Sally Seraphin talked about her media project, her online magazine, The Thinking Republic (TTR): https://thethinkingrepublic.com. In 2009, the year the Formative Experiences book was published, she saw a lack of translation of basic science for greater societal benefit. There was not enough public engagement. She saw people trapped in silos, speaking only to people in their own academic societies and those they worked with. They were not engaged with people to inform and shape social progress. Last summer, she launched her website and has already produced two issues, with two more issues in preparation. The latest published issue is Being Counted, which looks at diversity, people infected with COVID, census, and counting votes (how are people being counted). Some of the variety of TTR contributors in the first two issues and their pieces are represented here, with the first contributors from Being Counted:

  • Jaclyn Johnson is a political scientist – How to Do Democracy: A Thought Experiment
  • Chase Iron Eyes is a lawyer and indigenous rights activist – works on the Lakota People’s Law Project; interview with him is on TTR
  • Jeanine Abrams McLean, vice president of Fair Count (Stacey Abrams’s sister, who founded Fair Count) – Money, Power, and Survival: Why We Must Be Counted in the 2020 Census
  • Davarian L. Baldwin is a social critic; at Trinity College – The Reparations Movement in Higher Education
  • Dan Lloyd is an office mate and philosopher at Trinity College whose work is on the philosophy of neuroscience – Under control (uses visual art to render brain images, e.g., depixelated a photograph of Trump’s face to capture the number of deaths from COVID) – Enough is enough
  • Mark Levine – musicologist at UC Irvine – Culture Jamming: Bringing Artists, Activists and Scholars Together in the Struggle for Radical Change (subvert culture norms, e.g., clowns as protestors)
  • Anahit Grigoryan, one of Seraphin’s former students, from Armenia – I woke up to war
  • Lisa Williams – Professor and poet at Center College – Here is the Church, Here Is the Steeple, Open the Doors and See Some People
  • Clarence Vaughan III – Professor, VP of diversity at Haslam Business School (University of Tennessee) – Working Across Cultural Boundaries: My Experience of the Many Faces of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Jayna Korthari – Indian lawyer and activist who looks at caste and gender (transgender people in India) – At the Intersections of Caste and Gender
  • Kwoya Fagin Maples – poet and professor of literature – slave women who were experimented upon to develop OB/GYN technology – Shadow Monster, Blackberry Winter
  • Kelly Ellenburg – Has a consulting firm that works on building bridges between major education institutions and local government entities (e.g., local water treatment facilities) – Being Small: Overcoming Conformity, Discovering Inner “Bigness,” Finding Tiny Heroes, and Stepping into My Power as a Uniquely Abled Person
  • Luisa Rivera – PhD student at Emory University who studies racialization of COVID – Immunological Ghosts: (Epi)Genetic Racialization in the COVID-19 Pandemic
  • Marianne Wanamaker – resigned from Trump advisory board; looks at black-owned businesses – 2020 Has Presented Enormous Challenges to Black-Owned Business (co-authored with Hancen Sale)
  • Sarah Willen, Emory alumna, from Seraphin’s cohort – journaling project at University of Connecticut – How to Decolonize Future Histories of COVID-19, Starting Now (co-authored with Adriana Sowell and Corona Zhang)

Strange Fruit was the first issue and looked at freeing of blacks in Appalachia; Seraphin contributed a piece on human biology (entitled, Strange Fruit and the Furtive Killing of Blacks)

  • Lisa Williams – poetry – Which Tree; Pastoral Mistake, Breaking out of my chest, this heart –
  • Phillip White – poetry – The Trees The Sky The Dirt
  • Imani Smith – student and activist post-Breonna Taylor’s death – To the witnesses of the movement
  • Raquel Fleskes – PhD candidate at University of Pennsylvania –The Tip of the Iceberg: Structural Violence in the Archaeological Record
  • Judson Laughter [NB: pronounced lotter]– How Can One Teaching Make A Difference in the School-to-Prison Pipeline (how one teacher who builds a connection with students at risk can make a huge difference)
  • Nihmotallahi Adebayo – Northwestern University Public Health – Implicit Bias in Mental Healthcare and the Plight of the Black Patient
  • Jonathan Harwell – criminal lawyer and Seraphin’s husband – Extrajudicial Killings and Judicial Injustices
  • Bertin (M.) Louis (Jr.) – anthropologist who read, If We Must Die, by Claude McKay (audio recording on TTR)

TTR issues in preparation, to be released soon:

  1. February (winter 2021) release: Fulcrum – with minimal effort, you lift a large load (can make a major difference by applying effort on the right facet of a problem). The issue looks at game-changing ideas for the reimagined society.
  2. Spring 2021 release: 3 Seconds – Human causes and consequences of climate change, including environmental racism. This issue will include computer glitch art.