The Thought Project Podcast At The Graduate Center

Since 2001, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) at the CUNY Graduate Center has worked to promote the study and understanding of Latin American and Caribbean cultures and Latino and Caribbean communities in the United States. Founding Director Laird Bergad, a distinguished professor of History at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, recently announced the appointment of his successor, Director John Guttierrez, a professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies at John Jay College, and Associate Director Mila Burns, a professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies department at Lehman College. The Thought Project caught up with Guttierrez and Burns, who are Graduate Center alumni, delighted to return in their new roles at CLACLS. Gutierrez and Burns expressed their respect for the work done by CLACLS, especially its flagship program, the Latino Data Project, which has drawn national attention since Bergad launched it in 2023. They also spoke about their interest in int

Eric Adams, the second elected Black mayor of New York City, inherited a city embattled by the the Covid-19 pandemic, a slow recovering economy, and a sustained spike in crime that continues to rise. Distinguished Professor John Mollenkopf (Political Science and Sociology), a consummate analyst of New York City politics, says there’s a widespread feeling that public spaces have become less enjoyable, more insecure, and even more threatening. He says this feeling goes beyond violent crime to pedestrian safety from cars and cyclists.He also discusses how homelessness and associated mental illness makes obvious the need to build affordable housing. Listen to hear the full episode of the Thought Project podcast that explores the first six months of Eric Adams mayoralty and the challenges that confront his administration in America’s biggest city.

Imagine being identified as a male on your driver’s license but a female on your birth certificate. That’s the Kafkaesque experience of many transgender individuals including scholar and author Paisley Currah, whose important new book, Sex Is as Sex Does, examines how sex functions as a tool of government. Currah, a professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, joins The Thought Project to talk about his book and why the state should stop regulating gender identity. He emphasizes that ending the policing of sex is an important step toward eradicating misogyny and unequal power structures that are based on gender. “Women still do all this care work,” he says, citing one example. Marriage is another. “Gender is always about hierarchy,” he says. He makes the case for moving beyond identity politics to make the U.S. a more humane place for trans and queer people through broad policies that promote equality. These include implemen

In this Pride Month episode of The Thought Project podcast, we talk to Max Osborn, a recent graduate of the Criminal Justice Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center who has carved out a niche as a queer criminologist, studying how LGBTQ individuals are affected by the criminal justice system. For his doctoral dissertation, Osborn, who is transgender and uses he and they pronouns, interviewed 42 LGBTQ individuals living in New York City to understand what their encounters with the police and with social services were like and how these interactions impacted their well-being, behavior, and sense of safety. He found, for example, that queer people, depending on the context, “altered their presentations to be more gender normative, to stand out less, to kind of anticipate what was being expected of them and sort of conform to that.” Osborn says that the LGBTQ people he spoke to described anticipating what would happen if the police or other authority figures discovered they were queer or trans. A persisten

Anne Valk, a specialist in women’s history and public history, joins The Thought Project for a Pride Month conversation that touches on the curtailing of LGBTQ rights and of women’s rights by the Supreme Court and state legislators. Valk is a professor of History and director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. As a public historian, Valk focuses on the ways history is preserved and presented to people through monuments, museums, libraries, and more. Also a noted oral historian, she has written about the history of second-wave feminism and of racial segregation in the U.S. Next month, the American Social History Project will host 30 middle and high school teachers for a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded institute on teaching LGBTQ history. Valk takes a long view of the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, noting that, “Roe has been eroded almost immediately since it was decided.” She adds, “The only way that positive change has happened i

In this Juneteenth Thought Project episode, we talk to Britton Williams about the Black MAP Project and reinventing mental health care for the Black community. Just over 100 years ago, a white mob lynched and mutilated Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, for criticizing the lynching of her husband. How did Turner’s family and community heal from this horror? Britton Williams, a Social Welfare doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, explores that question and related ones through the Black MAP Project. Williams joins this Juneteenth episode of The Thought Project to talk about the Black MAP Project and her research into the ways that Black people have promoted their own health and well-being. She plans to use her findings to re-fashion mental health care so that serves Black people, free from the bias and oppression have pervaded the field. “Enslaved peoples who sought freedom through escape were once labeled with a disorder termed drapetomania,” she writes on the website. “Bl

In this Pride Month podcast, we hear from the director and associate director of the CUNY LGBTQI+ Consortium, which advocates for and celebrates the CUNY LGBTQ community. Director Jacqueline Brashears (she/hers), a.k.a. Dr. Unicorn, is a biology professor at LaGuardia Community College. She is an LGTQ advocate and trans woman who has blogged about her transition. Associate Director JC Carlson (they/them) is a student life events manager and LGBTQI+ programs coordinator at Queens College. In 2018, they founded CUNY Pridefest, which returns to Queens College this year on Friday, June 10. Brashears and Carlson discuss the history and recent expansion of the CUNY LGBTQI+ Consortium, which began at Queens College in 2017. The consortium now includes 14 CUNY campuses across all five boroughs. The CUNY Graduate Center is the latest campus to join the consortium and is collaborating with CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies to host a program during Pride Month. Listen in to learn more.

The Russia-Ukraine war, now in its 11th week, continues to prove analysts wrong. This week on The Thought Project podcast, Julie George, a professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College and a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, explains why the conflict confounds her and other regional experts. “It's very hard to predict how the war will unfold, in part because we predict the future based on previous events,” George says, “and a lot about this war is unprecedented and very different and reflects a different tactic taken by the Russians and by the Russian leadership.” George describes President Vladimir Putin’s stance as, "We are not going to accept failures in this war, and when faced with pushback, we will escalate and go on the offensive." George comments on the U.S. foreign policy approach to the war, including the tight coordination with NATO and the billions of dollars in aid sent to Ukraine. She likens the weapons support for Ukraine to the

Abe Silberstein is a master's student in Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, and History at the CUNY Graduate Center and the associate director of the North America office of the Abraham Initiatives, an Israeli organization founded in 1989 that “strives to fulfill the promise of full and equal citizenship and complete equality of social and political rights for Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.” Fluent in issues related to U.S. foreign policy on Israel and the Middle East, Silberstein has published essays in The New York times, Haaretz, The Forward, War on the Rocks, The Times Literary supplement, UK, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and Israel Studies Review. He joins the Thought Project as the fractious Israeli parliamentary government splits over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Silberstein unravels Israel’s complicated relationship with Russia, including their mutual interests in confronting Iran in Syria. There’s much more to learn about Middle East politics and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East

Last June, after more than a year of COVID-induced remote work, Emily Drabinski, interim chief librarian and critical pedagogy librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center, and her staff reopened the Graduate Center library to students and scholars on a limited basis. “Every student we saw, made my heart swell 18 sizes,” she says. The pandemic proved to her and others that the library is more than a portal to information. “The library is a space where you can go that is non-commercial and that is freely available to you,” she says. Drabinski is currently a candidate for president of the American Library Association, running on a platform of “collective power, public good.” She joins The Thought Project podcast to talk about why we need libraries and her priorities of openness and access for the Graduate Center library and for all libraries.

How did activists in Ireland convince an overwhelming majority of the country to vote in 2018 to reverse the country’s abortion ban that had been more or less in place for over a century? According to Graduate Center Ph.D. candidate Brenna McCaffrey (Anthropology), the change in public opinion was influenced by a relentless campaign led by women who put the issue of access to safe, medically approved abortion pills at the center of their advocacy. McCaffrey followed the campaign and is writing about it in her dissertation, All Aboard the Abortion Pill Train: Activism, Medicine, and Reproductive Technologies in the Republic of Ireland. Her research also influenced her decision to become an abortion rights activist via TikTok after the passage of the Texas abortion ban in September 2021. McCaffrey’s efforts garnered media coverage of how women in Texas were seeking alternatives to the limited options available to them and the growing recognition that the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade th

CUNY Graduate Center Professor Ramona Hernandez and alumna Allison Guess (Ph.D. ’21, Earth and Environmental Sciences) join this episode of The Thought Project for a timely discussion of the Hispaniola Slave Rebellion of 1521. Hernandez is the director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and a professor of Sociology at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include the mobility of workers from Latin America and the Caribbean, the socio-economic conditions of Dominicans in the U.S., and the restructuring of the world economy and its effects on working-class people. She is the author of The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States and co-author of Dominican Americans. Guess is a professor of Africana Studies at Williams College and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and a Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. She is also a research fellow at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. The Hispaniola Slave Re

Edwin Grimsley is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in biology. His dissertation, The Collateral and Cumulative Effects of Marijuana Criminalization, examines the racialized development of marijuana laws in the United States, and how the criminalization of marijuana possession disproportionately affects Black people. Prior to joining the Graduate Center, Grimsley spent 10 years as a case analyst at the Innocence Project where he used DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. His work led to freeing seven people from prison. A multitude of experts assert that the U.S. criminal justice system is broken. The U.S. has less than 5% of the world's population but 20% of the world's prisoners. Here, Black and brown people are much more likely to be imprisoned than white people. On this episode of The Thought Project podcast, Grimsley shines a light on how the U.S. sends thousands of innocent people to prison and how science can be lever

Joining The Thought Project today is Elaine Montilla, assistant vice president of information technology and the chief information officer at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was just named to the 2021 Outstanding 100 Role Model LGBT+ Executives list sponsored by Yahoo Finance. The list showcases leaders who are breaking down barriers and creating more inclusive workplaces. Montilla joined the Graduate Center in 2005 and is a proud member of the LGBTQ community. She is also the founder of 5xMinority, whose mission is to elevate the voices of underrepresented minorities in the tech field. A TEDx speaker and a member of the Forbes technology council, she regularly comments on issues of diversity and inclusion within the tech community. Listen in to our conversation.

When CUNY Graduate Center Professor Matthew K. Gold tweeted last month that he and his colleague Lisa Rhody received a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help their students learn digital skills and create digital projects, he drew an outpouring of support. Close to 20 colleagues from across The City University of New York and beyond congratulated him and Rhody, and he thanked each of them. Gold and Rhody are widely respected as pioneers and proponents of the digital humanities, a once obscure area of academia that is now a significant field of scholarship and teaching. Over a decade ago, Gold founded the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives to integrate digital methods into the research, teaching, and service missions of the Graduate Center. Rhody became deputy director of the initiatives in 2015. Today, the initiatives encompass an array of research projects, workshops, labs, and degree programs. Gold and Rhody join The Thought Project podcast to talk about their new

David Bloomfield is a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center and of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College. A former general counsel of the New York City Board of Education, he is regularly consulted by the media for his expertise on education policy. He is the author of American Public Education Law, Third Edition and frequently pens op-eds, book chapters, and articles. He has twice been named to the Education Power 100 by City & State magazine. Bloomfield returns to The Thought Project as schools across the U.S. have returned to in-person learning after months of remote education. While cities like New York are seeing many successes, other communities are roiled in controversy over COVID-19 safety procedures and the teaching of critical race theory. A recent school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, dissolved into chaos as parents thronged the auditorium to protest the school board’s support of teaching students about structural racism. The inciden

Philip Luke Johnson is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also a lecturer in the undergraduate writing program at Princeton University. His dissertation research is supported by fellowships from the Graduate Center, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He has published articles about his research on the Guantánamo Bay prison in Critical Military Studies and the online magazine Critical Violence at a Glance, with a post titled “What Will It Take to End Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo Bay?” He previously wrote about terrorism and organized crime in Mexico in Perspectives on Terrorism. Johnson discussed his research in Mexico on episode 78 of The Thought Project podcast. This week, Johnson joins The Thought Project to discuss the military tribunal at Guantánamo Bay of five men accused of aiding the 9/11 attacks. The Guantánamo Bay prison was established under controversial terms: The U

Today’s guest is physicist and engineer Professor Andrea Alù, who joined the Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY as the founding director of the Photonics Initiative. He is also the Einstein Professor of Physics at the Graduate Center and a professor of Engineering at The City College of New York. Broadly recognized as a leading scientist in optics and photonics, Alù and his team are working to understand how metamaterials can be used to interact with electromagnetic and mechanical waves and force them to behave in unusual ways, opening the door to leapfrog advances in energy harvesting, data delivery, and medical treatment. Alù is the principal investigator for research projects supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, Simons Foundation, National Science Foundation, and several other major funders. He is the 2021 Blavatnik Award Laureate for his work in Physical Sciences and Engineering. Andrea Alù appears on The Thought Project podcast for the second time to talk about his br

Today’s guest, Professor Candace McCoy, is a faculty member in the Criminal Justice Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Trained in law, she applies legal concepts to social science research on a variety of criminal justice operations and organizations. She has published widely and has held several fellowships for research and teaching. From 2016 to 2018, while on professional leave from the university, she served as the director of policy analysis for the Office of the Inspector General of the New York Police Department. McCoy has taught hundreds of students in a career spanning four decades and has worked with government agencies for research and training. She is a member of the Ohio bar. In her return appearance on The Thought Project podcast she discusses why shootings are on the rise and how the U.S. can fight and win a war on guns. She elaborates on her Thought Project blog post, “And Now, a War on Guns, in which she discusses efforts by the Biden administration to curb gun violence. These inclu

Today’s guest, Rachel B. Tiven, is an established civil rights leader and change-maker who is coming to the Graduate Center to get a Ph.D. in History. As a lawyer and nonprofit leader, she has become a leading voice on issues involving LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, and voting rights. In 2018, after serving as CEO of Lambda Legal, Tiven managed the voter protection hotline for the Georgia Democratic Party and the Stacey Abrams gubernatorial campaign. She followed that role with a one-year residency at Columbia Law School, which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. Intrigued, she began researching the history of the women’s suffrage movement and started the @DailySuffragist social media project. This semester, she comes to the Graduate Center to deepen her knowledge of the movement for women’s full citizenship in the United States. “I want to understand what works, what works to get people to give up power, to share power with others, especially what works to get people to share po