Sonali Rajan (Rajan@tc.columbia.edu)

 

(Re)Search for Solutions is a podcast created by the Media and Social Change Lab (MASCLab) at Teachers College, Columbia University. We use media to amplify research and to center the perspectives of a diverse range of experts – researchers, practitioners, and community members and leaders – in order to interrupt singular and oftentimes narrow discourses of complex social and natural phenomena. Complex problems require that we maintain their complexity in how we imagine, design, and report on solutions. This is true both of the smallest challenges and of the most complicated issues that adversely impact people’s lives - from school selection to climate change, from access to affordable health care to income inequality. In this podcast, we partner with research teams to lift study findings off the flat pages of a journal article and transform them into compelling narratives that can increase engagement by public audiences. “Solutions” refers to the work of research teams who aim to improve social conditions through their research and also to the new questions, creative practices, and applications that research inspires. Much of this work reflects the interdisciplinary of "climate" and "environment" that our Center for Sustainable Futures is championing and advocating for our collective research and practice efforts. 

 

In this first episode of (Re)Search for Solutions, we discuss greening - the conversion of an overgrown vacant lot to a small, grass-covered community space - as a non-policy-based solution to gun violence. We interviewed Dr. Charlie Branas, the Chairman of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, about his research into the effects of greening and the resulting decrease in gun violence in areas surrounding greened spaces. We also interviewed Keith Green, the Director of the Philadelphia LandCare Program at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), who coordinates greening projects throughout communities in Philadelphia and became an invaluable partner in Charlie and his team’s greening research. Check out the first episode below!