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.
Jonathan Hack ’09, director of content and strategy for the Justice, Health, and Democracy Impact Initiative at Harvard University, sees a juxtaposition when comparing the current Supreme Court to the Supreme Court of Earl Warren, who served as chief justice from 1953 to 1969. In the 50s and 60s, the court expanded rights in America, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.
“The question is, what is the role of the Supreme Court, and should the court be making the decisions that it's making,” says Hack. “We have defaulted as society over the course of our years under the U.S. Constitution to viewing the court as that final arbiter as the traditional forms of law making have made it harder and harder to see bills become law.”
Setting children up for success starts before they’re even born. Ellen Darling, Ph.D. ’16, developed the Before Baby Relationship Checkup — adapted from the Marriage Checkup created by Clark psychology Professor James Córdova — to strengthen relationships between parents who are expecting a child. Darling explains how bettering a birthing parent’s mental health improves social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes for babies.
“You're influencing a whole system. By improving mom's health, she's more able to attend to, and be attuned to, the developing infant,” Darling says. “You're impacting a whole other generation and getting that generation off to a good start.”
“The circulation of grief and rage is a type of commentary on the state of affairs in the world. It’s what we express when we don't have the right words,” says Professor Hanley.
In “Medea,” a play written by Euripides in 5th-century BC Greece, the titular character seeks vengeance on her husband Jason as he leaves her for a Greek princess. A chorus of women initially rally in support of Medea. Clark professor Danielle Hanley describes this as a form of “affective solidarity,” which grows out of the circulation of emotions that magnetically pull other people in — calling out an injustice.”
“They're thinking more about outcomes than they are process,” he says. “It’s dichotomous thinking rather than contemplating ‘who am I’ and ‘who could I be in a community?’”
The Making Caring Common project wants to infuse messages about the common good into the college admissions process. Emily Roper-Doten, vice president for undergraduate admissions and financial assistance at Clark, and Barnard, discuss the role of compassion in college admissions.
“If you look at the discourse around why teachers shouldn't focus on these issues in classrooms, there's a lot of talk about indoctrination. That type of discourse is out there, and it's used often. I shared with my students that folks who want to push back have to be in spaces where their voice can be heard.”
Clark education Professor Raphael Rogers '94 teaches aspiring teachers. That means he helps students learn how to discuss difficult topics in the classroom, including racism and slavery. This work comes as people across the country — from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to parents in Massachusetts towns — challenge whether uncomfortable parts of American history belong in schools.
“I think about the way structures of nutrition and structures of heteronormativity mimic each other — we're taught that we're supposed to eat certain things at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all of which are culturally specific,” says Elizabeth Blake, Professor of English. “Similarly, our understanding of how sexuality operates is culturally specific and prescribed. What I'm interested in is the way modernist writers think about transgression in terms of eating, which invites us to think about transgression in terms of sexuality.”
When Blake opened “The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,” she was captivated by more than the recipes. The cookbook is a theoretical representation of the value of food, the value of art, and queer life. It was published in 1954, after the death of Gertrude Stein, Toklas’s life partner. Blake has spent a decade researching the intersection of queer theory, modernist studies, and food studies after finding inspiration in Toklas’s recipes and stories. Her new book, “Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms,” is the first scholarly monograph to combine the three subjects.
“Being open to the changing nature of language, identities, and the ways that we interact with the world is something I bring into our discussions of Shakespeare.”
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. Shaw is among the editors of the forthcoming “Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance,” which responds to a growing movement to make Shakespeare studies inclusive to audiences historically marginalized in relation to Shakespeare’s poetry and plays.
Some people feel a tingle in their brain after watching someone whisper in a YouTube video. Hugh Manon, professor of screen studies, and Sho Niu, professor of computer science, study the social media phenomenon ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response.
ASMR videos rank among the top five YouTube searches globally and in the U.S. Manon and Niu have studied thousands of ASMR videos for a paper examining the trend and understanding the culture and community.
“I surround myself with materials and objects and work on them all at the same time. I’m like the eye of the hurricane. That's how I've developed over the years,” he says. “It's the closest thing to freedom that I've embodied in my entire life.”
Sculpture Professor James Maurelle Clark’s, first full-time sculpture professor, explains why he’s passionate about using recycled objects and the magic of keeping child-like play in artistry.
When Betsy Huang, an English professor and Clark’s Andrea B. and Peter D. Klein ’64 Distinguished Professor, picked up J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” at age 12, Bilbo Baggins’ adventure to lands vastly different than his comfortable home in the Shire felt relatable. It was just two years after Huang immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan.
Huang began to study science fiction as a scholar, analyzing everything from the harmful racist tropes included in early works to the more progressive novels that arrived halfway through the 20th-century. Right now, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories are abundant, from the HBO series “The Last of Us” to AMC’s “The Walking Dead.” Huang says these tales about immense loss are not as progressive as some may think.