Past Events

How Does Confronting Our History Build a Better Future? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

How Does Confronting Our History Build a Better Future?

Recent attempts to confront difficult history have exposed major divisions over memory in the United States. But scholars, social justice activists, and many others argue that grappling with the sins of the past, and the ways they reverberate into the present, is a necessary foundation for reimagining the future. Museums are finding new ways to collaborate with communities on projects …

Sacramento In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is A Good Job Now? For Fairness In the Workplace

The state of California has some of the nation’s strongest legal protections for workers. But Californians continue to suffer from various forms of abuse by their employers—from unpaid overtime to dangerous working conditions; from wage theft to racial, ethnic, gender discrimination. What are the biggest challenges for agencies and communities as they seek to turn pro-labor legislation into better workplace …

What Is the State of Surveillance? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is the State of Surveillance?

Early this year, an uncrewed Chinese-operated high-altitude balloon floated across U.S. airspace, stoking anxiety and fascination among Americans, who assumed it was spying on them, and ultimately provoking President Biden to order the Pentagon to shoot it down. Just as alarming as foreign espionage, though, is the fear of information-gathering turned inward. American anxieties around the “surveillance state” have only …

Do We Need More Food Fights? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

Do We Need More Food Fights?

We know cooking best as an act of nourishment, love, and tradition—but it can also cut as sharply as the knives that chop an onion. In Sinaloa, Mexico, a group of relatives of desaparecidos (the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared from the country), have banded together to fight back against government indifference and complicity. Dubbed Las Rastreadoras …

Why Isn’t Remembering Enough to Repair? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Memphis In-Person | Streaming Online

Why Isn’t Remembering Enough to Repair?

The Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel did not believe in collective guilt. Instead, he asked for repair, and for holding the post-World War II generation of Germans responsible “not for the past, but for the way it remembers the past. And for what it does with the memory of the past.” Other societies and communities have taken up Wiesel’s call—at the …

Fresno In-Person | Streaming Online

“What Is a Good Job Now?” In Health Care

While agriculture consumes more land and gets more notice, health care employs more people and represents a bigger piece of Fresno’s economy. But just as access to health care is profoundly unequal, so are pay and working conditions in health jobs. And the pandemic and health facility closures, as with Madera Community Hospital, have added to the stresses and insecurities …