IDEAS IN ACTION | USC's Podcast Series

University of Southern California
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IDEAS IN ACTION | USC's Podcast Series Podcast

IDEAS IN ACTION is a podcast series produced by the University of Southern California. Aligned with the university mission dedicated to “the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit,” the series brings you thought-provoking conversations across various disciplines, happening at USC's University Park and Health Sciences campuses today. Recordings are available on this website, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Spotify.

  1. Religion in the Public Sphere

    AUG 27

    Religion in the Public Sphere

    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.

    1h 0m
  2. Placemaking and the Politics of Land

    JUL 25

    Placemaking and the Politics of Land

    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.

    1h 0m
  3. Dis…Miss Gender? Artists and Writers on Gender Today

    JUN 24

    Dis…Miss Gender? Artists and Writers on Gender Today

    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.

    1h 2m
  4. Creating New Futures through the Arts

    MAY 31

    Creating New Futures through the Arts

    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.

    1h 2m
  5. Living Long & Living Well: Longevity Today

    APR 29

    Living Long & Living Well: Longevity Today

    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.

    1h 2m
  6. Muslim Inclusion and Empowerment: from Hollywood to Higher Education

    MAR 27

    Muslim Inclusion and Empowerment: from Hollywood to Higher Education

    Since 9/11, Muslims have occupied the U.S. public and political spheres as threats to national security, as victims of hate crimes, as targets of torture and war, and as a community to be included in diversity initiatives. This insightful panel will explore Muslim inclusion and representation in a variety of contexts, including education, politics, and the entertainment industry. Shafiqa Ahmadi is an associate professor of Clinical Education at the Rossier School of Education and the co-director for USC’s Center for Education, Identity, and Social Justice. She is an expert on diversity and legal protection of underrepresented students, including female Muslims, and is the co-editor of Islamophobia in Higher Education: Combating Discrimination and Creating Understanding. Maytha Alhassen holds a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from USC. She is the writer of the report, Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them, and producer and writer of the Golden Globe and Peabody­–winning Hulu series Ramy. Evelyn Alsultany is the author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion and Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. She is an associate professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, has served as a consultant for Hollywood studios, and co-authored the Obeidi-Alsultany Test with criteria to help Hollywood improve representations of Muslims. Hajar Yazdiha is an assistant professor of Sociology, faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute, and a 2022–23 Ford Foundation Fellow at the USC Dornsife School of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. She is an expert on the racial politics of inclusion and exclusion and is the author of The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Moderator: Varun Soni is the Dean of Religious Life at USC, University Fellow at USC Annenberg’s Center on Public Diplomacy, and an adjunct professor at the USC School of Religion. His writings have appeared in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Crosscurrents, Jewish Journal, and Harvard Divinity Bulletin.

    1h 0m
  7. Mending America: Overcoming Our Political and Cultural Divides

    FEB 26

    Mending America: Overcoming Our Political and Cultural Divides

    In light of the growing divisions among Americans, this panel will address the intersection of culture and politics in society, how we can better understand divisiveness, and find common ground. Geoffrey Cowan is an award-winning writer, television producer, and University Professor and Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He is the author of several books, including Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary, See No Evil: The Backstage Battle Over Sex and Violence on Television, and The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of Public Policy at the USC Price School of Public Policy, whose research focuses on arts and culture, the American consumer economy, and the role of cultural capital in geographic and class divides. She is the author of several books, including The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class and The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for Our Country (forthcoming). Jeffery Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Maria B. Crutcher Professor of Citizenship and Democratic Values, and director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at USC. His book, Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968, shows how the GOP evolved from a biracial party into one dominated by whites, with lessons that inform today’s politics. Moderator: Robert Shrum is the director of the Center for the Political Future and the Carmen H. and Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. A legendary political strategist, he was once described as “the most sought-after consultant in the Democratic Party,” by The Atlantic Monthly.

    54 min
  8. Laughing Matters: The History and Power of Comedy

    JAN 31

    Laughing Matters: The History and Power of Comedy

    Comedy can be seen and experienced in many forms—onstage, on screens, and even in hospitals. Like laughter, its effects are contagious and its power spills over onto all of us. This panel of experts, comedians, and expert comedians will talk about the history of comedy and its potential to create change. Wayne Federman is a stand-up comic, actor, author, comedy writer, professor, and Emmy-winning producer. He has appeared multiple times on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon and has his own stand-up special on Comedy Central. He is the author of the bestselling book, The History of Stand-Up: From Mark Twain to Dave Chappelle, and teaches the history of stand-up comedy at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. Lanita Jacobs (joining remotely) is an associate professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at USC. Her fieldwork across sites of hair care, hospitals, and humor, asks how speakers construct a sense of themselves as individuals and community members without forgetting the socio-political stakes animating their lives. She is the author of To Be Real: Truth and Racial Authenticity in African American Standup Comedy. Kristina Wong is a performance artist, comedian, writer, and elected representative in Koreatown Los Angeles. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she founded the Auntie Sewing Squad, a national network of volunteers sewing masks for vulnerable communities. Their work inspired the book, The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice. Wong’s show, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, is a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and winner of the Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Solo Performance. Moderator: Zachary Steel is an assistant professor of Theatre Practice and director of Comedy at USC. He has taught at the Clown School, is currently teaching at the Idiot Workshop, and is director of USC Comic+Care, a program that utilizes the practice of various comedy disciplines to strengthen community and support the healing process. USC Comic+Care has partnered with LAC+USC, CHLA, Norris Cancer Center, The Children’s Bureau, and other healthcare organizations.

    1h 0m
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4.3
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

IDEAS IN ACTION is a podcast series produced by the University of Southern California. Aligned with the university mission dedicated to “the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit,” the series brings you thought-provoking conversations across various disciplines, happening at USC's University Park and Health Sciences campuses today. Recordings are available on this website, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Information

  • Creator
    University of Southern California
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2024
  • Episodes
    68
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    Copyright © University of Southern California
  • Show Website
    IDEAS IN ACTION | USC's Podcast Series

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