From left (seated): Shalena Broadnax, NYC Regional Manager; Ravenna Koenig, Junior Fellow; Alyssa Best, East Coast Regional Manager; Wendy Suzuki, NYC Alum; Taryn Yaeger, Junior Fellow; Moe Orenstein, Supporter and Katie's Father; Standing: Kim Taylor, NYC Alum
On the 11th and 12th of December The OpEd Project welcomed a new addition to their Public Voices Fellowship Program: Princeton University! Princeton is the fourth academic institution after Yale, Fordham and Stanford to join the ranks of this inspiring program where professors are given support and training in making their voices heard in public media.
The Princeton Program is lead by two amazing women. Courtney Martin, is a blogger, cultural critic and author of five books including Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists and Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. Her co-leader at Princeton is Janus Adams, an Emmy award-winning journalist, historian, founder of BackPax children’s media and author of nine books including the Glory Days trilogy of African American history and culture. We can’t wait to hear about the amazing successes that Courtney, Janus, and the brilliant scholars at Princeton are going to have in the coming weeks!
In other very exciting news our first op-ed from the Fordham Public Voices Fellowship Program was published on the 8th! Christiana Z. Peppard is Assistant Professor of Theology & Science in the Department of Theology at Fordham University. Her op-ed on fracking is an excellent example of using a particular expertise to write differently about a problem that a lot of people are writing about. She says, ”from my stance as a scholar of theology and science, environmental ethics, and CST, I can say that at least three steps are necessary before fracking can begin to be viewed as a desirable ‘bridge fuel.’” To find out what those are, check out the article here.
December is certainly a time of festivities, and The OpEd Project was lucky to kick off the season with 20 new additions to the community.
The December 2011 NYC Crew
Nidhi and Katie Share Some Laughter
Exchanging Interesting Stories
Seminar leaders Deborah Siegel and Janus Adams led the show, with a pop-in from founder Katie Orenstein (left)
Seminar leader Deborah Siegel (center) provides hands-on support for participants
Janus and Deborah share the love
On Friday the Stanford Public Voices Fellowship Program met for their second convening. We’re so excited to hear about how the Stanford scholars make their expert voices public in the coming weeks, especially since they’ve already wowed us with the op-eds they’ve written since the program’s commencement. The scholars have published four incredible opinion pieces over the past 6 weeks (and that’s not counting the ones that have already been accepted for publication but won’t make it into print for another few days). Well done Stanford!
Jenna Davis, of Stanford’s Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, took advantage of the 10th anniversary of World Toilet Day to write an article that focused on the global sanitation crisis in her CNN.Opinion article, The World Needs More Toilets. Her article puts a spotlight on subject of extreme importance that doesn’t get talked about enough: access to toilets and the prevention of sanitation-related illness in a global context.
Also among the Stanford Fellows who recently published is Prudence Carter, associate professor of sociology, whose piece, The Double Blinds of Racial Inequality, ran in the Boston Review yesterday. In pondering the difficulty of choosing which inequality, race or class, is more significant to us today, Prudence pointed out that the “color-muteness” of the Occupy movement doesn’t just prioritize class as an issue, it totally denies race as one.
Also deserving of hearty congratulations is Ellen Lust of the Yale Fellowship, who, upon returning from trips to Morocco and Egypt, promptly wrote two pieces on the protests currently going on in both.
One of her articles, Morocco elections aren’t a model for the Arab Spring as West claims, ran in The Christian Science Monitor. Her other article, Hope on Egypt’s hair-raising road toward democracy , can be found at CNN.Opinion.
Congrats fellows! We hope to continue to be enlightened by your insights in the weeks to come.
