Challenge. Change.

Angelo Guisado ’08, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, watched Ketanji Brown Jackson become the newest Supreme Court Justice this month and thought about the impact of the moment. The first Black woman and public defender to reach the high court, Guisado says Justice Jackson is bringing a perspective to the Supreme Court that is long overdue. But, Guisado believes Americans need to drop the belief that the Supreme Court is not a political institution. He’d like to see an apolitical Supreme Court, as would Steve Kennedy ’88, a Clark professor and senior trial counsel for The Hartford insurance company.

As Jackson became the country’s newest justice, Kennedy, who leads Clark’s mock trial team, works to give students a sense of what it’s like to be in the courtroom.

Learn more about Clark University's Prelaw Advising Program.

In a roundtable discussion moderated by Mary Jane Rein, the executive director of Clark's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Professor Ken McLean and Professor Frances Tanzer analyze the documentation of the ongoing war, and how people experience a crisis in its acute phase, compared with chronic events.

Home to a uniquely rich undergraduate program and a landmark doctoral program, the Strassler Center is the first and only institute of its kind. Since 1998, it has gained international standing as the foremost PhD program training students in Holocaust History, the Armenian Genocide, and other genocides perpetrated around the globe.

Suzanne Scoggins has read plenty of literature about contentious politics and protests in China, but never saw research about day-to-day policing. After studying in China and teaching English to police officers there, Scoggins had the connections to learn more. Her book, “Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest,” explores the paradox of China's self-projection as a strong security state despite its weak police bureaucracy. This episode explores the reality of policing in China, where officers with little training and few resources have a strained relationship with the public.

Edward Carr, director of the International Development, Community, and Environment Department at Clark, speaks about his role as a lead author in a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in which his chapter focuses on an urgent need for adaptation. To really make an impact, people need to think about climate change at the polls, Carr says.

Learn more about Clark's IDCE Department and read about Carr's contribution to the IPCC in the news:

• The Boston Globe: The effects of climate change are worse than we thought, an unflinching new UN report finds
• The New York Times: Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt, U.N. Warns

We talk to Valerie Sperling, a Clark professor of political science, about the war in Ukraine. Sperling explains why she doesn't think launching an attack on Ukraine was in the best interest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and discusses potential risks of nuclear attacks.

Sperling has been studying Russia since she was in college in the 1980s and is teaching a course on Russian politics this semester. Learn more about political science at Clark.

Clark University professors Kristina Wilson and Terrasa Ulm talk with us about the influence gender has on design. Wilson, a professor of art history, describes how designers in post-war America created furniture while thinking of the female form. Ulm, a game developer and professor of interactive media, explains that in video game design, a community of diverse consumers use social media to be involved in the game design from concept to creation.

Learn more about Art History and Game Design at Clark.

Last year, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a rare advisory warning that young people are facing “devastating” mental health effects from the accumulated challenges experienced by their generation. In this episode, Nadia Ward, director of the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise at Clark, describes how the Institute is confronting the crisis by creating immersive technologies that help lift adolescents and young adults toward positive outcomes, and explains why an assertive response is vital.

Learn more about the Mosakowski Institute