Multiple presenters discuss ideas for the future of work, food, and cities. Allison Carruth, Alexis Madrigal, Geoff Manaugh, Leila Janah, Nicola Twilley, Sarah Rich share their insight. Location: Doerr-Hosier, McNulty Room"
Bio
Allison Carruth
Allison Carruth is an assistant professor of English at UCLA, starting this fall, and has served most recently as the associate director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research examines the intersections of contemporary literature, food politics, and life science. She is co-organizer of the Food Justice Conference and book review editor for Gastronomica. Her first book, Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She is working on a new book project entitled The Transgenic Age.
Leila Janah
Leila Chirayath Janah is the founder of Samasource, an award-winning social business that connects people living in poverty to microwork — small, computer-based tasks that build skills and generate life-changing income. She serves on the boards of OneLeap and TechSoup Global and as an advisor to mobile shopping app RevelTouch.
Prior to Samasource, Janah was a a Visiting Scholar with the Stanford Program on Global Justice and Australian National University’s Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. She was a founding Director of Incentives for Global Health, an initiative to increase R&D spending on diseases of the poor, and a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.). She has also worked at the World Bank and as a travel writer for Let’s Go in Mozambique, Brazil, and Borneo.
Janah is a frequent speaker on social entrepreneurship and technology, and her work has been profiled by CBS, CNN, NPR, the BBC, The New York Times, and The New Scientist.
She received a BA from Harvard and lives in San Francisco.
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. Madrigal co-founded Longshot Magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the Association of Magazine Media and best science website in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti. He’s spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, South by Southwest, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010. Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley Office for History of Science and Technology.
Geoff Manaugh
Geoff Manaugh is the author of BLDGBLOG and The BLDGBLOG Book, former senior editor of Dwell magazine, and a contributing editor at Wired UK. He is co-director of Studio-X NYC, an off-campus event space run by the architecture department at Columbia University. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Technology, Sydney, and he lectures widely on architectural topics at museums, schools, and other venues around the world. Manaugh recently curated the exhibition Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions for the Nevada Museum of Art; an accompanying book, co-published by Actar, is forthcoming. Manaugh is also a freelance journalist, writing for Popular Science, The New York Times, GOOD, Volume, Domus, and many websites.
Sarah Rich
Founder, Longshot Magazine, Foodprint Project, and Editor Emeritus at Inhabitat
Nicola Twilley
Nicola Twilley is author of the blog Edible Geography and co-director of Studio-X NYC, part of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation’s global network of advanced research laboratories for exploring the future of cities. She is curator of a forthcoming exhibition at the Center for Land Use Interpretation exploring North America’s spaces of artificial refrigeration and co-founder of the Foodprint Project. In June 2012, Future Plural, the curatorial and publishing initiative that she co-directs, launched Venue, a pop-up interview studio and mobile media rig traveling around North America through September 2013.
Allison Carruth, assistant professor of English at UCLA, shares what environmentalists and organic food producers can learn from pesticide creator Monsanto.
