Challenge. Change. is a weekly news program featuring profiles on faculty research and expertise relating to current issues, alumni experiences and expertise, and student experiences on and off campus at Clark University in Worcester, MA. I created CC during my time as Director of Multimedia Storytelling at Clark. I co-produced, edited, and scored every episode.
Here are a few favorite episodes. Find more on Apple and Spotify.
The grief and rage circulating online aren't just emotions, Clark Professor Danielle Hanley argues—they're commentary, the language we default to when we can't find the right words for what's happening around us.
Rabbi Joshua Franklin '06, M.A. '07, noticed everyone talking about ChatGPT last November of 2023. So he ran an experiment with his congregation—he asked the AI to write a sermon on vulnerability based on a Torah portion, then read it aloud. No one could tell it wasn't him.
What makes a great sentence? It’s something English Professor Jeff Noh and his creative writing students could debate this for hours. Sentences can be complex or simple. Unconventional or original. Succinct or meandering. Noh and his students share favorite sentences and break down what makes them special.
English Clark professor Betsy Huang found herself in Bilbo Baggins at age 12. His journey beyond the Shire mirrored her own—she'd left Taiwan for the U.S. just two years before. From then on, she turned to fantasy and sci-fi to make sense of the world around her.
When Justin Shaw teaches Shakespeare, he's teaching his students how to decode power—who has it, who wants it, how relationships bend around it. It's why the plays still resonate 400 years later. But while Shaw preps these lessons at Clark, teachers in the South are quietly removing "Romeo and Juliet" from their syllabi. The culprit: state legislation banning books with sexual content.
Certain sounds—whispering, tapping, crinkling paper—trigger a tingling sensation in some people's brains. The phenomenon, called ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), has exploded on YouTube and social media. Clark professors Hugh Manon (screen studies) and Sho Niu (computer science) are studying why these videos captivate millions and what they tell us about intimacy in the digital age.
Robert Goddard was dreaming about Mars years before his liquid-fueled rocket lifted off in 1926, ninety-seven years ago this month. Charles Slatkin '74 wants to keep that dream alive. When Goddard's childhood home in Worcester went up for sale in 2021, Slatkin—like Goddard, a Clark grad who became a professor—bought it.
English professor Elizabeth Blake sees a parallel between how we're taught to eat and how we're taught to desire. Breakfast foods, lunch routines, dinner expectations—they're all cultural constructs, not natural laws. The same goes for sexuality. We inherit scripts about who we're supposed to want and how relationships should look, and we mistake those scripts for something inevitable. But they're just as culturally specific, just as prescribed, as the idea that cereal belongs in the morning.