Sunday, June 25th, was a quiet and uneventful night in New York’s East Village—at least at the street level. Around 9:00 PM, small groups began to gather on a stretch of East 4th Street between Cooper Square and Second Avenue. After locating a nondescript door (this took some teamwork) and passing down several flights of stairs, guests found themselves in a markedly different world.

The scene: an open concrete pit, an above-ground swimming pool, a disco ball, a rope swing, seats from a passenger jet, and a model in red emerging from behind plastic sheeting—all vibrating with music and lit in purples and blues.

This was the world of Whimsical Magic, described by its invitation as “a visual feast of imaginative design, provocation, and fusions of multimedia delight.” Part fashion show and part theater, Whimsical Magic was produced by fashion designer Bones Jones (House°Bones) and Maurice Ivy in support of Logic(s) magazine.

Some of the night’s whimsy came from the venue itself. Now known as Ella Funt, the space at 82 West 4th Street was an early bastion of drag and queer entertainment. Known in the 1950s and 1960s as Club 82, performers were men dressed as women, and wait staff were women dressed as men. Marking the end of Pride Month, Whimsical Magic was considered by its producers an awakening of this storied space.

“Queer Black Infiltration” by Bones Jones for Logic(s).

The show featured Bones’ Spring/Summer ‘23 collection, which was recently photographed for the inaugural issue of Logic(s)—the first magazine to explore tech from Black, Asian, and queer vantage points. In an accompanying interview with Editor-in-Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Bones discusses relationships between aesthetics, tech, attribution, and Black queer kinship.

Bones’ work finds good company in the magazine’s latest issue, “supa dupa skies: move slow and heal things.” Pushing the bounds of tech journalism beyond product reviews and doomsday speculation, this issue critically engages with topics including surveillance via digital prison mail, the role of caste in Silicon Valley, and the link between plantation labor and modern computing. It also pushes boundaries in form, mixing long-form essays and interviews with fiction, Tezhip (the Turkish art of illumination), poetry, and fashion.

Whimsical Magic presented an expansion of Bones’ Spring/Summer collection to the fashion, art, academic, tech and LGBTQ+ communities of New York. Over the course of two hours, the event delivered on its promise to celebrate, delight, and provoke.

Rather than having a clear start, unexpected and delightful vignettes (including an impromptu marshmallow roast with a blow torch) mounted in intensity until the crowd was transfixed on the action happening center-stage. But center-stage, as guests soon learned, was a suggestion at best. Models emerged from behind plastic sheets, and, instead of returning after a catwalk, subverted expectations by dipping in and out of the crowd. Stanchions separating the crowd from the performance were taken down and refashioned into garments.

Attendees received copies of the first-ever issue of Logic(s).

As did its beginning, Whimsical Magic’s end blended into the rest of the night. The crowd lingered and celebrated before filtering back to the world above, bringing with them copies of Logic(s), renewed joy, and a little bit of magic.

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Logic(s) is now available for subscription. To find out more, click here.

To shop Bones’ work, click here.

Special thanks to Reginald Robson for technical production and artists Christine Shepard, Viper, Mimi Tao, and Beau Jangless for their contributions.

Local politics affect many aspects of everyday life, including education, transportation, and public safety. However, participation in local politics is often low. Through our partnership with MyVote Project, we’re re-imagining what local voter engagement could look like—and we’re taking cues from young New Yorkers.

MyVote Project is a national, nonpartisan organization promoting civic engagement and voter participation among young people and voters of all ages. Powered by a network of more than 250 student volunteers, MyVote Project combines old-school community outreach with social media, virtual meetings, and a website that makes local policies and policymakers searchable by postal code. In partnership with Incite, MyVote Project is experimenting with new models of local voter engagement.

On June 17, MyVote Project and Incite hosted an event at The Clemente in New York with music, food, and appearances from local leaders, entertainers, and artists. By taking conversations out of classrooms and boardrooms, our Community Conversations series aims to create a more open and welcoming space for discussing the local issues that matter most.

The second in a series, this event focused on the lasting impacts of Covid-19 on life in New York. In small groups, local high school students led participants through discussions about the impact of Covid-19 on education, performing arts, healthcare, and small business.

Those with expertise and lived experience helped with the discussions, including psychotherapist and parent coach Hannah Lavan, community engagement specialist Paulette Spencer, and fashion designer Bones Jones.

Before parting ways, all participants met as a larger group to discuss their findings. Insights from Community Conversations will shape MyVote Project’s website and form a basis for further experimentation. It’s our hope that the models we develop through this partnership can be implemented nationally.

For more information on our partnership with MyVote Project, click here.

How does where you live impact your ability to access mental healthcare? This question isn’t as easy to answer as you might imagine.

Typically, the most accurate snapshots of mental healthcare access have been at the county level. County-level data, however, can obscure access disparities and complexities, especially in large, diverse counties like Kings County (Brooklyn) or Los Angeles County (Los Angeles). As a result, how access varies by neighborhood is not readily understood.

Inciter and seventh-year doctoral student Daniel Tadmon is working to change that.

As part of his doctoral dissertation, Tadmon has aggregated nearly one hundred disparate data sources to create a high-resolution snapshot of mental healthcare access in the US. Factoring in the distribution of patients and services, the transportation networks connecting them, as well as competition dynamics triggered by demand, Tadmon is now able to measure access at a fine-grained, neighborhood level.

His novel dataset is already enabling new insights.

A snippet from Tadmon’s work mapping therapist access in Brooklyn, New York. Even in provider-dense Brooklyn, there are measurable disparities in mental health care access.

Immediate findings underscore how county-level data offers insufficient fidelity to examine access. “We’ve long known that there are access gaps between urban and rural counties,” says Tadmon, “but with granular data, computational analysis can now show that large disparities often also exist between different neighborhoods within the same city.”

This insight is just a beginning—mental healthcare access is complex and multi-layered, explains Tadmon. This work addresses only a foundational element of access: whether or not someone can reach a provider with availability. With this foundation, additional components of access can be layered in, including affordability, insurance coverage, stigma, and discrimination. The resultant spatial-social framework can be used to examine the barriers individuals face when seeking care.

Tadmon’s hope is that his work can be used to better understand how mental healthcare access (or lack thereof) serves to reproduce social disadvantages. According to Tadmon, this work offers a doorway into understanding how the people who are faced with social circumstances that trigger mental illness are the same people facing the greatest barriers to treatment. Moreover, findings stemming out of his research have potential to inform policy affecting mental healthcare access.

In February, Columbia’s Data Science Institute awarded Tadmon, Peter Bearman, and Mark Olfson with a $75,000 grant as part of its Seed Funds Program. This funding will enable Tadmon to further develop his work and keep the dataset updated.

We’ll keep you posted on published research stemming from this project.

For more information, contact Chris Pandza.

Assembling Voices Fellows attend an archiving workshop with Shannon O'Neill, Curator for NYU’s Tamiment-Wagner Collections.

In November 2022, we introduced you to our latest cohort of Assembling Voices Fellows. For refresher on the program:

Assembling Voices is a year-long Fellowship for artists, writers, scholars, journalists, performers, activists, workers, and others with compelling ideas for public initiatives that bring people together around issues of democracy and trust.

Assembling Voices is part of our ongoing effort to facilitate inventive forms of communication and collaboration between students, artists, activists, and others from outside the academy to arrive at new understandings and practices that advance public action.

To enable our Fellows’ work, we provide them with financial, administrative, and intellectual support. Last month, we invited our Fellows to our office in New York for two days of connection, collaboration, and training.

A central part of this visit was connecting our Fellows to our intellectual network. We collaborated with our Fellows to create a custom workshop schedule, which included sessions with OHMA all-stars Amy Starecheski and Nyssa Chow. We were honored to learn about successful public engagement from the Fellows over shared meals and conversations.

An integral part of this experience was connecting the Fellows to each other. Despite differences in geography, community issues, and methodological approaches, Fellows were energized by learning from each other and finding common ground in their work.

This year’s Assembling Voices cohort poses with Rebecca Feldherr, our program coordinator.

“Being able to exchange ideas on process and experience has helped me reassess and refine my approach to this work,” noted Fellow C. Dìaz. As Fellow Ricia Chansky put it, “[we] not only learned about each others’ projects, but the overlap between them… [which] allowed us to really engage with one another through a shared language of activism and integrated conceptual frameworks that strive to center community voices.”

Fellows Naomi and Mauricio saw this meeting as a jumping off point for future collaboration:

We saw great overlap and points of connection in our work, both philosophically and methodologically, and as a result are now in conversation about ways to collaborate in the long term.

By working with their communities, support at Incite, and each other, our Fellows are furthering new modes of public engagement that advance equity and democracy. We’ll keep you posted on how their work evolves. For more information on the program and our incredible cohort’s work, visit our website.

Want to get involved in Assembling Voices? Next month we’ll start our search for 2023-2024 Fellows by putting out a call for applications—subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to know.

Assembling Voices is also accepting new donors. If you’re interested in supporting our Fellows’ work, send us a note at assembling-voices@columbia.edu.

Marsha P. Johnson hands out flyers in support of queer NYU students.
Photo: Diana Davies / New York Public Library.

Last year we announced our partnership with Emerson Collective and Baldwin for the Arts to support acclaimed author Jacqueline Woodson’s I See My Light Shining: Oral Histories of our Elders. This ambitious oral history project seeks to preserve the stories of elders who have shaped America—from Civil Rights activists to Native American tribal leaders to survivors of Stonewall—before they’re lost to history. Though the project’s collection of narrators is diverse in geography and lived experience, each story is united by common themes of identity creation and migration.

Woodson has selected a remarkable cohort of writers to collect these stories in locales across the country. Ten writers will conduct around 30 interviews each—that’s a collection of nearly 300 interviews!

Given its complexity, managing this production is no small feat. Our very own Madeline Alexander, Project Manager, has been working diligently to make this cross-country undertaking possible. Managing all of the project’s elements—including training, budgeting, interview logistics, and transcription—Alexander has successfully brought the project well into its interview phase.

As recordings and transcripts from across the country arrive at her desk, Alexander is already witnessing the project’s potential firsthand. “I See My Light Shining is an homage to the bravery, experiences, and essence of our elders,” Alexander says. She adds:

“We seek to uplift the narrators’ voices by investigating migration throughout the United States as a geographic access point to identity creation. We plan to honor and create accessibility to life stories, because as we have found, each story is a talisman to the understanding of our own histories, identities and connections with each other.”

I See My Light Shining poses important confrontations to issues of authority and representation, which Alexander notes, are central to Incite’s mission: creating knowledge that leads to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.

The experience has also been transformative for the project’s ten writers. Project writer and Stonewall Book Award winner Carolina de Robertis reflects on their experience: "I've been blown away over and over by this work, and look forward to seeing it (and my amazing colleagues' interviews) shared with the world."

We share in Carolina’s sentiment, and look forward to updating you on the project’s progress and public rollout later this year.

From time to time, INCITE and its research affiliates will share their thoughts on a range of topics. Unless otherwise indicated, the opinions of each post are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of INCITE. The following piece was written by William McAllister, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows Program at INCITE.

To meet its constitutional obligation as envisioned by the founders of the republic, a majority of the Electoral College must vote for someone other than Donald Trump to be president. The founders created the Electoral College in part because they feared national, direct election by the “people”—white men, 21 and over who owned property!—could result in an unqualified president. The wise men of the Electoral College would avoid choosing such a man.

Ah, irony. Trump is precisely the unqualified man the founders feared from direct election. In Federalist 68, Hamilton writes that the Electoral College ensures against a President with “talents for low intrigue” and the “little arts of popularity”—traits that define Trump; and that it guarantees a person with the “esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” “pre-eminen[ce] for ability and virtue,” “aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration”—Trump?, not so much. That Hamilton did not include disqualifiers like being a crook, a charlatan, an authoritarian, and mendacious may only indicate he couldn’t imagine someone with all these malevolent traits being taken seriously as a candidate.

Political conservatives and the right generally assert their sacred protectorate over the constitution as the founders understood it. Since Trump is clearly anathema to the founders and since the founders established a mechanism for preventing Trump from becoming President, the right must be urging the Electoral College to vote for someone other than Trump: Tea Partiers, carrying copies of the constitution close to their hearts; politicians and legal scholars, promoting “originalism” in constitutional interpretation; right-wingers, deifying the founders; and conservatives, claiming to revere the values and norms that, they say, the founders were embedding in government by eschewing direct election and erecting the Electoral College.

Don’t hurt yourself trying to find any of these kinds of people taking this position. Prominent advocacy organizations (Federalist Society, Judicial Watch), think tanks (Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation), publications (Weekly Standard, National Review), online and other media (Fox, Breitbart), like all on the right, have all failed to do so. We expect everyday political disingenuousness, among the commentariat as we do among politicians and ourselves, but the current situation is not everyday. This is arguably the most threatening electoral result to the political system and the national government since 1860. At such a moment, our everyday disingenuousness—ok, hypocrisies—simply won’t do. And liberal declarations that getting the Electoral College to not vote for Trump is a “moonshot,” while almost certainly correct, miss the point. This moonshot is exactly the vote the founders would expect from the Electoral College. So too should the political right and the Republican Party.

Twice in the last sixteen years the candidate chosen by the Electoral College has differed from that chosen by the nation as a whole. The first time indeed proved to be tragedy, for Iraqis, Afghanis, U.S. soldiers and their families, and for Americans blown up by the Great Recession; now the second occurs as farce. Liberals and the left have long opposed the Electoral College; and evidently the right does not believe it should function as their sacred founders intended. This suggests we should replace the Electoral College’s state-by-state, winner-take-all method with an alternative that better reflects the plurality winner of the vote of the nation as a whole. That is, we need a more democratic method. Our country should not fear such democracy, especially now that those voting include women, the descendants of enslaved people, those who do not own property.

To accomplish this, alternatives to an unlikely constitutional amendment have been proposed. The initiative furthest along at the state level—each state’s pledging its Electoral College vote in proportion to its popular vote—has been approved by ten states. But these are deeply blue states so that for this, or another proposal, to succeed will almost certainly require a powerful political impetus. This can and should come from those who have benefitted from the current system. We will soon have three former presidents from the Democratic Party, and we currently have two from the Republican Party. It is up to these former presidents to come together in declaring against the Electoral College, agreeing on an alternative, and using their political talents and fund-raising abilities to put a democratic remedy into law. Our former Presidents have rightly been concerned with ills and elections elsewhere in the world. Now they should focus on the U.S. 

In a pathbreaking move that has strengthened the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH), the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) has partnered with the Columbia University Libraries in managing and administering the activities and programs of the CCOH. INCITE and its founder Peter Bearman (Sociology) have worked closely with the staff of CCOH over the years, particularly in the development of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Projects and the Oral History Master of Arts program.

Under the terms of the new partnership, INCITE will have responsibility for the research, education, and outreach activities of CCOH. These include new oral history projects, the Oral History Master of Arts program (which was already jointly administered by CCOH and INCITE), the Summer Institute, and public programming. All of these activities will take shape under the CCOHR. The R stands for Research. The Libraries, in turn, will focus its energies on the curatorial and archiving aspects of CCOH’s mission. The Libraries will devote more staff and attention to acquiring, processing, and making more generally available the rich set of resources that comprise the CCOH archive. All of these activities will take shape under the CCOHA, the A stands for Archives.

This new relationship thus anchors CCOH firmly in faculty research and teaching, while bolstering Columbia University Libraries commitments to professional archival management through the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML).

This semester, Mary Marshall Clark, director of CCOHR, along with program coordinators David Briand and Sarah Dziedzic, all officially joined the INCITE team. The CCOHR will carry out a full portfolio of new and important oral history projects. CCOHA will continue to provide reference and support services under the management of the RBML. Research activities will take place at INCITE’s research space at 122nd and Broadway.

Click here to learn more about CCOHR.

The Interdisciplinary Center Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) cultivates public intelligence concerning socially and culturally vital ideas that can be advanced by research, education and conversation at the interdisciplinary seams that the social sciences share with one another, the humanities, the life and behavioral sciences: incite.columbia.edu.

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research's mission is to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, and to teach and do research across the disciplines: /ccohr/

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services is one of the top five academic research library systems in North America. The collections include over 11 million volumes, over 150,000 journals and serials, as well as extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps, and graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are organized into 22 libraries and various academic technology centers. The Libraries employs more than 500 professional and support staff. The website of the Libraries is the gateway to its services and resources: library.columbia.edu.

The Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program is hosting a free short course on epigentics Nov. 22 & 23. 

Click here to learn more and apply. 

The Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows program, organized by INCITE and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is pleased to announce its cohort of 13 new fellows for the 2013-14 academic year. Members of the cohort span the social sciences, humanities, and life and behavioral sciences.They will join seven returning Mellon fellows from the 2012-13 cohort.

Click here for learn about the current cohort.

Click here to learn more about the program.

The Wall Street Journal highlighted INCITE's participation in a $2.6 million plan to digitize the New York Philharmonic's archives. The Research Project, Subscribers to the New York Philharmonic, 1842-Present, is overseen by Prof. Shamus Khan.

The article describes the project that analyzes "the orchestra's subscriber lists to create a database mapping New York's elites in the seats of the concert hall" in order to better understanding New York's "evolving social life."

"What if we knew who'd gone to the Philharmonic over the last 150 years—where they sat, who sat around them, what concerts they went to—and we knew where they lived in the world?" Khan told the Wall Street Journal. "We think that can tell us a lot."

The Oral History Master of Arts, a program jointly supported by INCITE and the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH), was featured in CCOH's annual report. In 2012 OHMA welcomed its largest cohort in the program's history. Download the report to learn more about OHMA and CCOH.