’s leadership, New York City recently released its newest long-term strategic plan, OneNYC 2050, which includes bold new actions to confront our climate crisis, achieve equity, and strengthen our democracy, demonstrating what a Green New Deal looks like in action. Since 2013, he has positioned New York City as the global leader in the fight against climate change. 

Until recently, Daniel served on NOAA’s advisory committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. He also concluded a 3-year term on FEMA’s National Advisory Council and advised the State of Louisiana on its 2017 Coastal Master Plan update.

Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Asset Management at the New York City Economic Development Corporation and spent five years with Bechtel Infrastructure Corporation. Daniel is a licensed Professional Engineer in New York and holds an MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from MIT.

COVIDCalls 5.7.2020 Daniel Zarrilli--COVID-19 and the climate crisis--how can we take on both?

Monica H. Green is an Independent Scholar and an elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Her work has won book prizes and teaching awards from both the Medieval Academy of America and the History of Science Society. Currently, she is working in two different areas. On the one hand, she continues her work on the intellectual and social history of European medicine in the 11th and 12th centuries, looking at the impact of Arabic medicine on Latin Europe. On the other hand, she is continuing her work on the global histories of the world's leading infectious diseases, with a particular focus on plague and leprosy. She is bringing out a new edition of her edited volume, Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death. And her book, The Black Death: A Global History, is in progress.

Jacob Steere-Williams is an Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston and an editor with The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. His work centers on the history of public health and the history of disease in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in Britain and the British Empire. He is the author of the forthcoming (November 2020) The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England, with the University of Rochester Press. His current book project examines networks and practices of public health in colonial India and South Africa during the Third Plague Pandemic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the current COVID-19 pandemic his work has been featured on several public forums, including The Post and Courier, CNN, and live webinars for the American Association for the History of Medicine, Princeton, and the Royal College of Physicians.

COVIDCalls 5.13.2020 Monica H. Green and Jacob Steere-Williams--pandemics in history

My guests today are experts in the importance of the face and face coverings in the ways society works, and in the production of bias. We talk face masks, race, politics, injustice, and the possibilities for reform.

Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Drexel University.  A historian and theorist of the face and body, Pearl’s most recent book is _Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other_.  She publishes widely for a public audience, most recently in the Washington Post.  Follow her on twitter @sharronapearl.

Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He is also an Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Recently, Ray published the book How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson) and another edition of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy.

COVIDCalls 5.15.2020 Sharrona Pearl and Rashawn Ray--facemasks, race, & injustice in COVID-19

Ryan Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. Ryan’s research and teaching focuses on topics related to communication law and policy, infrastructure politics, and cybersecurity. He is the author of Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things: The Politics of Infrastructure Security (MIT Press, 2020) and the editor (with Vivek Mohan) of Rewired: Cybersecurity Governance (Wiley, 2019). 

Megan Finn is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Information School. She published Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters in 2018 (MIT), about postearthquake communication practices. Her newer projects examine ethical research practices in the field of computer security, and investigate the implications of novel information policies on a transnational scale.

COVIDCalls 5.18.2020 Ryan Ellis & Megan Finn--information infrastructures in disaster

My guest today is Maggie Jones.  Maggie is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. She also teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.  We discuss her May 14, 2020 New York Times Magazine story "How do You Maintain Dignity for the Dead in a Pandemic?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/magazine/funeral-home-covid.html

COVIDCalls 5.19.2020 Maggie Jones-How do You Maintain Dignity for the Dead in a Pandemic?

My guests today:

Billy Fleming is research coordinator for the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Most recently, he co-authored The Indivisible Guide and co-created Data Refuge, an international consortium of scientists, librarians, and programmers working to preserve the environmental data at risk of erasure during the Trump Administration. Before coming to Penn, Fleming worked on urban policy development in the White House Domestic Policy Council during the Obama Administration. 

Kate Marvel is a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, where she uses supercomputers, big data, and satellite observations to study climate change.  Before becoming a climate scientist, Kate received a PhD in theoretical particle physics from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Scholar.  She teaches in Columbia's Climate and Society Master's program and writes for Scientific American and other popular outlets.

Franco Montalto is a Professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering and director of the Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Lab at Drexel University. He is also the director of the North American Hub of the Urban Climate Change Research Network, and founder and president of eDesign Dynamics LLC, an environmental consulting firm based in New York City. He studies the effects of built infrastructure on societal water needs, ecohydrologic patterns and processes, ecological restoration, green design, water interventions.

COVIDCalls 5.20.2020 Fleming, Marvel, & Montalto

My guest today is Sulfikar Amir--he is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and a faculty member in Sociology at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. 

He is the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster, and author of "The Technological State in Indonesia: the Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics" (Routledge, 2012). His ongoing project examines hidden vulnerability leading to nuclear meltdown in the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He has developed a framework of sociotechnical resilience to assess the capacity of sociotechnical systems for responding to disruption and crisis.

He is also documentary filmmaker. He has directed and produced three documentary films, all focusing on nuclear issues. The latest one is "Healing Fukushima", which chronicles the role and experiences of medical experts in Fukushima in dealing with radiation hazard in the aftermath of nuclear disaster.

COVIDCalls 5.21.2020 Sulfikar Amir--COVID-19 in Singapore & Indonesia + Healing Fukushima

My guests today:

James Dodd is a Consultant Senior Lecturer in Respiratory Medicine at the Academic Respiratory Unit, University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on the multi-system impact of lung disease and he is currently undertaking neuroimaging studies of brain pathology and cognitive function in patients with COPD. His clinical work is at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, where he has responsibility for the care of patients with complex COPD and asthma.

Havi Carel leads the Life of Breath at the University of Bristol, UK. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she also teaches medical students. Her research examines the experience of illness and of receiving healthcare. She is the author of Phenomenology of Illness which appeared in 2016. She is also the the author of Illness (2008, 2013), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006) among many other books.

Sarah Milov is a historian based at UVA.  Her work focuses on how organized interest groups and everyday Americans influence government policy and the terms of political debate. Right now I'm beginning a project that examines the relationship between gender and whistleblowing in the modern United States.   My first book, The Cigarette: A Political History is a history of tobacco in the twentieth century that places farmers, government officials, and citizen-activists at the center of the story.

COVIDCalls 5.22.2020 Dodd, Carel, & Milov--breathing & breathlessness with COVID-19

Vivian Choi is assistant professor of Anthropology and Sociology at St. Olaf College. She is also affiliate faculty in Race and Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on the political, environmental, and technological dimensions of disasters. Her current book project is entitled Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka, and examines the intersections of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the decades-long civil war which ended in 2009 in Sri Lanka. She is currently developing a new project on climate change and sea surface warming - a slow-moving disaster - in the Indian Ocean. Among her works is an article I highly recommend: Anticipatory States: Tsunami, War, and Insecurity in Sri Lanka."

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and academic. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development. 

Her research interests include intra-governmental relations in crises; the paradox of well-funded disaster responses; measurement and evaluation of disaster responses; and the effects of competition among actors in humanitarian aid. 

Malka Older’s  science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She is also the author of the sequels, Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018). Her short story and poetry collection And Other Disasters came out in late 2019.

COVIDCalls 5.25.2020 Vivian Choi & Malka Older-minority populations & humanitarian aid + fiction

Today we have a discussion about the class of 2020!

Chris Lehmann, Chris Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy, a progressive science, and technology high school in Philadelphia, PA. The Science Leadership Academy is an inquiry-driven, project-based, 1:1 laptop school that is considered to be one of the pioneers of the School 2.0 movement nationally and internationally.

Chris is the 2014 winner of the McGraw Prize in Education. In June 2013, Chris was named Outstanding Leader of the Year by the International Society of Technology in Education. In September of 2011, Chris was honored by the White House as a Champion of Change for his work in education reform. A very accomplished author and public speaker, Chris has written for such education publications as Principal Leadership Magazine, Learning and Leading with Technology Magazine, and the School Library Journal.

Serenity Baruzzini is a Class of 2020 student, graduating from Science Leadership academy. She was in the CTE engineering program and was Captain of the FRC team, 4454.She spent most of her time at robotics, but could also be found playing Magic the Gathering or video games with friends. She is now going to Drexel University as a mechanical engineering major. While she is unsure of what lieson the road ahead, she aspires to be a high school engineering teacher someday, taking inspiration from her own engineering teacher and mentor, John Kamal (senior).

EP #52 - Chris Lehmann, Serenity Baruzzini and John Kamal - Class of 2020 P1

Today we have the second of our discussions with the class of 2020!

Apoorva Selvaraj is graduating from a five year BS/MS Biomedical Engineering program at Drexel University this June. Through the program she has also co-oped at Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare, and Pfizer. She has  been heavily involved as a student at Drexel. She served on the Undergraduate Student Government Association through the past five years, and currently serves as the Student Body President at Drexel and uses it to elevate student voice and opinion to better the undergraduate experience. 

Olivia Van Buskirk is from Port Huron, Michigan and a recent graduate (May 2020) of Central Michigan University, where she completed degrees in meteorology and geography. At CMU, she was actively involved in our Alternative Breaks program that focused on engaging students in week long service experiences to learn more about various social justice issues. In this way she found her passion for integrating meteorology and social science and I will be starting a master’s degree in geography at the University of Oklahoma in the fall to pursue that path! 

Elizabeth Whiteside is the valedictorian for the Class of 2020 at Woodrow Wilson HS in Dallas, TX, and her time in high school was spent deeply involved in academics and leadership, as well as the arts and athletics. In addition to serving with the Student Council as class president for freshman through junior years, Elizabeth participated in cross country, all four years of Woodrow musicals, and served as an officer for the National Honor Society her senior year. In the fall, Elizabeth will be attending Emory University, where she intends to study Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology, with further plans to attend medical school.

EP #53 - Apoorva Selvaraj, Olivia Van Buskirk & Whiteside - Class of 2020 P2

Today we a public health update with public health expert Esther Chernak of Drexel, and a discussion of improvisation & disaster research with Tricia Wachtendorf, co-director of the DRC at UDEL.

Dr. Esther Chernak.  Esther  is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, and has a position in the Drexel University College of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel. Prior to joining the Drexel faculty in 2010, Dr. Chernak worked at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health for over 25 years.

Tricia Wachtendorf is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware and Director of the Disaster Research Center – the oldest center in the world focused on the social science aspects of disaster. Over the past two decades, her research has focused on multi-organizational coordination before, during and after disasters, transnational crises, and social vulnerability to disaster events. Dr. Wachtendorf has engaged in quick response field work after such events as the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, the tsunamis affecting India, Sri Lanka (2004) and Japan (2011), Hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Sandy (2012), as well as the earthquakes in China (2008) and Haiti (2010). With numerous research grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, she has published widely on improvisation in disasters as well as disaster convergence. SHE IS CO-AUTHOR, WITH James Kendra of American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evac of Manhattan on 9/11, Temple Press.

EP #54 -Esther Chernak & Tricia Wachtendorf

A podcast about disasters around the world.

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