Spring 2026
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All colloquia are held via Zoom webinar from 12:00-1:00 pm ET
Recordings will be made available after the presentation
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February 18th
Karen Jacobsen presents: Host Cities: How Refugees Are Transforming the World’s Urban Settings
How does a rapid mass humanitarian influx affect cities? My recent book, Host Cities, explores what happens to cities when large numbers of refugees come to them - and stay. My book focuses on cities in the world’s poor countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, but these cities’ experience offers insights into urban change all over the world in terms of refugees’ economic, security, environmental and landscape impact.
Karen Jacobsen is the Henry J. Leir Professor in Global Migration at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her research explores urban displacement and global migration, esepcially the livelihoods and financial resilience of migrants and refugees, and on climate- and environment-related mobility. She directs the Refugees in Towns Project at the Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security (Tufts U). In 2013-2014, she was on leave from Tufts, leading the Joint IDP Profiling Service (JIPS) at United Nations in Geneva. From 2000-2005, she directed the Alchemy Project, which explored the use of microfinance to support people in refugee camps. Her latest book, Host Cities: How Refugees Are Transforming the World's Urban Settings (Yale University Press, 2025), examines the impact of displacement on cities.
February 25th
Edward Bartholomew presents: Light Justice in the Public Realm: A new framework for equitable visual infrastructure
Light Justice is the practice of planning, designing, implementing, and investing in good lighting for historically neglected neighborhoods through a process of stakeholder engagement and communitysupported placemaking with light. We believe that “everyone deserves quality lighting and beneficial darkness.” This talk will address lighting equity in sustainable and healthy exterior spaces. It examines the causes and characteristics of how lighting is weaponized against underserved, oppressed communities, and the impact of overlighting on human physical and mental health.
Light Justice investigates the intersection of lighting and environmental justice by revealing the history
and practice of lighting for underserved communities. This talk will answer these key questions:​
How can we bring quality lighting to everyone?
What are the barriers to everyone having quality lighting?
What are examples of quality lighting that are accessible and affordable to everyone? ​
Edward Bartholomew, IALD, LC, LEED AP, IES, is Principal of Bartholomew Lighting, an award-winning,
Black-owned architectural lighting design and consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With
over 30 years of experience, Edward has led the design of sustainable, inspiring, and socially responsive
lighting systems for monuments, academic and institutional buildings, corporate environments, public
spaces, and community-centered projects. He is a frequent speaker at regional, national, and international
conferences on lighting design, equity, and the role of light in human and civic well-being.
Bartholomew Lighting is a Massachusetts-certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) committed to
delivering healthy, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible lighting solutions that revitalize people,
places, and the public realm. With more than 75 years of combined experience, the firm’s multidisciplinary
team draws from backgrounds in architecture, theater, and art to support projects from pre-design through
construction administration, including daylighting analysis, energy modeling, photometrics, BIM
coordination, and commissioning. The firm’s portfolio spans renovations, institutional, commercial,
landscape, master planning, and monument work, with notable projects including the recent award-winning
Harriet Tubman Memorial, “Shadow of a Face” in Newark, NJ.
Edward is a co-founder of Light Justice, an advocacy organization advancing equitable, community-engaged lighting practice in under-resourced environments, and the founder of BUILD (Black United in Lighting & Design), an affinity group supporting African-American lighting professionals. He also serves on the Illuminating Engineering Society’s DEIR Committee, contributing to broader industry efforts around
inclusion, education, and standards. Through both practice and advocacy, Edward and Bartholomew
Lighting advance the belief that well-designed light—and intentional darkness—are essential civic and
architectural resources that support equity, health, safety, and environmental responsibility.
March 11th
Daniel Laurison presents: Tackling the Political Disconnect: Working-Class and Low-Income People on What Politics Means to Them and How They Might Be Mobilized
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A functioning democratic society must involve all kinds of people in deciding who will hold the power to enact laws and allocate tax dollars. However, working-class and low-income people vote at significantly lower rates than the more privileged in the US, and their participation has been declining in recent elections. Our research team conducted interviews with 144 people who rarely or never vote to understand their lives, their views of politics, and how they might be moved to be part of US democracy.
This talk describes some of the key results of those interviews, and our recommendations for increasing political participation among low-income and working-class people in the U.S. The people we spoke with were not apathetic or ignorant, and most told us making voting easier would not bring them to the polls. Instead, we found that low-income and working-class people see electoral politics as deeply disconnected from their lives, experiences, and communities; politics seems like a game played among the privileged, rather than a means to solving the problems they face. A fully inclusive democracy requires creating and sustaining real connections with people and communities who do not currently feel represented.
Daniel Laurison is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, and the Director of Swarthmore’s Healthy, Equitable and Responsive Democracy Initiative (HEARD). He was a 2021 Carnegie Fellow and is the former Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Sociology. His research is on issues of class, social mobility, racial inequality, and political participation. He is the author of Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (Beacon Press 2022) and The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to Be Privileged (Policy Press 2019, co-authored with Sam Friedman). He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013, and held a post-doctoral research position at the London School of Economics before starting at Swarthmore College in 2016. He has worked as a volunteer and staff for campaigns, and in the non-profit sector, as well as in academia.
April 1st
Benjamin Sovacool presents: Conceptual frameworks and new frontiers in energy justice
This presentation explores how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making and highlight the futurity, fairness, and equity dimensions of energy production and use. It defines "energy justice" as a global energy system that fairly distributes both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that contributes to more representative and inclusive energy decision-making. Such an assessment brings together core understandings of distributional and procedural justice alongside cosmopolitan interpretations of equity and recognitional notions of fairness. The presentation then focuses on six new frontiers or fruitful areas of future research. First is making the case for the involvement of non-Western justice theorists. Second is expanding beyond humans to look at the Rights of Nature or non-anthropocentric notions of justice. Third is focusing on cross-scalar issues of justice such as embodied emissions. Fourth is identifying business models and the co-benefits of justice. Fifth is better understanding the tradeoffs within energy justice principles. Sixth is confronting utopian or falsely constructed justice discourses. In doing so, the presentation argues in favor of "justice-aware" energy planning and policymaking, and it hopes that its (reconsidered) energy justice conceptual framework offers a critical tool to inform decision-making.
Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University in the United States, where he is the Founding Director of the Institute for Global Sustainability. He is also Professor of Energy Policy at the Bennett Institute for Innovation & Policy Acceleration at the University of Sussex Business School. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow in the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). He was formerly Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School in the United Kingdom, and Director of the Center for Energy Technologies and University Distinguished Professor of Business & Social Sciences at Aarhus University in Denmark.
April 15th
Penn Loh presents: Solidarity Economy Movements in Massachusetts
This talk will share stories of the emergence of solidarity economy movements in Massachusetts. There is increasing recognition that colonial capitalist modernity is not only wreaking havoc on people and the planet, but that this world cannot sustain itself. Loh will trace how these movements, many of which he has been involved with, have been fighting for and building over the past fifteen years various ways of living in interdependence and collective care, around projects such as worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, community investment funds, mutual aid, and more.
Penn Loh is Teaching Professor and Director of Community Practice at Tufts University’s Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. He is also a faculty member of the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. He partners with various community organizations through the Solidarity Economy Initiative, Right to the City Alliance, and Center for Economic Democracy. From 1996 to 2009, he served in various roles, including Executive Director, at Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), a Roxbury-based environmental justice group. He holds an M.S. in environmental science and policy from Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley and a B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT. He has published broadly on environmental and social justice issues. He is currently a trustee of the Hyams Foundation and board member of Center for Economic Democracy.
