Challenge. Change.

Grief and rage are at the center of political science Professor Danielle Hanley’s research. She’s working on her first book project, an examination of those two emotions in the context of Greek tragedy and contemporary protest movements. 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.

Hanley describes this as a form of “affective solidarity,” which grows out of the circulation of emotions that magnetically pull other people in — specifically emotions calling out an injustice. This also happens in 21st-century social justice movements, she notes.

“The circulation of grief and rage is a kind of commentary on the state of affairs in the world. It’s what we express when we don't have the right words,” says Hanley. “One of the things I'm thinking about is how to balance the different obligations we have to one another with our own liberation.”

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.

Political Science Professor Robert Boatright has watched the Speaker of the House role become a career-ending position. This was the case for Paul Ryan and John Boehner, former Republican speakers who became disenfranchised and then left Congress. The pattern repeated itself this month as Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California, was ousted. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, is the new House speaker as of Wednesday, Oct. 25.

“It's unclear why an ambitious Republican would want to be Speaker of the House anymore given what you can anticipate,” says Boatright. The process of becoming speaker has become unprecedentedly public. When Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, was vying for the position earlier this month, he campaigned to the public. Social media figures like Steve Bannon used their platforms to mobilize voters to pressure moderate Republicans. “The idea that the public would play a role in figuring out who they thought was a good candidate and go after people who didn't agree with them is really pretty remarkable,” says Boatright.

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.

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. 

“The powers that be in these political entities want us to stop talking about Shakespeare as anything other than the white, straight cultural power,” Shaw said in an interview recorded during Banned Books Week, which highlights the value of free and open access to information.

“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,” he adds. “These discussions happen today, but guess what? They're wrestling with the same issues in Shakespeare's time, too. They're wrestling with how to talk about race. They're wrestling with how to talk about sexuality. They're wrestling with how to talk about class and religion.”

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.

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.

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.”

When Prescod-Weinstein presented Clark University's annual Presidential Lecture recently in Tilton Hall, she made sure to let students know her path to success wasn’t always easy. “With struggle, I have made it to the other side,” she told her Clark audience, on Oct. 5.

Prescod-Weinstein sat down with a group of computer science and biology students, Dean of the College Betsy Huang, and Associate Provost and Dean of the Faculty Esther Jones, for a discussion on the intersection of theoretical physics and Black feminist science.

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

The United States’ population is becoming less religious — 38 percent of younger Millennials consider religion “very important” in one’s life compared to 72 percent of the Greatest Generation, according to data from the Pew Research Center. But that trend doesn’t mean the country is seeing fewer faith-based influences in politics. Clark Sociology professor Jack Delehanty says it’s imperative to distinguish the difference between those who claim a religious identity or attend church versus those who subscribe to political or moral authority to appeal to some sense of sacred order. 

“When people come together and talk about the issues that they care about, people agree on a lot,” says Delehanty. “The problem is that there aren't that many spaces where people do that anymore. People don't go to church that much anymore, or local libraries, bowling leagues — venues where previous generations would've encountered each other face to face and had an opportunity to trust one another. That’s gone. It creates a vacuum into which this highly structured competitive political ethos falls into place.”

Delehanty discusses the intersection of religion and politics in his new book “Making Moral Citizens: How Faith-Based Organizers Use Vocation for Public Action.” 

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 team at Challenge. Change. is working on a very special episode that touches on the expanse of the universe, physics, and Black feminist science with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. It's a thoughtful and vulnerable conversation, and we think you'll love it. We'll be back early next week, so please subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss this episode. TTYL! 

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

Everyone is in pursuit of a good life, but what exactly does “good” mean? Students in philosophy Professor Wes Demarco’s The Good Life, a First-Year Intensive course, spend an entire semester trying to determine if there’s a link between health, achievements, social involvement, ethical endeavors, and living a satisfactory life.

“In empirical psychology, there is wonderful work on self-deception in relation to positive affect. So, if the good life were about pleasure-pain ratio, why not just live in illusion? Why not blissful ignorance,” Demarco asks. “In my philosophical opinion, this is why we need to subject the idea of a pleasant life to critical examination.”

Demarco discusses concepts of happiness, human nature, and quality of life, analyzing their importance on one’s journey to fulfillment. 

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.

When English Professor Elizabeth Blake opened “The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book,” she was captivated by more than the recipes. The pages are rife with gossip and stories about artists in modernist Paris. 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.

“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,” Blake says. “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 recommends Francesca Ekwuyasi's “Butter Honey Pig Bread” and Rabindranath Tagore's "The Hungry Stones" to anyone interested in exploring the ways literature invites readers to think about food and the body. 

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.

Decades of research have shown Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist and senior research scholar at Clark, that people in their 20s can bounce back from adversity quickly. But new data have led Arnett to question whether today’s 18- to 29-year-olds may be less resilientthan previous generations.

Young people are in roughly the same amount of mental distress now as they were at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Arnett’s findings, which were published in a report commissioned and released by the Ruderman Family Foundation. In fact, 18- to 29-year-olds have had the highest levels of anxiety and depression since the pandemic onset.

“I would've theorized that this group would have the lowest rates of mental health distress from the impact of COVID-19 because they're the least susceptible physically; they’re the least likely to be hospitalized of any age group, and the least likely to die,” says Arnett, who coined the term “emerging adulthood” to describe the period from one’s late teens to late-20s.

Arnett wants to interview young people to pinpoint the sources of their increased mental distress in 2020, and why this trend has continued three years later. “Right now, we don't have that information and we urgently need it,” he says. “We need to know this for the next pandemic, but we also need to recognize that this pandemic is not over. It's not over in hospitalizations and deaths, and it's not over in respect to mental health.”

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.

Alicia Gauvin ’12 was enthralled when she attended a workshop led by Megan Andelloux, a Rhode Island-based sex educator. Today, Gauvin is the executive director of SHIP (Sexual Health Includes Pleasure), which provides adults with sexuality education, therapy, and professional training that is culturally inclusive and medically accurate. It’s the same organization that Andelloux founded in 2010 and inspired Gauvin that day on campus.

Gauvin discusses why she believes sex education should be a valued public health program, the value of partnering with therapists specially trained in the diverse dimensions of human sexuality and sexual trauma, and how inclusive education could impact the current political climate.

“The main reason SHIP exists is to bridge the sexual health literacy gap as a result of the absence of comprehensive sex education nationwide,” says Gauvin, who majored in psychology. “Sex education humanizes the spectrum of sexuality and prevents people from using sexuality as a form of oppression. We are seeing a snapback from the years of marriage equality and greater visibility for queer folks.”

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.