About the Project

Structural racism — the normalized and legitimized range of policies, practices, and attitudes that routinely produce cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color, especially black people — is the main driver of racial inequality in America today. This project explores how five key drivers of structural racism — housing, criminal justice, education, wealth and media — form a flexible, highly connected apparatus.

Nitin P. Padture is a Professor of Materials Science in the School of Engineering at Brown, and Director of the Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation (IMNI). He came to Brown four years ago from the Ohio State University, where he was the College of Engineering Distinguished Professor. Professor Padture’s research and teaching interests are in the broad areas of synthesis/processing, characterization, and properties/performance of advanced materials and nanostructures used in applications ranging from jet engines to computer chips to solar cells.

Panelists:

Anthony Bogues, Director, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies

Jordan T. Camp, Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity and International and Public Affairs, CSREA and the Watson Institute

Yalidy Matos, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs and Race and Ethnicity in America, CSREA and the Watson Institute

New work in psychology and cognitive science has posed significant challenges to traditional understandings of moral deliberation and moral action.  But such challenges are hardly new: in different forms, they extend as far back as Freud and even earlier.  This talk will explore the distinctive ways in which literary genres and modes themselves illuminate our understanding of moral life – and it will ask how literature can reframe some of the most pressing questions at play in recent cultural debates about the motives and limits of moral deliberation, and about the nature of both cognitive

Children are both resilient and vulnerable to their intrauterine environment, as well as, to the world they live in once they are born. These early influences have lifelong impacts on their abilities to be productive and healthy adults. Fortunately, individualized interventions targeted early can positively impact children’s health.

Houses, cars, and children shape modern lives, urban landscapes, and family debt. Emotionally, they structure rituals of aging and consumer desire. Economically, they are both assets and liabilities, and for more than a century they have represented the largest investments ordinary people make over the course of their lifetime. Together, over that century in the United States, houses, cars, and children have organized the family economy and driven the national economy—they are the pivot points where family economics meets political economy.

Overview

How does racial inequality manifest itself in today's America? What does this mean for the future of American democracy? There is a huge gap in the wealth, asset holdings, schooling, imprisonment, employment, and mortality of black and white Americans. This circumstance poses profound challenges for the future of American democracy.

The variation among individuals is due to two primary sources: the genes that make up the genome and the environment in which those genes are active. The relative contributions of genes and environment in the response to natural selection and in medical conditions today remains a contested issue. With the advent of high throughput genomics, there has been tremendous interest in mapping the genes that have enabled evolutionary change or caused human disease.

Cosponsored with Department of Philosophy 

Cosponsored with Department of Philosophy 

Panelists:

The paradigm of plate tectonics is fundamental to our understanding of the Earth, yet the question of what makes the lithosphere “plate-like” remains unanswered. As Earth’s outer thermal boundary layer, the lithosphere partly derives its high strength or viscosity from its cold temperatures, relative to the warmer layer of asthenosphere that lies beneath. However, much debate has centered on whether the viscosity difference between the lithospheric plates and asthenosphere is enhanced by the presence of small amounts of volatiles and/or partial melt in the asthenosphere.

Overview

This talk will take stock of recent developments in postcolonial theory. I will suggest that postcolonial theory is a modern philosophy of renunciation that offers a unique proposal for uninjured life and non-injurious community. 

Moderator

Christina Paxson, President

Faculty Panel

Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor, Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science and Interim Director, Pembroke Center

Maud S. Mandel, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, Dean of the College

Monica Muñoz Martinez,, Stanley J. Bernstein '65 P'02 Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnic Studies, Faculty Fellow, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities

Discussants:

Charles Larmore, W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Brown University

Prerna Singh, Mahatma Gandhi Assistant Professor of Politics and International Studies, Department of Political Science, Brown University

Cosponsored with Department of Philosophy

Abstract

This presentation will describe an arc in the mathematical/theoretical physics research of the presenter that has traversed concept spaces from equations, to graphical imagery, to coding theory error-correction, and pointing toward evidence of an evolution-like process possibly having acted on the mathematical laws that describe reality.

Our dominant cultural conception of responsibility, modeled on the legal notion of liability, is deeply disabling of environmental action because it presupposes intentionality and control, emphasizes blame and punishment, and saddles the individual with changes that no one can accomplish alone. This conception of responsibility is ill suited to the environmental domain, where people often contribute to damage without intending or controlling their effects, and where they reasonably chafe at being blamed for participating in practices they cannot realistically avoid or change on their own.

Overview

Overview

Children's opportunities to climb the income ladder vary substantially depending upon where they grow up. But the question remains: what can we do about it?  Friedman will discuss how we can use big data to take this next step, using both higher education and place-based policies as examples. In particular, he will demonstrate how big data offers new opportunities for scholars to diagnose problems and develop policies specific to each setting - in effect, precision medicine for social science.

Wherever improvisation appears—whether in music, comedy, sports, or diplomacy—it fascinates observers with its apparent spontaneity and inexplicability. It seems to demonstrate powers of invention, reaction, and readiness that cannot be found in other modes of behavior or action, and for this reason it is often invested with a surplus of ethical, social, or aesthetic value. Professor Gooley's lecture outlines the emergence of this modern concept of improvisation and examines the role music has played in its crystallization.

Overview

For many, China’s recent One Belt One Road initiative poses a challenge to US hegemony.  The “New Silk Road” infrastructure linking Asia, Africa and Europe asserts not simply a new world order, but also a new historical narrative—that of the modern restoration of an ancient world order once dominated by China’s silk trade.

Diane Lipscombe runs the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown - a hub of researchers focused on developing scientific breakthroughs in conditions such as epilepsy, autism, and depression.

In this episode, Diane talks about the want ad that transformed her life trajectory, how research about the heart informed her study of the brain, and what motivates her more than 30 years after her first job as a research assistant.

Listen to the podcast 

In this talk, Professor Schiller will talk about her current research on gender inequality and federalism with a focus on human security against domestic violence.  Women tend to be the majority of victims of domestic violence around the country, but there were no laws concerning domestic violence until the late 1970s at the state level, and it was not until 1994 that the first major federal law was passed specifically focused on addressing violence against women.

In this episode, John Friedman discusses his research, which combines economics, big data, and public policy to understand why some children rise out of poverty and some do not. He’s particularly interested in measuring upward mobility - or what we call “the American Dream”- whether low income children grow up to earn more than their parents. His research is designed to inform powerful policy changes across the country, in specific neighborhoods, and on college campuses.

The initial draft sequence of the human genome, published in 2001, promised to usher the world towards personalized medicine, in which a patient's genome is used to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Almost twenty years later, many clinically actionable mutations have been identified and are incorporated into treatment, and medical genomics offers exciting opportunities for data-driven discoveries about the genomic underpinnings of health.

What controls the amount of life on Earth?  It’s a question rarely thought through, even by people familiar with biology.  On a verdant day in summer, it feels as if there is no limit.  On a cold day in winter,  the constraints become more visceral.  This intuition is not wrong – the amount of sunlight hitting the earth is the primary energy source for almost all life. But even plants, which use the energy from sunlight to build sugars, proteins and other organic molecules that make up their tissues, do not depend on the sun’s energy alone.  Like us, they need water and nutrition.

COVID-19 is having a disproportionate impact on members of marginalized communities, with disparities in infection rates and health outcomes emerging by race, ethnicity and immigration status. This multidisciplinary faculty panel will explore and discuss the underlying factors driving these disparities and ideas for addressing the issues. 

Tejal Desai, Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering, will discuss the use of nanotechnology as a way to develop new therapeutic interventions for disease. She will share insights from her work to design new platforms, enabled by advancements in micro and nanotechnology, to overcome existing challenges in therapeutic delivery.

Advancing Solutions for Ocean & Climate Health

We teach in difficult times. Using Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, this series engages Brown instructors in reflecting on why we teach, who we are as teachers, and how we can engage our students in sometimes challenging conversations in our classrooms.

The past academic year was one of the most challenging for higher education in recent memory. American campuses have experienced divisive unrest in reaction to political turmoil in this country and abroad. These dramatic events exist in a context of broader questions concerning the contours of free expression on campus.