"You cannot talk about race without talking about cotton. The materials that I use are desperately important as a layer of meaning in the work that I make."
Public Thinker
In this interview series, public scholars talk about how they found their path and how they communicate to a wide audience.
Public Thinker: Merve Emre Throws a Party for Different Readers
“One way to think about the act of annotating is that you are that meddlesome party gossip, telling the reader how to draw connections between the different parts of the text.”
Public Thinker: Ainissa Ramirez on Putting the Story Back in Science
“We teach science as separate from the rest of the world. I want people who live in the world to see how they’re actually doing science.”
Public Thinker: Meghan O’Gieblyn on God, Machines, and Intelligence
“We can’t always explain how algorithms reach their decisions. The reasoning of algorithms, like the will of God, is unfathomable.”
Public Thinker: Ashanté Reese on Food Geographies and Food Justice
"So many people don’t think about food as political."
Public Thinker: Catherine S. Ramírez on Measuring the Unmeasurable
“That is the paradox of assimilation … You can be essential—an essential worker—and at the same time excluded from the CARES Act.”
Public Thinker: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Looks to the Night Sky
“There are two ways of reading Black invisibility and one of them is futuristic.”
Public Thinker: Katherine McKittrick on Black Methodologies and Other Ways of Being
“How might scientific storytelling, or stories of science, shape the struggle for liberation?”
Public Thinker: Hua Hsu on Reading until You See Double
“When I write, I try to begin from a place of authority and then I try to lose it over time. I want to transfer it to the reader.”
Public Thinker: Shobita Parthasarathy on Why We Need to Diversify Expertise
“I'll say something controversial. Bioethics tends to not interrogate the details of science, let alone the more technical questions.”
Public Thinker: Thomas Frank on How Populism Can Save America
“A relentless assault on received orthodoxies has the effect of making you unpopular with the people for whom those received orthodoxies are orthodox.”
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
"The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive."
Public Thinker: B. R. Cohen on How Food Became “Pure”
“There were so many new laws, I had to make a map showing the spread and intensity of antimargarine laws in states over a quarter century.”
Public Thinker: Marcia Chatelain on Feminism, Fast Food, and First Gens
“Being in community with people and teaching and learning outside of the confines of our classroom: I still actually really believe in that.”
Public Thinker: Virginia Eubanks on Digital Surveillance and People Power
“We have to build against the legacy of inequality. Intentionally. We have to build our values into our design practices.”
Public Thinker: Geraldo Cadava on the Past and Future of Hispanic Republicans
“I was shocked to learn that Hispanic conservatives celebrate Cortes’s arrival in Mexico.”
Public Thinker: Astra Taylor on Democracy’s Long Crisis
“If we want democratic scrutiny, the demos must first have power.”
Public Thinker: Nancy K. Miller on Feminist Lives
“Although I was reluctant to generalize about women’s friendship, I was also thinking about a model that would counter the male model of friendship.”
Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization
“Hurricane Maria ushered in a great deal of trauma and suffering, but it also allowed us to reassess the very nature of the political.”
Public Thinker: Tressie McMillan Cottom on Writing in One’s Own Voice
“You don’t tell children not to grow. And you don’t tell a writer not to write.”