What Is a Good Tourism Job Now? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Riverside In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is a Good Tourism Job Now?

Riverside County’s economy depends on tourists—visitors to downtown Riverside’s Mission Inn, concertgoers in Indio, wine drinkers in Temecula, Canadian snowbirds who flock to the Coachella Valley. These travelers and their wallets have produced a surge in low-wage, low-benefit jobs in hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, and other businesses that often fail to present opportunities for advancement and career-building. Because of this, …

How Is Art A Weapon in War? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

How Is Art A Weapon in War?

There is a long and global tradition of artists—visual, performing, and literary—creating arresting, even beautiful works that address the horrors of war. How is art used as a form of protest, to change minds as well as hearts? What happens to its meaning over time—as war persists, and as new battles erupt? And what does it say about us all …

What Kind of Monuments Do We Deserve? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Jackson In-Person | Streaming Online

What Kind of Monuments Do We Deserve?

Beyond debates over keeping statues up or tearing them down and changing the names of schools and streets lie more fundamental questions at the intersection of personal and public memory. We know how to honor and memorialize idealized heroes; we know less about remembering complicated, real people, who did extraordinary things—let alone how to remember historical figures who changed the …

How Should Societies Remember Their Sins? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
In-Person | Streaming Online

Why Isn’t Remembering Enough to Repair?

The Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel did not believe in collective guilt. Instead, he asked for repair, and for holding the post-World War II generation of Germans responsible “not for the past, but for the way it remembers the past. And for what it does with the memory of the past.” Other societies and communities have taken up Wiesel’s call—at the …

How Should Societies Remember Their Sins? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
In-Person | Streaming Online

Does Confronting Our History Build a Better Future?

Recent attempts to confront difficult history appear to be dividing the United States and entangling communities in cultural and legal conflict. But historians, social justice activists, and many others argue that grappling with the sins of the past, and the way they reverberate into the present, is a necessary foundation for reimagining the future. What are the best and most …