Director's Message, Fall 2022
As we head into the holiday break, it is a good time to reflect on the fall and my time as interim director at CASBS. The view from the front office is quite different from a fellow’s desk. Indeed, the view from the front office has changed dramatically as two of our iconic trees had to be removed because of disease. The new building, our first since 1954, is going up. Steady progress is being made and we are hopeful it will be ready by spring. The construction has proved only moderately disruptive to the staff, even less so to the fellows. The building, which we have dubbed the Collaboratory, will offer us additional space for meetings, a small conference room, and various features that will bring us into the 21st century. There will be a new courtyard that will add to our meeting space and enhance the overall landscape of CASBS.
Our new class of fellows and vising scholars already has formed very strong bonds. This class is more international and younger than any class in the history of the Center. There are also no returning fellows, so everyone is starting on the same page, afresh. There is shared interest in regulating technology, reducing bias and inequalities, and in speculative governance, the latter a way to think about new types of governance arrangements that enable us to imagine less dystopian futures. This group borrows from all manner of the literary and creative arts, especially science fiction, and a wide array of social science. These groups have all emerged from the ground up, so to speak; they were not the product of any advance design or intended program. They bring excitement, energy, and connect fellows in new and unexpected ways. The friendships formed among our cast of fellows are a delight to see. Rather than have a formal social committee, this class opted to have every fellow become an event organizer, and consequently we’ve enjoyed an incredible array of activities.
We’ve had an active speaker series. Former fellow and director Claude Steele talked about his new book-in-progress and took comments from three current fellows and the rest of us. Past fellow and current faculty fellow Nate Persily, an elections security and administration expert, provided us his analysis of the November mid-term results.
Our various multi-year programs and projects, as well as summer institutes, continue. In the newsletter you will hear about the enCOREage project, an effort to create a new-to-the-world economics textbook that is more relevant to students’ lives and much more inclusive in terms of topics. The Toward a Theory of AI Practice project has drafted a white paper that resulted from last summer’s conference at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. And the Creating a New Moral Political Economy program will celebrate its culmination with a special issue of Deadalus in February 2023 and a conference the following month to highlight its many contributions.
This summer we will host two institutes for the first time. We will have the first installment of the Institute on Diversity, led by former fellows Mary Murphy, Jennifer Richeson, Katherine Stovel, and current fellow Sylvia Perry. We’ll host the fifth iteration of the Organizations and Their Effectiveness institute in July. This community has been meeting virtually throughout the pandemic, bringing together all four previous cohorts. We held an in-person three-day meeting at the University of Cambridge in May, combining our CASBS scholars from Europe and the UK with local Cambridge faculty. We will return for a repeat engagement this spring. The institute will bring a new cohort as well as former scholars who will begin to serve in our ‘guest chef’ roles.
Mike Gaetani, our communications director, has been busy with all manner of outreach efforts. One notable new partnership he helped put together is with La Vie des Idées, a leading French publishing platform for social science dialog. Mike also has produced a number of new videos highlighting the fellowship programs that I urge you to view and share. Finally, we’ve developed more partnerships that provide funding for fellows from parts of the world that are not often included in U.S.-based residential programs. Thanks to a fellowship partnership with the Riksbankens Jubileumfond, we will soon have a funded Swedish fellow. Similarly, we will have a Korean fellow supported by the Korean Foundation for Advanced Studies. We’ll have more to say about both early in 2023. Combined with our existing partnerships that bring us fellows from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa, these new forms of support help the Center financially and diversify our class.
The magic on the hill continues. I send everyone warm wishes for the holidays,
Woody Powell
Sara Miller McCune Interim Director
Photo of Woody Powell courtesty of Stanford PACS