Putting the Public in Public Health
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Joshua M. Sharfstein, M.D., Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement; Director, Bloomberg American Health Initiative; Professor of the Practice in Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
How can an academic institution play a constructive role in advancing community health? Not through research insights alone, according to Dr. Josh Sharfstein, a former Maryland health secretary and now vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In this lecture, Dr. Sharfstein will talk about the practical challenges and opportunities in public and community engagement for institutions of higher learning that aspire to heal the world.
Organized by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.
Structural Inequities in Maternal and Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare: US and Global Contexts
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May Sudhinaraset, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Community Health Sciences, Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA
Dr. May Sudhinaraset, PhD is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair in Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at UCLA. Her research focuses on understanding the structural and social determinants of immigrant and women’s health both globally and in the US. Her work centers around three complementary streams of work: (1) structural and social contexts of vulnerable women; (2) quality of sexual and reproductive health services globally; and (3) social policies and immigration in the US. Her global work includes women’s experiences during childbirth, family planning, and abortion services, development of quality improvement interventions in Kenya and India, and large-scale maternal and child health evaluations in Myanmar. She currently is Principal Investigator of the NIH-funded BRAVE Study (Bridging communities Raising API Voices for health Equity), the first community-engaged study to provide the most comprehensive sexual and reproductive health data among Asian immigrant women across a hierarchy of immigration statuses. In 2019, she was named a Changemaker in Family Planning by the Society of Family Planning.
Organized by the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health. Cosponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship; the Center for Health, Equity, and Aging (CHEA); the Department of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies; the Women’s Center; the Global Studies program; and the School of Public Policy.
The White Rural Threat to Democracy
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Thomas F. Schaller, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Paul Waldman, Ph.D., Journalist & Author
Rural White voters have long enjoyed outsized power and thus unofficial status as what the authors call America’s “essential minority.” Unfortunately, rural Whites’ commitments to constitutional democracy have recently begun to weaken and erode. Schaller and Waldman explain the four interconnected threats to the functioning and survival of our constitutional system that rural Whites now pose, and four compounding factors that exacerbate rural Whites’ eroding commitments. Visit their website to learn more about their latest book, released in February 2024, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.
Organized by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.
Liquid Motion: Canoeing and Surfing in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora, 1444-1888
Recording not available.
Kevin Dawson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, University of California, Merced
“Liquid Motion” examines how African women and men perceived, understood, and interacted with oceans and rivers through swimming, underwater diving, surfing, canoe-making, and canoeing. Africans inspire us to rethink assumptions about maritime history, by considering maritime traditions that Westerns lacked. Enslaved Africans carried these maritime traditions to the Americas, where they used them to benefit their exploited lives and enslavers exploited them to generate wealth.
Organized by the Department of History and cosponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.
What Does Language Do and What Can We Do With It?
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Christine Mallinson, Ph.D., Professor, Language, Literacy & Culture Program; Affiliate Professor, Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies; Director, Center for Social Science Scholarship; Special Assistant for Research & Creative Achievement
Language is essential to humanity. How we use language is a key part of how we define ourselves and how we relate to each other, as individuals and in society. In recent years, however, the authenticity of how we communicate has been disrupted by the rise of AI-generated content, including images, video, text, and audio, which can be used as powerful vehicles for deception. In this talk, centering the case of audio deepfakes, Mallinson explores why language matters: what it does, how it works, and what we can do with knowledge about how humans use it. Through interdisciplinary collaborations, she asserts, researchers can more fully address pressing challenges of our time—from misinformation and disinformation, to developing ethical and responsible language technologies, to sustaining global linguistic diversity, while advancing equity and inclusion in the humanistic and scientific study of language itself.
The Lipitz Lecture is organized by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and co-sponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.
A 50 years ‘celebration’: Examining 5 decades of Mass Incarceration and Gender Studies
Recording not available.
Raquel Matos, Ph.D., Associate Professor/Researcher, The Research Centre for Human Development; Director of the Faculty of Education and Psychology, Universidade Católica Portuguesa
2023 marked 50 years of mass incarceration, as the number of prisons and the population behind bars have dramatically increased globally over the past five decades. The early 2020s also marked half a century of research into gender, violence, and social control – a thematic focus that has defined my academic journey. As I coincidentally celebrated my 50th birthday in 2023, in this lecture I propose to reflect on the evolution of my field of study throughout my lifetime. I will begin by drawing a picture of prisons and gender and crime studies from 1973 to 2023, to discuss the advances (or setbacks) in incarceration policies and in the response to the critiques of the feminist perspectives in criminology over those 50 years. To conclude, I will question whether the starting point for the forthcoming years differs from the circumstances we faced five decades ago, regarding gender and incarceration.
Organized by the Department of Psychology and cosponsored by the Center for Social Science Scholarship.