The Thought Project Podcast At The Graduate Center

Martin D. Ruck, a professor of psychology and urban education and senior advisor to the president for diversity and inclusion at The Graduate Center, CUNY, is leading the GC’s drive to achieve diversity and anti-racism goals laid out last spring in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In this podcast, Ruck discusses the project and his vision for creating an inclusive environment at The Graduate Center and in higher education.

Tsedale Melaku, author of You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism and alumna of The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow, joins The Thought Project podcast to discuss race, gender, and racism within American institutions, including universities. Melaku seeks to bring the racial equity and social justice activism from the streets into organizations. She is working on her second book, The Academic Handbook on Workplace Diversity and Stratification (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2022), and, in this conversation, she suggests ways to address racism within higher education, based on her own experiences and her research. Listen to this special 100th episode of The Thought Project podcast.

Americans are coping with unemployment, hunger, and housing insecurity at levels that rival the Great Depression, according to Mimi Abramovitz, the Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Work at Hunter College and a professor of social welfare at The Graduate Center, CUNY. A prolific writer and researcher, she is among the noted policy experts calling for social security for all as a bridge to a better future. Listen to The Thought Project podcast as she expounds on this idea among others on how to mend America's frayed social safety net that has been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.

How the Pandemic Is Affecting Labor: Luke Elliott-Negri on The Thought Project by CUNY Graduate Center

What Biden’s Presidency Will Mean for Education: David Bloomfield on The Thought Project by CUNY Graduate Center

Robin L. Garrell started her role as president of The Graduate Center, CUNY in early August – just about 100 days ago. An accomplished biomedical engineer, she was previously vice provost for graduate education and dean of the graduate division at UCLA. In this episode, she reflects on moving across the country to lead The Graduate Center during a pandemic and how she is approaching important issues in her new role. These include increasing diversity, keeping students engaged in a remote environment, and preparing students for careers within and beyond higher education. ​

As the votes in the U.S. presidential election are still being counted, Graduate Center, CUNY professors and political experts Heath Brown and Charles Tien join The Thought Project to discuss what’s ahead for our country. They assess the depth of the blue-red divide, the strength of voter turnout, and how the election could play out in the courts. They find reasons for optimism and pessimism about the future of democracy. Heath Brown is an associate professor of public policy and criminal justice at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. The author of five books, he studies policy process, interest groups, presidential transitions, and education policy. Charles Tien is a professor of political science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests include American politics and U.S. Congressional representation, especially the representation of minorities and women in Congress.

On the brink of the U.S. presidential election, Javier Padilla, a political science Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, discusses how affective polarization is impacting our country. The term refers to the animosity between Democrats and Republicans that extends beyond politics. The COVID-19 pandemic, Padilla asserts, has intensified this polarization, and it’s coming to a head with the upcoming elections. Padilla wrote an opinion piece for The Graduate Center’s soon to be launched Thought Project blog, “Coronavirus and American Elections: A Story of Polarization.” He talks about that essay and more in this episode.

Thomas Weiss on The Thought Project - Episode 93 by CUNY Graduate Center

Kevin Nadal is a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is one of the leading researchers on the effect of microaggressions, or subtle forms of discrimination, on the mental and physical health of people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people; and members of other marginalized groups. He joins the The Thought Project podcast to discuss his new book, Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System. In this episode, he talks about the systemic discrimination LGBTQ people face, which pushes many of them to the margins of society. A large proportion of homeless youth in New York, for example, are LGBTQ. Often struggling to get by, members of the LGBTQ community are doubly punished by a law enforcement system that treats them like criminals rather than helps them as victims.

Margaret M. Chin is an associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of two books, including the most recent, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don't Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder. In Stuck, she portrays how second-generation Asian Americans who graduated from college between 1980 and 2008 have fared in the corporate world. Based on extensive interviews and research, she found that “race affects the movement of Asian Americans up the work ladder.” Despite academic success in elite universities, Asian Americans are stymied from achieving corporate success due to persistent racism, a lack of trust among white colleagues, and the resulting challenges with gaining sponsors and building a network. She joins The Thought Project to talk about her book and her important findings about the “bamboo ceiling.”

Stanley Renshon is a professor of political science at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a trained psychoanalyst who has used these skills in his examination of four U.S. presidents: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, whom Renshon examines in his latest book: The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency. In his first podcast, Renshon explained how a presidential scholar also trained in clinical psychology and who is a certified psychoanalyst “psychoanalyzes" a president like Mr. Trump from a distance. In this second podcast, he explains what his research found. He notes, about the 45th president: “There literally are two presidencies going on. You could call the first one, president bombast, and that's the way to attempt to traduce tradition … his demeanor is not what it should be and we think it ought to be for a president. But, on the other side, in a sense, hidden in plain sight, is the relentless serious presidency of Trump. He is really trying to get

Stanley Renshon is a professor of political science at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is also a trained psychoanalyst who has used these skills in his examination of four U.S. presidents: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, whom Renshon examines in his latest book: The Real Psychology of the Trump Presidency. In this podcast, the first of two, Dr. Renshon explains how a president scholar also trained in clinical psychology and who is a certified psychoanalyst psychoanalyzes a president like Donald Trump from a distance. Renshon says about the 45th president: “Literally, there's never been a president quite like Donald Trump, and my guess is that it's highly unlikely there'll ever be another one like him again. He really is a black swan of presidencies. He's unique and very consequential.”​

Health Brown is an associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He studies, among many other things, presidential transitions, which are governed by law. With the possibility that President Trump won’t be reelected in November, there is a question being asked for the first time in U.S. history: Will the presidential transition be peaceful? Brown addresses this issue and more in this week’s conversation.

This episode of The Thought Project features Graduate Center Distinguished Professor Richard Alba (Sociology), whose latest book, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream, is out this week. Alba’s voluminous research for the book began in 2015, represented by a New York Times opinion-editorial, “The Myth of a White Minority,” in which he argued that the American mainstream was being redefined by increasing numbers of people with mixed-race family backgrounds. The looming “white minority” alleged by polarized voices in American politics is short-sighted according to Alba, who reveals a fluid multi-ethnic and multi-racial American society and mainstream. Alba’s book crystallizes the question of how Americans self-identify, which is constrained by census categories that don’t acknowledge people of mixed heritages. Alba asserts that racism continues to plague America and offers policy options to ameliorate and address these challenges to the expansion of America

This week's guest is Steve Romalewski, director of CUNY the Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center. ​Romalewski spearheads the Census 2020 project in partnership with civil rights groups and philanthropic foundations that are leading the effort to ensure a fair and accurate census count for especially "hard to count" communities. The Mapping Service contributes online maps to help census advocates and trusted partners to focus their outreach and educational efforts. In recent days, the coalition has adjusted its campaign in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, urging people to fill out the census form while at home. Anyone can check response rates by accessing the digital maps created by the Mapping Service. This podcast was recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States. The Census 2020 Hard to Count is available online​.

This week’s guest is Graduate Center, CUNY Professor Wendy Luttrell. She’s a sociologist committed to social justice research, especially in the field of education, and currently serves as the executive officer of The Graduate Center’s Urban Education doctoral program. She also has appointments in the sociology, psychology, and women and gender studies programs. Her research focuses on how educational inequality works at the school level, taking root in students' self-evaluations and actions, including their sense of exclusion, entitlement, constraint, possibility, success, and failure. She is author of four books, including the recent Children Framing Childhood: Working-Class Kids’ Visions of Care, which is the subject of today’s podcast. Luttrell followed school children from racially and ethnically diverse families in Worcester, Massachusetts, to gain insight into their capabilities, desires, and needs. Integral to the study were the children’s photographs and videos taken at different ages (10, 12, 16 an

This week’s guest is Graduate Center, CUNY Ph.D. candidate Melva M. Miller (Social Welfare), executive vice president at the Association for a Better New York (ABNY). She is leading the organization’s Census 2020 initiative for an accurate count of New York City. She previously served as the deputy borough president of Queens. She has served in the Queens Borough President’s office since 2007 as the economic development director, creating and implementing a borough-wide strategy to enhance Queen’s economic growth. Miller has three CUNY degrees — a bachelor’s degree from John Jay College, a master’s in social work from Hunter College, and a Master of Philosophy in Social Welfare from The Graduate Center. In this podcast, Miller talks about what is at stake for New York in the 2020 Census, how ABNY is removing barriers to Census participation among immigrants and other hard-to-count communities, and why she sees the Census as a social welfare issue.

This week’s guest is Brett Stoudt, is an associate professor at The Graduate Center where he heads the Critical Social/Personality and Environmental Psychology subprogram of the Ph.D. Program in Psychology. Stoudt, who is also a Graduate Center alumnus, has worked on numerous participatory action research projects with community groups, lawyers, and policymakers nationally and internationally. His interests include the social psychology of privilege and oppression as well as the human impact of the criminal justice system. He serves as the associate director of the Public Science Project at The Graduate Center, and he is on the steering committee of the Communities United for Police Reform In New York City. In this conversation, he discusses New York’s Raise the Age law, which upped the age of criminal responsibility to 18. Stoudt and a coalition of partners are monitoring the new Youth Court that was created by the legislation to determine its effectiveness.

This week’s guest is Eugenia Paulicelli, professor of Italian, comparative literature, and women’s and gender studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Queens College. She is the founder and coordinator of the Fashion Studies concentration within the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies at The Graduate Center. She is editor, co-editor, and author of several books and publications on the history and theory of fashion, cinema, and literature. She is also the founder of the IC-CUNY Film Festival that just held its second season in 2019, dedicated to the crafts of cinema and costume design. In this podcast, she discusses the history of fashion, her scholarly study of it, and how technology is affecting the industry.