Join us for the Block 2 First Monday, "Colorado in Context: Democracy, Representation, Fairness, and Math." CC Associate Professor Beth Malmskog will discuss how math can help identify and prevent partisan gerrymandering and share her research group's work for fair maps in Colorado's 2021 redistricting process. We will also look briefly at what mathematics can say about other ways to pursue better representation, including alternative voting methods and multi-member districts. Math can offer surprising insights into democracy and fairness. 

Dr. Beth Malmskog is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at CC. Before joining the college in 2017, she was an Assistant Professor at Villanova University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at CC, and a Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. She earned her PhD with Dr. Rachel Pries at Colorado State University and her research focuses on arithmetic geometry, number theory, combinatorics, coding theory, and cryptography, as well as mathematical aspects of fair redistricting.  

Malmskog is passionate about teaching and talking about math. She co-led a Math Circle and taught Math for Liberal Arts at Graterford (now Phoenix) State Correctional Institution, near Philadelphia, PA. She is now part of the Liberal Arts in Correctional Facilities program at CC, teaching at the Youthful Offender System institution in Pueblo, Colorado.

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Please join us to hear esteemed author and political commentator Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. present a picture of race and democracy that is colored by current events and framed by African American history. Bearing witness to the difficult truth in our country today, Dr. Glaude lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and what we all must ask of ourselves to call forth a new America. Along the way, Dr. Glaude shares stories about the transformative power of imagination. “We must resist those voices who urge us to settle for the world as it is and call us to imagine a better world,” Dr. Glaude says.

Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual, and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, the former Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, and a member of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor.

Glaude’s writings include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. His most recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own, takes a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States, and the challenges we face as a democracy.

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Please join us to hear Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery discuss “Building a Multiracial Democracy.” In the 1960s, the Civil Rights marchers in Selma created a multiracial democracy. For the first time in American history, democratic participation was not limited based on racial caste. In the half-century since, our nation has grappled with what it wants to be. Do we want to embrace our newfound status as a multiracial democracy, or do we want to return to a racial caste system as we were for most of our history? Lowery will speak on the work of building a multiracial democracy amid the rise of nativism and racial division, looking at the unique tensions of this moment and how they correspond with similar periods throughout American history. 

Wesley Lowery is one of the nation's leading reporters on issues of race and justice. He is the executive editor of The Investigative Reporting Workshop, a Journalist-in-Residence at the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, and a contributing editor at The Marshall Project. He began his career covering politics but was sent to Ferguson, Mo. in 2014 to cover the police killing of Michael Brown for the Washington Post. In the years since, he’s chronicled the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing a bestselling book and launching Fatal Force, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning real-time national database of people shot and killed by the police.

Lowery has led and contributed to investigative projects that examined unsolved homicides in major American cities, what happens to fired police officers, repeat offender criminal defendants, fentanyl overdoses in major cities, the failures to catch the deadliest serial killer in American history, and what happens to people who are shot by the police and survive. His latest book, American Whitelash, chronicles the rise in white supremacist violence in the years since Barack Obama's election.

A collection of Colorado Front Range scholars with diverse areas of expertise within US elections and politics will gather to analyze and decode the results of the 2024 election cycle.

Panelists:

• Associate Professor Elizabeth Coggins, Colorado College, Department of Political Science

• Professor Douglas Edlin, Colorado College, Department of Political Science

• Assistant Professor Michael Greenberger '17, University of Denver, Department of Political Science

• Professor Anand Sokhey, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Political Science

• Associate Professor Dana Wolfe, Colorado College, Department of Political Science

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