The coronavirus pandemic does not exist in a vacuum. We look at other urgent issues of our time, and examine how they affect and are affected by COVID-19.

We start this episode—as most things seem to now—with the partisan polarization in the U.S., asking a political science professor if people really are seeing everything in red or blue. Then a historian and legal scholar tells how we got to this state of racial injustice, decades after the Civil Rights movement. Finally, the German professor leading Penn’s environmental humanities program describes life in the climate crisis and the vision she gets from her students of going beyond a "new normal."

Guests:

Matthew Levendusky, Professor of Political Science and Penny and Robert A. Fox Director of the Fels Institute of Government

Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History and Africana Studies

Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities

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Produced by Susan Ahlborn  

Narrated by Alex Schein

Edited by Alex Schein and Brooke Sietinsons


Interviews by Susan Ahlborn, Blake Cole, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker

Theme music by Nicholas Escobar, C'18  

Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions


Illustration by Nick Matej


Logo by Drew Nealis

In These Times is a production of Penn Arts & Sciences. Visit our series website to learn more and listen to the first season of In These Times. 

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