The Academic Minute for 2023.01.09-2023.01.13

The Academic Minute from 1.9 – 1.13

Monday
Ben Cotterill – Clemson University
Children’s Eyewitness Testimony

Ben Cotterill, PhD, is a lecturer at Clemson University, where he teaches courses relating to forensic psychology. His research interests include personality development, the reliability and credibility of eyewitness testimony, and testing police procedures used with children. His doctoral thesis examined how children’s temperament relates to their eyewitness performance. This year he released a book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, called Are Children Reliable Witnesses?

Tuesday
Mneesha Gellman – Emerson College
How Does Cultural Survival Happen? One Word at a Time
Dr. Mneesha Gellman is associate professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. She is the author of Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), and Democratization and Memories of Violence: Ethnic Minority Social Movements in Mexico, Turkey, and El Salvador (Routledge 2017). The founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, she is the editor of Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach in Prison (Brandeis University Press 2022). Dr. Gellman is vice president of the Human Rights section of the American Political Science Association, and she serves as an expert witness in asylum hearings in US immigration courts.

Wednesday
Karen Levy – Cornell University
How Surveillance is Changing the Long-Haul Trucking Industry
Karen Levy is an associate professor of Information Science at Cornell University and associated faculty at Cornell Law School. Her new book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, offers a behind-the-scenes look at how surveillance and automation are affecting the trucking way of life.

Thursday
Austin Sarat – Amherst College
Alabama and Lethal Injection Issues
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Chair of Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford, 2014),The Death Penalty on the Ballot (2019), and Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution.

Friday
Teresa Wright – California State University, Long Beach
Protests in China: What’s New and What’s to be Expected
Teresa Wright is a professor of Political Science at California State University, Long Beach. Her research focuses on state-society relations, protest and dissent, and the relationship among capitalism, democracy and authoritarianism—particularly in China and Taiwan. Along with four solo-authored books and one solo-edited volume, her published work includes journal articles in Comparative Politics, Economy and Society, The Journal of International Affairs, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, The China Quarterly, China: An International Journal, Church and State, and Asian Survey; and numerous chapters in edited volumes. From 2012-2022 she has served on the Editorial Board of the China Quarterly.