Past Events

What Is the State of Surveillance? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

What Is the State of Surveillance?

Early this year, an uncrewed Chinese-operated high-altitude balloon floated across U.S. airspace, stoking anxiety and fascination among Americans, who assumed it was spying on them, and ultimately provoking President Biden to order the Pentagon to shoot it down. Just as alarming as foreign espionage, though, is the fear of information-gathering turned inward. American anxieties around the “surveillance state” have only …

Do We Need More Food Fights? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

Do We Need More Food Fights?

We know cooking best as an act of nourishment, love, and tradition—but it can also cut as sharply as the knives that chop an onion. In Sinaloa, Mexico, a group of relatives of desaparecidos (the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared from the country), have banded together to fight back against government indifference and complicity. Dubbed Las Rastreadoras …

Why Isn’t Remembering Enough to Repair? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Memphis 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 …

Fresno In-Person | Streaming Online

“What Is a Good Job Now?” In Health Care

While agriculture consumes more land and gets more notice, health care employs more people and represents a bigger piece of Fresno’s economy. But just as access to health care is profoundly unequal, so are pay and working conditions in health jobs. And the pandemic and health facility closures, as with Madera Community Hospital, have added to the stresses and insecurities …

A cut out of Michelle Wilde Anderson against a yellow-orange background. She wears a black blazer and is smiling, looking slightly to the right. Hovering to her right is a cut out of two copies of her book 'The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America.' Below the books is the Zócalo Book Prize logo.
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

2023 Zócalo Book Prize: How Does a Community Save Itself?

America’s high-poverty cities and counties have suffered for decades, enduring skyrocketing inequality, the opioid epidemic, rising housing costs, and widespread disinvestment. Governments have offered a variety of failed solutions, from luring wealthy outsiders to slashing public services. But four communities are turning inward instead: Stockton, California; rural Josephine County, Oregon; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Detroit, Michigan. In these diverse places—all of …

What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian
Los Angeles In-Person | Streaming Online

What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?

Boxing is a sport of contradictions. Known as the “sweet science” because of the technical skills its fighters need to succeed, it is also incredibly brutal. Boxing has provided a creative outlet and a path out of poverty for generations of California strivers, forging cultural and individual identity, promoting dignity, pride, and agency, and delivering million-dollar paydays for some. But …