Building a Global Public Square

Fall 2018

The proposition next to the radiant, gold-painted shipping container was simple and inviting. “Portals,” said the sign. “Step inside and engage people around the world, live, as if in the same room.”

Last June, from a sun-drenched quad on the Homewood campus, Portal visitors were transported—with the help of a floor-to-ceiling video screen and immersive audiovisual technology—to a location outside Erbil, Iraq, where four men sat inside another Portal.

It is, as the sign suggested, as if you are in the same room, free to talk about the weather, or the time difference between the two locations, or the challenges of gaining access to higher education in a conflict zone.

Four years after the Portals idea first began as a public art experiment by Amar Bakshi, a 2012 graduate of Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, the concept has evolved into a global network of more than 30 locations that facilitate conversations across miles and divides.

The Hopkins Portal was temporarily situated on Decker Quad, in front of Garland Hall. It was brought to campus by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, which aims to foster the kind of civic discourse that is a cornerstone of thriving democracies around the world and sees the Portals as precisely the kind of next-generation technology that makes that sort of dialogue possible.

“When you think about it, we often use technology to distance ourselves, and technology can actually drive us deeper into our tribes,” says Bakshi, co-founder of Shared Studios, which runs the Portals project.

On that day in June, a steady stream of curious visitors ducked into the Portal space. The connections were prearranged: with Gaza City to discuss the design challenges involved in devising new solutions for emergency response care; with Erbil to discuss how educational institutions around the world can provide opportunities for refugee communities; with Milwaukee to talk about the ongoing research of Krieger School sociologist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Vesla Weaver, who is using Portals to inspire peer-to-peer dialogues about police-community relations in urban neighborhoods across the country.

Outside, in a comment book, visitors wrote messages in gold ink about their Portal experience.

“Thank you for making the world a smaller, more compassionate place for all of us,” read one.

“I can see the walls of differences breaking down,” read another.

This notion of bringing people from around the world together to engage in conversations, to solve problems, and to transcend differences is central to the mission of the SNF Agora Institute, which launched last year with a $150 million gift from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

The signature Portal model is a golden shipping container fitted inside with patented and patent-pending hardware and software—cameras, microphones, and screens to connect users to live conversations, like a more intimate version of Skype. Over time, Shared Studios has also found ways to allow more flexible setups—in classrooms, school buses, and even inflatable stations.

As the Portals technology has advanced, Bakshi says, so has the vision.

“We’re trying to think more broadly about how to take advantage of human diversity to enrich people’s lives,” he says, pointing to the larger goal of “building a new sort of public infrastructure,” a kind of “global public square.”

That idea, of course, is also at the heart of the SNF Agora Institute, which borrows its name—agora—from the Greek word for a public assembly space.

Alumni Kudos: Fall 2018

Fall 2018

Roy T. Chen ’94 (natural sciences) received the Fellowship Award of the Academy of General Dentistry in June. He practices in Astoria, Oregon.

Susan de Sola, MA ’89, PhD ’97 (English), is the recipient of the Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry for her blank verse poem “Buddy.” She has published poems in The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse, and the Birmingham Poetry Review.

Cari Lynn ’97 (MA, writing) won a 2018 NAACP Image Award for the book she co-authored, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women.

 

Pre-Orientation Adventures

Fall 2018

Incoming students braved the rapids in Pennsylvania’s Ohiopyle State Park during the annual weeklong Pre-Orientation program fondly known as “Pre-O.” Facilitated by upperclassmen in the Experiential Education program, Pre-O is offered every August to help freshmen establish a network of peers as they transition into life at Hopkins.

Interested students can choose from among five outdoor experiences including backpacking, canoeing and hiking, rock climbing, multi element, and kayaking. Other offerings range from community service and leadership programs to Habitat for Humanity and an immersion into Baltimore’s film and culture scene.

By the Numbers

  • 21 years since the first outdoor Pre-O program
  • 92 first-year students took part this year
  • 39 student instructors this year
  • 14 outdoor trips this year

Empowered While Imprisoned

Fall 2018

photo: Bridget Carolan
Through the lens of prison uprisings, Bridget Carolan ’20 studies how society’s most powerless women can ignite political change. She is in Ireland this semester, visiting jails including Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, above.

In the summer of 1974, some 200 inmates at New York State’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women staged an uprising and took over parts of the prison. Known as the August Rebellion, it was in response to the inhumane treatment of an inmate who had initiated a lawsuit against the facility. Nearly six years later, and on the other side of the Atlantic, inmates at the Armagh Women’s Facility in Armagh, Northern Ireland, began refusing to bathe or work, and a few went on a hunger strike. This was during the Irish Troubles, and the women were protesting their loss of certain rights after having been reclassified from political prisoners to common criminals.

Junior political science and international studies major Bridget Carolan has a deep interest in incarceration policy and sees “a lot of parallels” between these two events. Her ongoing research project has her learning all she can about these actions with the larger goal, she says, of examining “how the most powerless women in society can ignite lasting political change” while incarcerated.

Both of these uprisings at women’s prisons were overshadowed by larger events at men’s facilities, such as 1971’s Attica Prison Riot in New York State’s Attica Correctional Facility, where 43 people were killed. “There is very little press coverage of the August Rebellion,” Carolan says. “They took over areas of the prison and took hostages, but there were no casualties on either side.” The Armagh actions, meanwhile, happened simultaneously with a much larger hunger strike at a men’s prison in Northern Ireland where nine strikers died. There were no fatalities among the women strikers.

In the United States, it appears women inmates used litigation more effectively than men. Indeed, after their uprising, the Bedford inmates won a class action suit that instituted better guidelines for when and how inmates are sent to solitary confinement or mental health facilities. Carolan anticipates spending years studying this topic with the ultimate goal of visiting where the uprisings took place and interviewing some of the surviving participants.

If the struggles of incarcerated women are often missing from the history books, they are getting some play in our living rooms through the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black, a women-behind-bars series that just completed its sixth season. Carolan says this is a good thing: “Even with the problems that can come with popular media portrayals of prisons, it gets people thinking about what it’s like to be a prisoner and how it’s nearly impossible to hold your captors to any sort of standards when you are completely at their mercy.”

Gender Defenders

Fall 2018

photo: Anthony Boutros
Anthony Boutros

Until last year, rapists in Lebanon could be exonerated if they married their victims. A number of women’s rights groups successfully fought for the repeal of controversial government penal code 522, which allowed rapists to escape justice by marrying their victims.

It was “definitely a win,” says Lebanese-American student Anthony Boutros, but he cautions that because of the complexity of the penal code (statutes similar to 522 remain on the books), and the dominating role of religious doctrines in the nation, the repeal is viewed by some activists as only a “partial success.”

“Religious bodies have the power over what we call ‘personal status laws’ in Lebanon,” says the junior sociology, international studies, and public health major. “So, everything from birth to marriage to divorce and death—anything that relates to your personal life—is governed by religious courts and religious bodies, and the government does not exercise its constitutional power to provide civil alternatives.”

Boutros refers to Lebanon as a “weak state,” and with research funding from three different Hopkins grants—the Aronson International Experience Grant; the Undergraduate Islamic Studies Research Grant; and the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Summer Grant—he visited the country last summer to interview leaders of more than a dozen gender justice groups about how they operate in this political environment.

As he began field work, Boutros says he was struck by “the innovative and diverse strategies that civil society organizations are employing to make a push for progress.” He began cataloging these approaches and the structures they are trying to overcome. One activist Boutros interviewed spent two years creating a civil society political party to compete against sectarian parties in elections. Another activist was working to increase gender justice within the sectarian parties. In addition, an academic activist was working through a business school to create sexual harassment laws and rules, not within the government, but in the bylaws for corporations.

“That way, employees who experience sexual harassment can sue their company, based not on the law of the land, but the laws of the company,” Boutros says. “There really is an incredible range of strategies at work. Lebanon’s imposing structures can make it seem hopeless to accomplish any kind of change, but civil society organizations are trying to make a dent.”

In Memoriam

Fall 2018

Joel Grossman, professor emeritus of political science, died June 2 of cancer at his Baltimore residence. He was 81.

A renowned scholar of courts and the Constitution, Professor Grossman spent 33 years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before coming to Johns Hopkins in 1996. He was the author or editor of five books, including The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. He also authored a number of widely influential articles on courts and constitutional law. Grossman served as editor of the Law & Society Review and received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2005. In 2007, he was recognized with the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Award. He remained active as a member of The Academy at Johns Hopkins after his retirement from the department in 2013, and in 2015, chaired the 14-member Task Force on Academic Freedom that was responsible for drafting a statement guiding academic freedom for the university community.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Grossman completed his undergraduate degree in political science at Queen’s College, CUNY. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees—also in political science—from the University of Iowa.

Aihud Pevsner, professor emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, died of cancer June 17 at his Baltimore residence. He was 92.

Pevsner was born in what is now Haifa, Israel, on December 18, 1925. His father was an immigrant from Belarus, and his mother was from Jerusalem. In 1928, the family moved to New York.

He served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1945, and married Lucille Wolf in 1949. He received his PhD in physics from Columbia University and served on the faculty at MIT before joining Johns Hopkins University in 1956.

Pevsner is credited with introducing experimental high-energy physics as a new field of study, and his extensive work led to the discovery of the eta meson, a type of subatomic particle made up of quarks and antiquarks. This discovery was crucial to the development of the Standard Model of particle physics, and was named in honor of Hopkins, with the Greek letter eta being equivalent to “H.” Pevsner served as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the 1970s, and was a fellow of the American Physical Society and a Trustee of Associated Universities Inc. He received two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Senior Research Fulbright Fellowship. In 1977, he became the first recipient of the Jacob L. Hain endowed professorship.

Willie Lee Rose, professor emerita of history, died in her sleep on June 20 at her Baltimore residence. She was 91.

A noted scholar of slavery and the Reconstruction period, Rose is perhaps best known as the author of Rehearsal for Reconstruction, a book that won several major prizes and that was considered a groundbreaking tome in the scholarly reconsideration of North American slavery. In a review of the book, The New York Times said Rose “has given us what is assuredly a definitive work.”

A native of Bedford, Virginia, Rose graduated from Mary Washington College and went on to teach high school in Elkridge, Maryland, from 1947 to 1949, when she married William G. Rose. She continued to teach until 1955, when she began to pursue graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University.

After receiving a doctoral degree from Hopkins, Rose taught at the University of Virginia, where she was named Commonwealth Professor of American History. She also served as the Cardozo Visiting Professor at Yale.

In 1970, Rose was appointed chair of the American Historical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession.

Rose was hired as a full professor at Johns Hopkins in 1973. In 1977, she was the first woman to be selected as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University. Established in 1922, the selective and prestigious professorship enables a distinguished American historian to spend a year in Oxford teaching, researching, and leading seminars.

Shortly after returning to Baltimore from Oxford, Rose suffered a debilitating stroke that greatly limited her academic work.

News Briefs: Fall 2018

Fall 2018

Colson Whitehead

The winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad read from his work as part of the President’s Reading Series.

“G” Whiz

Cognitive Science professor Michael McCloskey and his research team struck a nerve when they showed that most people don’t recognize the lower-case looptail letter “g,” which was publicized in The Atlantic, TIME, and HuffPost, among others.

Mummy Mysteries

An exhibit at the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, “Who Am I? Remembering the Dead Through Facial Reconstruction,” aims to reconstruct the faces and lives of two women mummified more than 2,000 years ago.

Dean’s Desktop: Fall 2018

Fall 2018

Over the past few years, civil discourse in our world—particularly around politics—has become anything but civil. Some blame the extreme partisan rhetoric that seems to have exploded. Others look to the rise of social media as the cause. Rather than point fingers, however, wouldn’t it be more productive to figure out how we can change the course of our discourse, and in the process, shore up our democracies?

Enter the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, named for the organization that made an astounding $150 million gift for us to explore and address the causes underlying the current discourse.

The SNF Agora Institute will bring together experts from around the world along with members of our own faculty, students, and the general public to examine and elevate the state of civil discourse and democratic decision-making. The goal is to encourage conversations, debates, and ideas that can chip away at the bitter polarization that has only served to divide us.

The institute draws its inspiration from the agora of ancient Athens, a gathering place for debate and discussion that made it the birthplace of democracy. Scientific theory also was born at the ancient agora, where great minds such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle instructed students and discussed philosophical and social issues. One could even argue that medicine’s Hippocratic oath and math’s Pythagorean theorem might not exist today without the presence of the ancient agora, as both Hippocrates and Pythagoras were public figures known to have shared their ideas at the agora.

Fast forward to today, where the goals of the ancient agora will inform our SNF Agora Institute, but it will look much different (and more inclusive) than it did centuries ago in Athens. The SNF Agora Institute will have its own building, to be designed by none other than world-renowned architect Renzo Piano. He is the recipient of architecture’s most prestigious prizes and creator of acclaimed buildings on five continents. Some of his most well-known projects include the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Shard in London, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, and the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. And now, the building for our SNF Agora Institute right here in Baltimore, dedicated to strengthening democracy by improving civic engagement and civil discourse worldwide. We have not yet determined where on the Homewood campus the new building will stand, so stay tuned.

This is the hope I have for our SNF Agora Institute: that people from around the world will benefit from the research, conversations, and efforts that will happen here; that they will learn how other people live and think; and that they will develop respect for one another amid their differences. On the opposite page is an article that illustrates how the SNF Agora Institute has already begun to build bridges. The SNF Agora Institute is going to be a game changer for our university and hopefully, for the world.

Sincerely,

Beverly Wendland

Five Questions: Joseph Colón

Fall 2018

photo: Joe ColonJoseph Colón is the director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA). The office is part of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, along with the offices of LGBTQ Life, Women and Gender Resources, and Campus Ministries. OMA aims to support, engage, and empower students through leadership development, programming, and diversity education.

1. Who are the students that OMA serves?

We are committed to enhancing the educational experience of students from underrepresented populations. But having said that, I view OMA as serving all students of the university—undergraduate and graduate alike. My goal is to see students learn from one another and to create lasting partnerships that are authentic and speak to their identities. Our office is a liaison to formulating introspection around identities and strengthening communities.

2. What services does OMA offer to students?

The OMA offers everything from identity workshops and trainings to cultural heritage celebrations to diversity education workshops to leadership opportunities to mentoring. For example, we’re in the process of connecting some of our alumni as well as faculty and staff who are interested in advising our various multicultural student organizations. We have so many people associated with Hopkins who want to connect with students and help guide them through such formative years of adulthood.

3. OMA encourages underrepresented students to participate in one of its leadership programs such as Men of Color Hopkins Alliance, Female Leaders of Color, Mentoring Assistance Peer Program, and the Multicultural Leadership Council. Why is that important?

I constantly hear from our students that they still struggle with trying to figure out their place at Hopkins. Our leadership groups help them find their voice so they can work to resolve issues and have a fulfilling time as a student. For example, one goal of the Multicultural Leadership Council is for its members to promote events and programs among different organizations so that all students can explore and learn from different identities and backgrounds. We’re promoting our cultural heritage celebrations as a yearlong engagement instead of being restricted to the national monthly recognition.

4. More than 30 student organizations collaborate with OMA, from the African Student Association to the Taiwanese-American Student Association. Why should these groups exist?

At Hopkins, as well as at many universities, we are beginning to recognize the many facets that are intersecting around identity, diversity, and equity. We advocate for all student communities, and we promote the fact that we are all a part of the conversations around diversity and inclusion. These organizations enable underrepresented students to realize there are others across campus who look like they do.

5. What is overall message for underrepresented students at Hopkins?

It’s my hope that all of our students think about what their responsibility is on a global and local scale and to engage the community at large about topics that are relevant beyond the classroom. And for underrepresented students in particular, I want them to have a voice and be fearless about their world. I want them to engage in asking tough questions and to always feel affirmed that they have a community that will advocate and empower them.

Sports Briefs: Fall 2018

Fall 2018

Women’s Cross Country

Junior Samantha Levy of the top-ranked women’s cross country team was named the Centennial Conference Athlete of the Week in October for her performance at the Paul Short Invitational. The Blue Jays raced in the highly competitive Gold Race, finishing in ninth place.

Men’s Tennis

Junior Austin Gu was named the Centennial Conference Player of the Week after his performance at the 2018 ITA Southeast Championship in October. This is his second career weekly conference honor.

Women’s Soccer

The sixth-ranked women’s soccer team swept the Centennial Conference weekly awards in October as junior Emily Maheras was named the conference offensive player of the week and senior Cristina Madalo was named the league’s defensive player of the week.

Football

The football team jumped into the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA) top 25 in October as the Blue Jays collected 87 points and are now ranked 25th in the nation.

Women’s Basketball

The women’s basketball team placed 10th on the 2017–18 Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) Academic Top 25 Honor Roll. The Blue Jays boasted a 3.625 grade point average for the 2017–18 academic year.

Baseball

Johns Hopkins head baseball coach Bob Babb announced the promotion of Adam Schlenoff to full-time associate head coach. Schlenoff, entering his eighth season, will take on a more prominent role in on-field drills and working with the Blue Jay hitters.

Alumni to Watch: Fall 2018

Fall 2018

Benjamin Ackerman ’15 (public health) was chosen to be one of 13 public health ambassadors in the U.S. by the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. Ambassadors elevate awareness of public health and serve as liaisons for prospective students of public health.

Michael Edward Walsh ’02 (international studies) received the award for student entrepreneurship at the 2018 Make a Difference Awards from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He is the founder of the Islands Society and a volunteer at the Red Cross, where he creates maps of remote areas to help responders deliver aid.

 

Fly by Night Research

Fall 2018

photo: Cameron Chenault in lab
Sophomore Cameron Chenault studies whether bats “predict” their prey’s flight paths.

The hoary idiom “blind as a bat” is a misnomer. “No, they can see,” says sophomore behavioral biology and film double major Cameron Chenault. But since many of the flying mammals are nocturnal, they need some help catching prey in the dark. And for many bat species, that help is echolocation.

Chenault was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study the process of using sound to locate objects and to do that, she is working with a trio of big brown bats in the lab of Professor Cynthia Moss in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “Right now, we’re training them to focus on a tether that has a mealworm attached,” she says. “They have to vocalize at it and pay close attention to it and face the worm. They’re rewarded if they do that.”

This is just the first step toward what the researchers really want to discover: how much bats use ”prediction” when tracking an insect on the wing. There is a delay in the process of a bat signaling at something and then detecting the bounced back response. Do the airborne mammals compensate for this by estimating to some degree a bug’s flight path?

“We’re hoping to have the worm go behind an occluder, and then we can see if the bat looks to where the worm should come out,” Chenault says. “If it does, they must be predicting something in between. In the wild, if a bat is vocalizing directly at a moth, then there’s no guarantee that the moth is going to stay right in place. So, in between calls we think it’s figuring out where the moth might go. That’s what we’re looking at in the lab.”

Beyond the pure science of figuring out how bat brains use their built-in sonar, there could be practical lessons as well. The ultimate end game is to see if there are ways some form of echolocation could help the visually impaired or the elderly navigate their spaces. Part of Chenault’s fellowship involved flying to Brisbane, Australia, last summer to attend the conference of the International Congress of Neuroethology (researchers who study animal behavior and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system). There, she mingled with scientists studying bats as well as fish and bees. But for her part, she’s loyal to her choice of winged subjects. “Bats have a bad rap,” she says. “But they’re pretty nice and calm and easy little guys to work with.”