Join us for the second Food for Thought event of the season. Featuring Lily Song (Architecture / the School of Public Policy and Urban Planning, CSSH) and Meryl Alper (Communication Studies).

Each Faculty member will share a short presentation about their research and lunch will be served!

Dr. Meryl Alper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies (College of Arts, Media, and Design) and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (Bouvé College of Health Sciences) at Northeastern University. At Northeastern, she researches the social, cultural, and health implications of communication technologies, with a focus on disability, digital media, and children and families’ tech use.

Dr. Alper is the author of Digital Youth with Disabilities (MIT Press, 2014) and the award-winning Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality (MIT Press, 2017). Her latest prized book, Kids Across the Spectrums: Growing Up Autistic in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023), explores the often-misunderstood technology practices of young people on the autism spectrum, as well as what it means to be “social” in a hypermediated society. In her research and teaching, Dr. Alper also draws on 20 years of professional experience in the children’s media industry as a researcher, strategist, and consultant with organizations such as Sesame Workshop, PBS KIDS, Nickelodeon, and Disney. Prior to joining the faculty at Northeastern, Dr. Alper earned a Ph.D. and M.A. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She also holds a B.S. in Communication Studies and History from Northwestern University, as well as a certificate in Early Childhood Education from UCLA.

Dr. Lily Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar who specializes in studying and undertaking long-term community engagement practices in addition to being an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and the School of Public Policy and Urban Planning (College of Social Sciences and Humanities).

Her research and scholarship focus on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class, and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. Her work both analyzes and informs infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of historically marginalized groups as bases for reparative planning and design.

Song serves on the Advisory Board of the non-profit participatory planning organization, Yayasan Kota Kita. She was previously a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she was Founding Coordinator of Harvard CoDesign, a GSD initiative to strengthen links between design pedagogy, research, practice, and activism. Previously, Song was a Provost Fellow at University College London and holds a doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT, where she was an active member of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab).

She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of California— Los Angeles, and BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.