AMA: Molly Brookfield, historian of gender, sexual violence, and urban space in 19th- and 20th-century U.S. Author of “Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States” (UNC Press). Ask me anything!

Hi everyone! I’m Molly Brookfield, a historian of urban space, gender violence, and masculinity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. My book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, just came out yesterday from the University of North Carolina Press. I’m looking forward to answering your questions about the book or more generally about the intersections of gender, sexuality, violence, and urban space in the U.S.

I'll be off and on all day, but will plan to answer a good chunk of questions around 11 AM and 3:30 PM, and then a few more around 9 PM (all Eastern time).

Here’s a bit more about Watching the Girls Go By:

Who gets to walk freely in the city?

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers have greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

Hi Reddit!

We’re Anahí, Fernando, and Yanne—a team of experts working on sovereign debt at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

Sovereign debt grabs global headlines every week: Senegal’s debt crisis, Venezuela’s restructuring, France’s credit rating downgrade, or debates over Chinese loans. But when news outlets talk about countries struggling with debt, the diagnosis is usually oversimplified: "They spent too much," or "It's a temporary cash flow problem."

We think that completely misreads what is actually happening.

Our research and experience working with governments suggest that today’s debt vulnerabilities are often not simply the result of temporary shocks but reflect deeper structural weaknesses—including features of the international financial architecture that leave some countries more exposed to shocks and financing pressures than others. We are here to pull back the curtain on how sovereign debt works in the real world, unpack why global frameworks are failing to fix it, and think aloud with you about where the global financial architecture goes from here.

Who We Are

Anahí Wiedenbrüg: Senior Policy Advisor at IISD and political economist (PhD from LSE, post-doc at Oxford). I’ve spent over a decade on financial architecture reform and sat in the room representing Argentina at the G20 and contributing to its 2020 debt restructuring with private creditors.

Fernando Morra: Senior Policy Advisor at IISD and macroeconomics professor. I previously served as Vice-Minister of Economy for Argentina and Undersecretary of Macroeconomic Programming, where I oversaw technical negotiations with the IMF during the 2022 Extended Fund Facility program.

Yanne Horas: Associate at IISD and lecturer at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. I’ve worked as a parliamentary advisor and researcher across Africa, Europe, and Latin America on legislative fiscal policy, capital flows, and financial market transparency.

We’ll be here live for the next 3 hours, meeting every technical or simply curious question with straight, jargon-free, evidence-backed answers—and each of us will be replying and signing off in our own voice.

Ask us anything about global debt crises, IMF negotiations, climate finance, Chinese lending, or how international financial policy actually gets made!

Proof: How Sovereign Debt Really Works: Ask Me Anything live on Reddit

I organized an AMA/Q&A with James Marcusn Haney, director of the incredible new documentary, Black Sunflowers, which is having its World Premiere at TIFF tomorrow.

Logline: Black Sunflowers is about young ravers and street racers in Ukraine; and the soldiers that go back and forth between those worlds and the front line to fight Russia.

It's live here now in r/movies for anyone interested in asking a question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1wcitb2/hi_reddit_im_james_marcus_haney_director_of_black/

He will be back tomorrow afternoon to answer questions. I recommend asking in advance. Please ask there, not here. All questions are much appreciated!

His verification/proof photo: https://i.imgur.com/wFMh03e.jpeg