The Baldy Center Podcast

The Baldy Center Podcast highlights UB faculty research and perspectives on current issues and events. We focus on UB's interdisciplinary scholars of law, legal institutions, and social policy.

Subscribe to be informed when new blogs are posted. Follow us on Twitter for updates from The Baldy Center.

Fall 2021 Episodes

Episode 18: Samantha Barbas discusses her new book The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst: Free Speech Renegade
9/7/21
Episode 18 features Samantha Barbas, Professor of Law and Director of The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy in the University at Buffalo School of Law. Professor Barbas discusses her new book from University of Chicago Press (2021) The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst: Free Speech Renegade. In the 1930s and ’40s, Morris Ernst was one of America’s best-known liberal lawyers. The ACLU’s general counsel for decades, Ernst was renowned for his audacious fights against artistic censorship.

AUDIO STREAMING 24/7

Listen to The Baldy Center Podcast on PodBean, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or most any audio app. Alternatively, you can stream the podcast on our website anytime by using the audio player on each episode page.

Baldy Center Podcast on Digital Commons, DC@UB

Fall 2021 Podcast Host/Producer

Edgar Girtain, Podcast 2021-22 Host/Producer

Edgar Girtain is host/producer of the 2021-22 Edition of The Baldy Center Podcast. He is a PhD student in the music department at SUNY Buffalo, where he studies with David Felder. Girtain is a director of the Casa de Las Artes at the University of Southern Chile (UACh), and president of the Southern Chilean Composers Forum (FoCo Sur). Girtain is an eminent composer, pianist, and writer of his own biographies. His diverse areas of work are often collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and international in ambition if not in practice.

Fall 2020 — Spring 2021 Episodes

In Fall 2020, the podcast offers insight from Mark Bartholomew (UB Law), Irus Braverman (UB Law), Amanda Hughett (former Baldy Center Fellow), David Herzberg (UB History), Jennifer Gaynor (Baldy Center) and others.

The Spring 2021 podcast includes UB faculty affiliates discussing research about: Nurse-Initiated Protocols in Emergency Departments; Tacit Racism; Urban Renewal and School Reform; Harm Reduction; Law, Class and Racial Capitalism on ClassCrits, the opiod crisis; and, the Alison Des Forges International Symposium, among other topics.

We invite you to subscribe to be informed when new podcast episodes are released.

Episode 15: Athena Mutua discusses the origins and goals of ClassCrits
5/5/21
Episode 15 features Athena Mutua, Professor and Law and Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar in the University at Buffalo School of Law. Professor Mutua discusses the origins and goals of ClassCrits, which focuses on the heterodox, or political economy approach in law. She presents the new online journal, The Journal of Law and Political Economy and discusses ways in which ClassCrits engages with ongoing and on the ground activist work in significant social issues.
Episode 14: Sustaining the Alison Des Forges International Symposia
4/21/21
Episode 14 of our podcast series is about the work of the Alison L. Des Forges Memorial Committee, and its international symposia held at the University at Buffalo. Beginning in 2012, the symposia has been sponsored, in part, by The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy. This episode features Roger Des Forges, the group's co-founder. He is joined in discussion with the Committee co-chairs, Ellen Dussourd and Shaun Irlam. Together, they offer insight on aspects of sustaining the Alison Des Forges International Symposia. This year's event takes place April 30, 2021. Learn more, here.
Episode 13: Victoria-Idongesit Udondian discusses her sculptural work “The Republic of Unknown Territory” and immigration
3/23/21
Episode 13 features Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, interdisciplinary artist and University at Buffalo Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art. Udondian discusses her new sculptural work The Republic of Unknown Territory on exhibit in the UB Arts Collaboratory. The work is focused on immigrants’ experiences in migrating and building society. Udondian art installation highlights the politics of the post-colonial global market in second-hand clothing. The gallery exhibit runs from February 27 to March 27, 2021, in The Space Between.
Episode 12: Marie Jauffret-Roustide discusses harm reduction as an effective response to the opioid overdose crisis
3/9/21
Episode 12 features Marie Jauffret-Roustide, PhD, Senior Fellow in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, and, Research Fellow at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, France. Jauffret-Roustide discusses the effectiveness of drug policies that are embedded in human rights and harm reduction, and compares them to repressive drug policies that are ineffective in protecting vulnerable people and the communities in which they live.
Episode 11: Erkin Ozay discusses his new book, Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore: Rethinking the 21st Century Public School
2/10/21
Episode 11 features Erkin Özay, assistant professor of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning. Özay discusses his new book “Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore: Rethinking the 21st Century Public School” (Routledge 2021), and his holistic approach to the relationships among urban development, urban design, and schools.
Episode 10: Waverly Duck and Anne Rawls discuss their new book, Tacit Racism.
2/10/21
Episode 10 features co-authors Waverly Duck, Distinguished Visiting Scholar, 2020-21, Center for Diversity Innovation, University at Buffalo, and Anne Rawls, Professor of Sociology at Bentley University. They discuss their new book, Tacit Racism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Their research focuses on understanding how centuries of institutional racism have shaped interactions between white people and Black Americans into patterns of implicit bias and tacit racism.
Episode 9: Jessica Castner, “Nurse-Initiated Protocols in Emergency Departments”
1/27/21
Episode 9 of The Baldy Center Podcast features Jessica Castner, a board-certified emergency nurse and an emergency nurse scientist. In 2014 she received a research grant from The Baldy Center, entitled, Complaint-Specific Protocols: Layers of Regulation and Emergency Nurse Scope of Practice. In this podcast Castner discusses her current research and recent publication on nurse-initiated protocols in emergency departments, and offers perspective on policy and protocol impacts on pandemic emergency room care in hospitals.

Keywords: Health and Society, Health Policy, Regulation, Emergency Nursing, COVID-19, pandemic.
Episode 8: Sarah Ludin discusses the socio-legal history of the Early Reformation in Germany
11/18/20
In episode 8 of the podcast Sarah Ludin discusses her developing book manuscript focused on the socio-legal history of the Early Reformation in Germany, which relies on close readings of 1521-1555 C.E. case files in the Holy Roman Empire to understand the historiography of secularism and the definition and significance of religion as a modern secular legal category.
Episode 7: Daniel Platt discusses “The Domestication of Credit.”
11/3/20
Episode 7 features Daniel Platt, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Springfield and former Baldy Center Postdoctoral Fellow. Professor Platt discusses his recent article “The Domestication of Credit,” focused on the moral politics of personal finance in 19th and 20th century U.S., paying specific attention to women’s contributions to household finances, to credit, debt, and financial institutions, and to the roles of coercion and discrimination in a debt economy.
Episode 6: David Gerber and Bruce Dierenfield discuss disability rights and religious freedom
9/21/20
Episode 6 of the podcast features David Gerber, emeritus professor of history at UB and Bruce Dierenfield of Canisius College. Professors Gerber and Dierenfield discuss their new book, focused on the Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District case at the crossroads of disability rights and church-state separation.
Episode 5: Jennifer Gaynor discusses maritime Southeast Asia
9/23/20
In Episode 5 of the podcast Jennifer Gaynor discusses her current research and her previous book, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia, which drew on European and Southeast Asian sources, as well as four years in Indonesia, where she worked with rare Bugis language manuscripts and lived in communities of Sama sea people.
Episode 4: Amanda Hughett discusses the history of prisoner labor unions
9/23/20
Episode 4 of the podcast features Amanda Hughett discussing the history of prisoner labor unions. The work examines how efforts to litigate around prison conditions in the 1970s unintentionally cut against imprisoned people’s efforts to mobilize at the grassroots level.
Episode 3: David Westbrook and Mark Maguire discuss airport security and counterterrorism
9/9/20
Episode 3 of the podcast features David A. Westbrook, UB School of Law and Mark Maguire, National University of Ireland Maynooth. Professors Westbrook and Maguire discuss airport security and counterterrorism, and their new book, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge, 2020).
Episode 2: Irus Braverman discusses medical posthumanities
8/7/20
Episode 2 of the podcast features UB School of Law professor Irus Braverman discussing her upcoming workshop, Medical Posthumanities: Governing Health Beyond the Human. Braverman's work explores holistic approaches to health that include scientific, natural science discussions between ecologists and virologists that also takes into consideration social and cultural understandings and also legal norms.
Episode 1: Mark Bartholomew discusses contact tracing
7/28/20
Episode 1 of the podcast features UB School of Law professor Mark Bartholomew. Professor Bartholomew discusses the pandemic, contact tracing, and the tension between public health security and privacy in using technology to track the coronavirus. Mark Bartholomew received a 2018-2019 research grant from the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy to help support his research, “The Law of Advertising Outrage.”

2020-21 Podcast Producer

Azalia Muchransyah

Azalia Muchransyah is a filmmaker, writer, and scholar from Indonesia. In Spring 2021 she completed her PhD in Media Study. During her time as our podcast producer, she was a PhD Candidate in Media Study at UB. Muchransyah's research investigates the status of activist media, specifically for HIV advocacy in Indonesia. Her short films have been officially selected for screening at international festivals and academic conferences.

Executive Producers

Samantha Barbas, PhD
Professor, UB School of Law
Director, The Baldy Center

Caroline Funk, PhD
Associate Director, The Baldy Center

Fall 2020 Podcast Trailer

Fall 2020, Podcast Trailer

Trailer Transcript: Fall 2020

Spring 2021 Trailer

Spring 2021, Podcast Trailer

Trailer Transcript: Spring 2021