Challenge. Change.

Throughout decades of studying relationship health, psychology Professor James Córdova has learned that couples often wait five or six years to seek help addressing difficulties in their partnership. This delay runs contrary to the attention most people give other aspects of preventative care such as annual physical exams and regular dental cleanings. Córdova wants more people to learn that relationship quality has an intrinsic impact on physical health. Distressing feelings cause a physiological response as stress hormones are released into one’s bloodstream. 

“One of the most significant sources of stress in our lives is a relationship that isn't going well,” he says. “People who are in really distressed relationships are aging faster and they're sick more often.” Even limited preventative care can make a lasting difference. To that end, Córdova created the Relationship Checkup, previously called the Marriage Checkup, 25 years ago. It’s a proactive model applied during couples counseling that identifies partners’ strengths and leverages them to reduce stress within the relationship.

“We know from 25 years of research that the effect is sustainable,” he says. “A checkup once a year is sufficient to improve the quality of relationship health, both in the short term and for the long term.” 

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

If love is a battlefield, evolution has given animals and insects the tools for competition. Peacocks boast flashy tails and birds sing to capture the attention of mates, meanwhile, elks and dung beetles use antlers and horns, respectively, to fight off other males during courtship.

These traits, which can vary widely within the same species, have long fascinated biology Professor Erin McCullough. “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,” she says. 

What’s puzzling, however, is that these traits can make species more susceptible to predators, seemingly at odds with natural selection “Reproduction is the currency that really matters,” says McCullough. “It doesn't matter if an individual lives forever — or if it lives a whole lot longer than its peers — if it never succeeds in attracting a mate, because then it won't leave any of its genes to the next generation.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Many people consider masculinity an inner essence or set of specific personality traits that define manhood. Psychology Professor Michael Addis has a different understanding. His research indicates masculinity is a performance one makes to reinforce gender in alignment with societal and cultural norms.

“There's no doubt that many of the things that boys and men have been taught to do to perform their masculinity can be harmful to themselves and to people of other genders as well,” says Addis.

Men who avoid being vulnerable in their relationships to appear masculine can live for decades with no emotional support, he says. Increased isolation could contribute to rising suicide rates among U.S. men ages 40 to 55.

“There's a whole range of positive experiences related to emotional awareness, intimacy, and connections with other people,” says Addis. “All of these things are helped by letting go of the pressure to be a certain way because of your gender.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

At his family’s Chinese restaurant, a young Curtis Chin was encouraged to talk to strangers.  The Detroit eatery, called Chung’s, was founded by Curtis’s great-grandfather in 1940 and drew diners from all walks of life, including then-Mayor Coleman Young, Hollywood stars, drag performers, and sex workers.

Chung’s closed in 2000, but the restaurant comes back to life in Chin’s memoir, “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant.” The author-filmmaker shares the joys of being a “Chinese restaurant kid” during a discussion with Associate Provost and Dean of the College Betsy Huang, English Professor Jeff Noh, Chloe Yau ’24, a Community, Youth, and Education Studies major, and Zabrina Richards ’25, a political science major.

“Everybody goes to a Chinese restaurant. It’s one of the places where you can go and see people from a different race, socioeconomic background, class background, religious background, sexual orientation,” Chin says. “As a kid, I got to see all of Detroit. It was wonderful as a writer, as a creative person, to have that shape me as a kid.” 

Chin also shared musings on family, identity, coming out, and getting famous during a conversation with the wider campus community. The visit was part of Chin’s national book tour.

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

During their first year at Clark, political science majors Ruthie Brian ’24, Beiyna Chaparian ’24, and Anna Walker ’24 took a course that called for comic books rather than textbooks. In the First-Year Intensive course Comic Books and Politics with Professor Ora Szekely, students used superhero tropes as a vehicle to analyze historical and contemporary politics. 

The course made such an impression on Brian, Chaparian, and Walker that the three took the concept and created an independent study for their senior year. They’ve been poring through comics and watching the latest superhero movies, exploring how the plots engage with global and national issues such as racial justice and immigration. As women and people of color portray more superheroes, a larger audience can see their lives reflected in the storylines, Chaparian says. 

“Having depth in characters and representation is important,” she says. “Watching ‘Ms. Marvel,’ I saw things that I could relate to in terms of what my family looks like and how my culture affects my identity.” Despite progress in representation, comics still contain disparities. The students have found that women superheroes typically have endured more trauma than their male counterparts, Walker says. Even the battle scenes display a gender imbalance.

“The idea of who has the right to violence is very fascinating to me,” Walker says. “Women's violence is often on a smaller scale, or more social, compared to the massive wipeout of cities that we see in comics and movies like ‘The Avengers.’” These combat scenes are an avenue for the trio to analyze the motives behind war. “No one considers themself evil,” Brian says. “People are going to justify their actions with either religion or another belief they hold.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

We're taking a winter break and will return with new episodes in January. We hope you have a lovely and bright holiday season. As always, thank you for listening, and don't forget subscribe!

See you in 2024.

While English Professor Dianne Berg analyzed true crime’s portrayal of mothers, sociology Professor Shelly Tenenbaum taught courses on global genocide in prison classrooms, leading ethical debates amongst her students.

As Rabbi Joshua Franklin ’06, M.A. ’07, challenged his congregation to guess who wrote a sermon he delivered (answer: Chat GPT) and debated whether artificial intelligence can comprehend empathy, philosophy Professor Wiebke Deimling went to the movie theatre to see “Barbie” and unravel why a fictional doll was having “irrepressible thoughts of death.”

It all happened in 2023. The Clark community has chronicled research, passions, and discoveries on Challenge. Change. On this episode, co-producers Melissa Hanson and Andrew Hart share clips of intriguing interviews recorded throughout the year.

Episodes featured include: 

• Debate and Discourse in the Prison Classroom with Professor Shelly Tenenbaum
• Rabbi Joshua Franklin ’06 on Artificial Intelligence and Empathy
• The Portrayal of Mothers in True Crime and Popular Media with Professor Dianne Berg
• Sci-fi, Immigration, and Representation with Professor Betsy Huang
• Ed Greig '23 vs. PAX East 2023
• Professor Cailin Marcel Manson and the Collective Power of Performance
• Coming of Age Stories and Confronting Divided Loyalties with Professor Spencer Tricker
• Barbie's Existential Crisis and the Philosophy Behind it with Professor Wiebke Deimling
• Queerness and Food are an Edible Delight for Professor Elizabeth Blake
• To Teach or Not to Teach Shakespeare with Professor Justin Shaw

Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. Email us with your suggestion for future episodes.

Turn on the TV or open a podcast app and you’re likely to find true crime. Americans have a morbid fascination with these stories — The Pew Research Center reports that true crime is the most common topic of top-ranked podcasts in the U.S. As a trio of scholars consumed this content, they noticed a pattern: Stories about LGBTQ+ people, as perpetrators or victims of crime, were told less frequently and in a different tone than that of their cisgender and heteronormative peers.

“The (Mis)Representation of Queer Lives in True Crime” is a new book co-edited by Abbie Goldberg, professor of psychology at Clark; Danielle Slakoff, professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento; and Carrie Buist, professor of criminology, criminal justice, and legal studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. The volume analyzes the intersection of LGBTQ+ people and crime, including the treatment of queer people in the criminal legal system, how the mass media delivers such stories, and which details are emphasized or erased in the dominant narrative.

“Although queer and trans people are disproportionately affected by crime, the majority of true crime podcasts, documentaries, and so on focus more on cisgender, heterosexual folks — often young, white folks,” Goldberg says. “A lot of media content creators are heterosexual and so they're often creating content that matches their own identities.”

Slakoff says the media’s depiction of queer people, especially trans women, often paints a picture of hypersexual, deceptive people. “If that is what's portrayed in the media, that is what people begin to believe — or they internalize those ideas,” she adds. It’s one factor that makes the queer community less likely to report a crime, according to Buist.

“LGBT folks are often blamed for not only their own victimization,” Buist says, “but for their existence.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Amid an intense combat scene in the 2019 film “Avengers: Endgame,” a group of female superheroes work together to pass the infinity gauntlet across a chaotic battlefield in a desperate attempt to defeat the villain Thanos and prevent worldwide destruction.

Political science Professor Ora Szekely suspects filmmakers intended that scene to be an empowering visual of women heroes supporting one another. To Szekely, something else stood out: The women heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe could easily fit together on the screen in unison. She says it’s an example of the imbalanced depictions of male and female fighters in the first three phases of the MCU.

“I remember watching this and thinking, there are hundreds of male heroes fighting in the background, and they managed to get all of the female heroes in one power shot,” says Szekely. “I think it doesn't necessarily send the message they were going for.”

This fictional world is under the microscope in “The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” a book in which 25 scholars provide an expansive analysis of messages about government, public policy, and society within the first three phases of the superhero movie franchise. Two Clark professors contributed to the book.

In the chapter “Female Combatants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Szekely explores how women heroes are portrayed differently than their male counterparts. The movies reflect gendered ideas about why women partake in combat — ideas that are often inaccurate, she says.

Political science professor Danielle Hanley examines the Avengers as a departure from the nuclear family unit in her chapter, “Avengers, Assemblage.” Hanley argues that the Avengers are more than just a group of superpowered colleagues.

“I'm arguing that the Avengers is a family and I'm using a lot of queer theory and feminist theory to do that,” she says. “I’m thinking about the objects and the structures and the institutions that exist and are part of informing what a family is. I argue that Thor's hammer and non-human characters are a part of the family assemblage.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

The word “utopia” comes from the Greek words for “no” and “place.” So, geography Professor Deborah Martin is intrigued by the frequency with which urban planners use utopian thinking when such a place, by definition, does not exist. In trying to create idyllic cities, planners overlook that urban areas have no singular use. Martin feels the best urban designs are the ones that don’t prescribe how a space should be used.

“What's utopian for one person, what makes the world work well, might not work for everybody else. When we think we know what people need, such as green space, then we prescribe green space in a certain way,” says Martin. “You end up having a lot of potential conflict over what people might think is good for everyone. It gets complicated pretty quickly.”

In this episode, Martin explains how urban designs reflect our values, the challenges of building for the 21st-century, and why one space can have different uses for different people. 

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.