Past Lipman Center Work
Panels
A conversation between Dean Jelani Cobb and Nell Painter, American historian and professor emerita, Princeton University, author and artist.
Introduction by Robe Imbriano, director of the Lipman Center.
Nell Painter has spent the past five decades or so shaping a unique and inspired narrative of American history as a professor and through her published works.
I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays was published by Doubleday in April 2024 and gathers her previous work into one volume.
A screening of THE HOLLY, an award-winning documentary and an intimate portrait of one man’s struggle to escape his past and to help solve a mystery that could save him from a life behind bars.
The screening was followed by a conversation with film director-producer and author Julian Rubinstein, activist Terrance Roberts, and CBS Assistant Professor of International Journalism Nina Alvarez.
A screening of Episode 5, "Fear," followed by a conversation with showrunner Shoshana Guy and award-winning documentarian and Columbia Journalism School Professor June Cross.
A discussion with BBC filmmakers Owen Pinnell and Jessica Kelly, whose documentary investigates sacrifice zones in Iraq, where oil companies' profits are prioritized over human rights, human health, and the environment, and John Beard, an environmental racial justice advocate from Port Arthur, Texas, who lives in an American oil industry sacrifice zone.
Introduction: Dean Jelani Cobb.
Moderator: Nina Berman, award-winning documentary photographer and author, and professor at Columbia Journalism School.
Panelists:
- Owen Pinnell, investigative journalist and filmmaker, BBC News Arabic;
- Jess Kelly, award-winning independent filmmaker;
- John Beard, former oil refinery operator and environmental activist; and
- Manuela Orjuela-Grimm, Departments of Epidemiology and Pediatrics (Oncology), Columbia University Medical Center.
Spanning past and present, Hidden Letters explores an ancient, secret language, devised by Chinese women to communicate with each other in an oppressive society, that a generation today is resurrecting to help navigate misogyny. Award-winning documentarian and Columbia Journalism School Professor June Cross interviews documentarian Violet Du Feng about her film Hidden Letters.
Introduction: Eason Lu, master's student, East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University.
How do we cover one of the messiest, most polarizing, and deeply personal issues today: abortion? Where does objectivity enter if it ever does?
Panelists:
- Cynthia Lowen, documentary director and Emmy-nominated filmmaker;
- Nicole Shipley, executive producer, who also produced "Trial of the Chicago 7”;
- Terry McGovern, professor, and chair of the department of population and family health, Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Moderator: Professor June Cross, director of the documentary journalism program, Columbia Journalism School.
In 2018, a white terrorist shouting anti-Semitic slurs shot and killed 11 people as they prayed inside a Pittsburgh synagogue on the Sabbath. A new documentary, "Repairing the World: Stories From the Tree of Life," not only shows the extraordinary aftermath where an entire community joined hands to heal, but also examines the threat to democracy and human rights by white extremists.
Panelists:
- Patrice O'Neill, documentary director;
- Charene Zalis, reporter;
- Tess Owen, senior reporter, Vice news, who covers extremism.
Moderator: CJS Professor Nina Berman
Panels moderated by Dean Jelani Cobb, featuring winners of the Lipman Center’s inaugural Initiative in Reporting on Race and Criminal Justice Grants.
Panelists:
- Pulitzer Prize winners Ashley Remkus and John Archibald from AL.com;
- Pulitzer Prize winners Margie Mason and Robin MacDowell from The Associated Press;
- Writer Samantha Michaels and data journalist Ryan Kelly from Mother Jones;
- Julieta Martinelli from Futura Media Group; and
- Brittney Martin, independent journalist.
Panelists:
- Historian Kathleen Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” and co-editor of the forthcoming "A Field Guide to White Supremacy," which gathers resources for journalists covering racial violence, white nationalism, and other issues of inequality; and
- Nina Berman, professor of journalism at Columbia and an award-winning documentary photographer who has tracked white supremacy for the past two years.
Panelists:
- Historian Ellen Wu, professor of history and director of Asian American studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of "The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority;" and
- Jiayang Fu, a staff writer at the New Yorker who has covered violence against Asians and China and American politics.
The Lipman Dialogues
The Lipman Dialogues are succinct, timely discussions with people at the center of issues relating to civil and human rights. Each dialogue focuses upon a single issue and a single journalist, activist, political figure or changemaker connected to it. We hope that by presenting these dialogues we will equip our viewers not only with an understanding of the urgent issues confronting us but also what can be done to address them.
- March 2022: Jelani Cobb with Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Futures Lab.
- February 2022: Jelani Cobb with Mary Jackman and Kim Shauman, sociologists at the University of California, Davis, who discussed the systemic neglect of Black American health and the high mortality rate.
- January 2022: Jelani Cobb with Howard French, author of "Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War."
- October 2021: Jelani Cobb with Kathy Gannon, AP's news director for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who covers the Taliban and women in Afghanistan.
Born Free and Equal: A Symposium on Journalism and Civil and Human Rights
The Center held a full-day symposium on April 1, 2019, that included two panels:
- “Crisis and Crucible: The Landscape of Civil and Human Rights in 2019.” Panelists included two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Martha Mendoza, National Writer for The Associated Press; Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of New York Times best seller "White Rage"; and Jenni Monet, investigative journalist of Native American issues. Moderator: Ginger Thompson, senior reporter at ProPublica and adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School.
- “Perspectives: A Dialogue With Ta-Nehisi Coates and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.” Coates is a New York Times best-selling author and former writer for The Atlantic; Hunter-Gault is a civil rights activist and former journalist who has worked for National Public Radio, PBS MacNeil/Lehrer Report, The New York Times, among others. Moderator: Jelani Cobb.
Brown Bag Chats With Columbia Journalism Investigations (2020-2022)
Designed to help emerging reporters learn how to cover race and equity issues responsibly:
Ann Marie Cunningham discussed her experience documenting violence against Black and brown girls and women.
Ron Nixon, global investigations editor at the AP and a Pulitzer and Emmy winner, and Adeshina Emmanuel, editor-in-chief of Injustice Watch, discussed their experiences in the traditionally white-male world of investigative journalism and how they believe their backgrounds, viewpoints and experiences help shape their work.
Alice Qaanik Glenn, an Inupiaq raised in Utqiagvik, Alaska and podcaster, discussed Native life in Alaska.
This session featured two veteran civil rights and social justice advocates who have worked to combat environmental racism affecting communities of color across the country and at the federal level. Marianne Engelman-Lado is a law professor who established the environmental justice law clinic at Vermont Law School and a deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency. Vernice Miller-Travis is a recipient of the Sierra Club’s Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award.
Monica Rhor, story editor at Chalkbeat and a 2018 Lipman Fellow, discussed her work reporting a series of stories about the criminalization of black girls in Houston and how the juvenile system contributes to high incarceration and poverty rates for black women and their families.
This session featured resident-activists from communities of color that have been thrust into the media spotlight because of environmental discrimination, natural disaster and other social issues. Our guests provided a firsthand account of what it is like to be on the receiving end of reporters’ questions and gave advice for how reporters can approach and develop sources within communities that might differ from their own backgrounds.
Freelance reporter Dan Vock broke down his investigation into Great Schools, an online company that assigns schools grades. His investigation found that the company makes neighborhood segregation worse.
Mary Annaïse Heglar’s climate justice essays have appeared in the New Republic, Boston Globe, and more. She shared her advocate perspective on reporters covering climate change and environmental justice — what we miss, what we do right and how we might approach sources different from us in order to better illuminate climate's unequal burdens.
Angela Lang is a 28-year old Milwaukee native who founded BLOC in 2017 to engage more people to vote in her native city, which some consider the most segregated American city. She spoke about the grassroots efforts in communities of color to get out the vote in the 2020 election.
Kira Lerner, a staff writer at The Appeal, has spent years covering voter suppression, disenfranchisement and voting rights. She deconstructed her work as a Lipman fellow examining a Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement law in Florida that prevented hundreds of African Americans from participating in the voting process.