IDEAS IN ACTION | USC's Podcast Series

How can we live long and live well, too? Experts on aging will discuss the individual and societal challenges as well as gifts of longevity from legal, health, and practical perspectives, as well as share advice on preparing for a safe and healthy old age.  M.T. Connolly, author of The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life, is a leading elder justice expert who won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work. Her book’s compelling stories reveal longevity’s abundant challenges and gifts, showing how unprepared we are for both—as individuals, families, and a society. Connolly founded the Justice Department’s Elder Justice Initiative, was architect of the federal Elder Justice Act, and is part of the USC Center for Elder Justice.  Valter Longo is the Edna Jones Professor in Gerontology at USC, director of the USC Longevity Institute, and group leader at the IFOM cancer research institute in Milan, Italy. He is the author of The Longevity Diet. The culmination of 25 years of global research on aging, nutrition, and disease, this unique combination of an easy-to-follow “everyday” diet and short periods of fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) provides a key to living to a healthy old age. Laura Mosqueda is a professor of Family Medicine and Geriatrics at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a widely respected authority on the care of older adults and people who are underserved. Since joining Keck, her roles have included Chair of the Department of Family Medicine, Associate Dean of Primary Care, and Dean. She is the principal investigator of two studies funded by the National Institute on Aging to understand the causes, consequences, and prevention of abuse of people with dementia. As a clinician, researcher, administrator, and educator, she has a unique perspective that is informed by her extensive experiences in the community. Paolina Milana is the author of several books, two of which are award-winning memoirs. Paolina is first-generation Sicilian-American and was primary caregiver to her mother and sister, both diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Paolina began her career as a features writer for a daily newspaper, then crossed over into public relations and marketing, succeeding as a communications executive. Paolina is the Founder of Madness to Magic Life & Book Coaching. She most recently spearheaded The Caregiver Chronicles, a collaborative book project with 22 family caregivers, each of whom authored a chapter. She is the USC Family Caregivers Support Center community engagement specialist.  Moderator: Sean P. Curran is a professor and James Birren Chair of Gerontology who serves as the Vice Dean of USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and leads a research program focused under understanding the connection between genes and diet in maintaining health across the lifespan. He established the Los Angeles Aging Research Alliance (LAARA) and co-founded the Geroscience Los Angeles Meeting (GLAM). He is the director of the Geroscience PhD program and is the co-director of the GEMSTEM program that provides research training and professionalization to undergraduate researchers interested in studying aging.

Thousands of new homes and businesses will be built to replace the ones that were incinerated by the Los Angeles County fires this month. If done properly, the rebuilding could create more resilient communities. However, if done poorly the structures will be tomorrow’s fire fuel. Join a panel of experts to learn the right — and wrong — ways to rebuild L.A. The panelists are:  Christopher Boone, USC Price Dean and Director of USC Urban Futures. Santina Contreras, USC Price Assistant Professor of Environmental Planning. Richard Green, Chair, USC Price Wilbur H. Smith III Department of Real Estate Development. William Deverell, Historian and Co-Director of The West on Fire. With the moderator, Sarah Pilla, Climate Reporter for Spectrum News 1.

Authors and creators will discuss the role of TV in society historically and today, including connections to politics, queer spectatorship, and representations of race, class, and gender. David Craig is a Clinical Professor of Communication and director of the Global Media and Communication program at USC. An expert in Hollywood, Chinese, and social media industries; a television historian; an Emmy-nominated producer and television executive; and a pioneer in the field of Creator Studies at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, his most recent books is Apocalypse Television How The Day After Helped End the Cold War. Anthony Sparks is showrunner, head writer, and executive producer of the TV drama, Queen Sugar, created by Ava DuVernay and executive produced by Oprah Winfrey and writer/producer for the Iron Mike series on Hulu. A former cast member of Broadway hit STOMP, he holds three degrees from USC (BFA, MA, and Ph.D.), where he studied Theatre, Film, Anthropology, and American History. Karen Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us, Why Karen Carpenter Matters (one of Pitchfork's best music books of 2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. In 2019, she was awarded Lambda Literary's Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She directs the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Public Culture at USC, where she is also Chair and professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity.  Moderator: Tara McPherson is the HMH Foundation Endowed Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. She is author of Feminist in a Software Lab and Reconstructing Dixie, co-editor of Hop on Pop and Transmedia Frictions, and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected. She was founding editor of the pioneering multimedia journal Vectors and the lead PI of the online platform Scalar. She has received funding from the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur foundations, as well as from the NEH.

Experts on electoral politics, political strategy, economic development, and immigration will have a wide-ranging discussion on the 2024 election and the systems that influence and inform voter beliefs and engagement. Brett Carter is an assistant professor of Political Science and International Relations at USC and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the author of Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief, and his work has been featured by the New York Times, The Economist, and NPR's Radio Lab, among others. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of Public Policy at USC. A recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, she holds the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. Currid-Halkett is the author of four books, including most recently The Overlooked Americans. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The New Yorker. Roberto A. Suro holds a joint appointment as a professor at USC Annenberg and the USC Price School of Public Policy. He is a long-time journalists' TIME, New York Times, Washington Post and a specialist on immigration and the Latino population. He was awarded a Berlin Prize for his scholarship on immigration and was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the American Academy in Berlin in 2019. Moderator: Manuel Pastor is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at USC, where he directs the Equity Research Institute and holds the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at USC. A member of the California Governor's Council of Economic Advisors and the California Racial Equity Commission, his most recent book is Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, co-authored with Chris Benner. Forthcoming in 2024 is Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future, also co-authored with Chris Benner ·  

A diverse panel of experts will shed light on how individuals and communities have stood against oppression and persecution during World War II, the civil rights movement, and in struggles for social justice today. Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, a professor of History, and Founding Director of the Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research at USC. He is an appointed member of the Academic Committee at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2017. He is the author of eleven books, among them the prize-winning The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses. His new book, Resisters. How Ordinary Jews fought Hitler's Persecution, is a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Susan H. Kamei, the managing director of the Spatial Sciences Institute, a professor of History, and author of When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II, is recognized as a leading scholar and educator on our country's unjustified wartime imprisonment of more than 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, solely on the basis of their race. A descendant of incarcerees, she draws upon personal and community stories to convey the continuing relevance of this tragic episode in our history to contemporary issues of racial identity, immigration, and citizenship, and today's threat to civil liberties. Hajar Yazdiha is an assistant professor of Sociology at USC, faculty affiliate of the USC Equity Research Institute, and author of the book, The Struggle for the People's King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. A public scholar whose writing and research has been featured in the New York Times, TIME Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Hill, and The Grio, Hajar researches the politics of inclusion and exclusion, examining the forces that bring us together and keep us apart as we work to forge collective futures.  Moderator: Allissa V. Richardson is an associate professor of journalism at USC's Annenberg School and the founding director of the USC Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab. The award-winning journalism instructor, scholar, and author studies how marginalized communities use mobile and social media to produce innovative forms of journalism, especially in times of crisis. Richardson's best-selling book, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism, explores the lives of 15 mobile journalist-activists who documented the Black Lives Matter movement using only smartphones and Twitter.

Panelists will offer a wide array of perspectives on acting, scenic design, playwriting, diversity in theatre, theatrical institutions, and possibilities for a more equitable and inclusive theatre world. Sharon Marie Carnicke, author of Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis and Stanislavsky in Focus, is an internationally acclaimed expert on acting for stage and screen. Her award-winning translations of Chekhov’s plays have been produced nationally. Her other books include Checking out Chekhov and Reframing Screen Performance. She is a professor of Dramatic Arts and Slavic Languages and Literatures at USC and founder of the Stanislavsky Institute for the 21st Century. Snehal Desai is the artistic director of Center Theatre Group, one of the largest theatre companies in the nation. Previously, he was producing artistic director of East West Players. A Soros Fellow and the recipient of a Tanne Award, Snehal was the Inaugural Recipient of the Drama League’s Classical Directing Fellowship. He has served on the boards of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists, Theatre Communications Group, and currently serves on the board of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. Snehal was on the faculty of USC’s graduate program in Arts Leadership and is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Rena Heinrich is an associate professor of Theatre Practice at USC. Her book, Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama, traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and exposes the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding. She is a contributor to Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity and The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century. Maureen Weiss is a performance designer and scenic investigator who has worked in all aspects of theatre, design, and art for the past 25 years. Her work has been seen internationally, and was honored at the Prague Quadrennial in 2023. As a designer, her work has been seen nationally, as well as locally in Los Angeles at The Getty Villa, The Latino Theater Company, The International City Theatre, and 18th Street Arts Center. Maureen is the co-author of Scene Shift: U.S. Set Designers in Conversation, with Sibyl Wickersheimer, which inspired an exhibition at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. She was an associate professor of Performance Design at Alfred University before coming to Los Angeles City College in Fall 2023.  Moderator: Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright born and raised in downtown Los Angeles and an associate professor of Dramatic Writing and director of the MFA Dramatic Writing Program at USC. His fellowships include the MacArthur Foundation; United States Artists; Ford Foundation; Joyce Foundation; Mellon Foundation & the PEN America Award for a Master Dramatist. His plays, including The Travelers, Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, and Mojada, have been seen throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe. 

Award-winning scholars on Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism will discuss the role of religion in public settings and spaces and the relationships between religion and culture, politics, and identity. Sherman Jackson is the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. He focuses on pre-modern Islamic law and theology with an emphasis on bringing them into robust and synergistic conversation with the realities of the modern world, including (if not especially) America. He is author of several books, his most recent being The Islamic Secular. Duncan Ryuken Williams is a professor of Religion and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at USC. Williams’ monographs include American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War, the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Religion Award and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and The Other Side of Zen. He is also the editor of seven volumes on race and American belonging or Buddhist studies including Hapa Japan, Issei Buddhism in the Americas, American Buddhism, and Buddhism and Ecology. Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Religion and Media at USC. Her new book is Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision. A scholar as well as a journalist, Winston’s research centers on white American evangelicals as well as religion and media. Moderator: Varun Soni is the Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at USC.

From California's wine country to the Panama Canal to Owen's Lake and the LA River, this provocative panel will explore placemaking and the land that we share, looking at issues related to labor, race, gender, sustainability, and more. Joan Flores-Villalobos is an assistant professor of History at USC whose work focuses on histories of gender, race, and diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal, focuses on the West Indian women who travelled to Panama and made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction.  Julia Ornelas-Higdon is an associate professor of History at California State University, Channel Islands, whose research and teaching focus on the intersections of race, agriculture, and labor histories. Her book, The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769-1920, explores California's 19th century wine industry as a site of conquest and racialization.  Alex Robinson is a landscape architect, researcher, and associate professor in USC's Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program whose work seeks to reinvent our most consequential anthropogenic landscapes through collective authorship, multidisciplinary tools, and community engagement. His book, The Spoils of Dust: Reinventing the Lake that Made Los Angeles, examines the unlikely reinvention of Owens Lake by the city that dried it. Moderator: William Deverell is director of the Huntington-USC Institute of California and the West and Divisional Dean of Social Sciences at USC. He is the author of numerous studies of the 19th and 20th century American West, including To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds: The American West After the Civil War and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past.

The new book Dis...Miss Gender? features a bold mix of photographs and short essays in which artists, writers, and theorists celebrate the rapidly evolving world of gender. The book's editor and several contributors will discuss intersectionality, queer thought, fourth-wave feminism, and more.  Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose work focuses on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world whose writing and commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. She is assistant professor of African American Art at UCLA and the recipient of the Smithsonian's 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director's Essay Prize. Anne Bray, editor of Dis...Miss Gender?, works at the intersection of public space and media art as a hybrid artist and director of the nonprofit public arts organization, LA Freewaves. Engagement with edgy, demanding, clarifying art by a broad public is Bray's mission. As a lecturer, she taught graduate seminars for 25 years in the new genre arts at Claremont plus media art and public art at USC. Her recent awards include the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship, Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Cultural Trailblazer award, NEA Our Town grant, and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant.  Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Recent publications include the catalogue Queer Communion: Ron Athey, co-edited with Andy Campbell, and In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. She is currently writing a book entitled Cultural Capitalism, which addresses the structural racism and neoliberalism of the twenty-first century art world and university, as well as organizing a survey exhibition of the work of Ken Gonzales-Day. Young Joon Kwak is an L.A.-based multidisciplinary artist and educator whose work spans sculpture, performance, video, sound, and community-based collaborations. They are founder of Mutant Salon and lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. They received an MFA from USC, an MA in Humanities from University of Chicago, and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are Visiting Faculty at California Institute of the Arts.  Moderator: Holly Willis is the Chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) initiative of the USC Center for Generative AI and Society. As a hybrid scholar/practitioner, she studies reconfigurations of cinema and experimental media and integrates critical theory and media production using video, still images, and sound as forms of critical making. 

Authors, artists, and activists will share how film, music, public art, and other art practices can help build communities and imagine new futures. Ben Caldwell is an arts educator, independent filmmaker, and creator of the KAOS Network, whose goal is to be the bridge that connects South LA communities with the new technology of the 21st century as a vanguard in all the art forms. Caldwell is the co-author and subject of KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell.  Robeson Taj Frazier is a writer, associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg (IDEA). He is the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination, producer of the documentary film It's Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet, and host of the PBS Digital Studios production, Hip Hop and the Metaverse. Jonathan Leal is an assistant professor of English at USC. Originally from the Rio Grande Valley, the South Texas region located at the border of the U.S. and Mexico, and now based in Los Angeles, the Latino author, composer, and scholar creates writing, music, and integrative arts projects that amplify creative resistances to bordered life. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop, co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision, and co-creator of numerous musical projects, including, most recently, After Now. Brettany Shannon, co-author of Co-Creative Placekeeping in Los Angeles: Artists and Communities Working Together, is an urban scholar researching the intersection of art, technology, public space, and community participation. Shannon is the co-editor of Planning for AuthentiCITIES and is an adjunct professor at California State Polytechnic Institute, Pomona; California State University, Northridge; and Woodbury University. Moderator: Annette Kim is associate professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and affiliated faculty at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Her books include Sidewalk City: Re-Mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City and Learning to be Capitalists: Entrepreneurs in Vietnam's Transition Economy. Her current research project, ethniCITY, remaps how race and ethnicity shapes spatial patterns in Los Angeles. She founded and directs SLAB (USC's Spacial Analysis Lab) an helped found the RAP collective about race, arts, and placemaking.