REGISTER
Physical spaces profoundly influence community well-being. Understanding this relationship is crucial for leveraging planning and policy to foster equitable outcomes. This panel brings together experts to explore how thoughtful planning and strategic policy can shift power toward communities, creating conditions where all can thrive. This discussion will bridge diverse perspectives on environmental conservation, design psychology, and disability studies to illuminate steps toward more just and inclusive environments.
The panel will feature You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley; Sally Augustin, Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces and Principal at Design With Science; and Karen Nakamura, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Disability Studies Lab at UC Berkeley. Meredith Sadin, Associate Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy and Senior Researcher at the UC Berkeley Possibility Lab, will moderate.
Co-sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces, the Possibility Lab, the Center for Research on Social Change, and the UC Berkeley Departments of Geography and Anthropology.
Panelists
Sally Augustin is a practicing environmental/design psychologist, the principal at Design With Science, and a researcher with the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces. She has extensive experience integrating science-based insights to develop recommendations for the design of places, objects, and services that support desired cognitive, emotional, and physical experiences. Her Design With Science clients include manufacturers, service providers, and design firms in North America, Europe, and Asia. Augustin is a graduate of Wellesley College (BA), Northwestern University (MBA), and Claremont Graduate University (PhD). Dr. Augustin is the author of Designology (Mango 2019), Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009), and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Information Design (Wiley, 2012).
You-Tien Hsing is a Professor of Geography and the Pamela P. Fong Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of development in East Asia, especially China. She is interested in the question of power and space. Her first book, Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection, centers on the role of culture in inter-regional capital flows. In her second book, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, she examines the issue of territoriality, looking at how the transformation of the state and society shapes and is shaped by land battles in Chinese cities and villages. Her co-edited book, Reclaiming Chinese Society, explores China’s emerging social activism in struggles over distribution, recognition, and representation. Her current project concerns the cultural and environmental politics in Northwestern China. For her research, she draws inspiration from ethnographic work, including in-depth interviews and participatory observation with a reflexive perspective. She believes that theorizing starts from muddy realities and is a process of open dialogues and self-reflections, of which the historical and the geographical, the institutional and the emotional are all indispensable parts.
Karen Nakamura is a Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and is the director of the Disability Studies Lab. Professor Nakamura’s research focuses on disability, sexuality, and other minority social movements in contemporary Japan, In 2006, she published Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity, an ethnography exploring sign language and deaf social movements. Her second project on psychiatric disabilities and community-based recovery resulted in two ethnographic films and a book titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). Her books, films, and articles have resulted in numerous prizes including the John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the SVA Short Film Award, and David Plath Media Award. She is currently finishing a project on trans movements as disability in Japan while launching a new project on robotics, augmentation, and prosthetic technology.
Meredith Sadin (moderator) is an Assistant Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy. She is a trained political scientist (Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2014) and her work focuses on political access, community engagement, and inequality. Dr. Sadin has extensive experience collaborating with practitioners, policymakers, and government agencies on projects designed to evaluate, implement, scale, and improve public policies and programs as well as access to the democratic process. She aims to utilize Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approaches in her research – conducting rigorous and systematic research with the collaboration of those directly impacted by the issue being studied. She currently serves as the Director of the Center on Civility & Democratic Engagement (CCDE) as well as a Faculty Research Affiliate at the Possibility Lab. Her work has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the CARESTAR Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Sadin has published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, Criminal Justice and Behavior, Punishment & Society, Journal of Urban Design, and cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New Republic.