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.
Anthony Bebbington, Higgins Professor of Environment and Society at Clark’s Graduate School of Geography, member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and International Program Director, Natural Resources and Climate Change at the Ford Foundation, has spent years researching the gains and losses that come with extractives, and the impact on communities across the globe.
“Sexual selection, or competition over mates, is responsible for many of the biggest, flashiest, most colorful, and conspicuous traits that we find in the animal kingdom,” says biology Professor Erin McCullough.
If love is a battlefield, evolution has given animals and insects the tools for competition.
High school students have been told time and time again that they need consistent good grades and a host of extracurriculars to stand out in the college application process. This mindset, however, can lead students to fixate on quantity over quality and miss out on experiences that help develop character and values.
Brennan Barnard, the college admissions program advisor of Making Caring Common, thinks a shift toward mastery over traditional grades could help.
When English Professor Justin Shaw teaches Shakespeare, he encourages his students to use the playwright and poet’s works as a vehicle to analyze relationships and power structures. As Shaw prepares these lessons for his Clark classes, he’s watched teachers in the Southern United States drop texts like “Romeo and Juliet” from their curriculums because of legislation restricting the use of literature with content that could be deemed sexual. Libraries and classrooms have also been subject to book bans targeting titles that address topics of race, gender identity, and sexuality.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Physics and core faculty member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her first book, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, & Dreams Deferred”, published in 2021, has been called “a timely, necessary, stellar book — a game-changer.”
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. Professors Hugh Manon and Sho Niu are studying why these videos captivate millions and what they tell us about intimacy in the digital age.