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.
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.”
“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.”
Blake’s new book, “Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms,” is the first scholarly monograph to combine the three subjects.
Seeing the growing popularity of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November, Rabbi Joshua Franklin ’06, M.A. ’07, engaged his congregation in a quirky, but poignant, experiment. Franklin asked ChatGPT to write a sermon based on a Torah portion about the idea of vulnerability and read it to his congregation. No one could guess who authored the text.
Franklin believes artificial intelligence tools will have implications across all industries. Everyone from doctors to lawyers to rabbis will need to evolve and develop their skillset. One way they can start is by focusing on empathy and developing relationships — something ChatGPT can’t do better.
“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.