Paw'd Defiance

UW Tacoma Senior Lecturer Julie Masura along with student researchers Tracie Barry and Abby Deaton talk about their work with microplastics in the waters of the Pacific Northwest. Masura's work in this area began a few years ago. She helped pioneer a method for collecting and analyzing microplastics that is used around the world. Masura also discusses the role students play in advancing research at UW Tacoma.

UW Tacoma Senior Lecturer Julie Masura discusses her love of puzzles. Masura has a garage full of puzzles that she's completed and attached to the walls. 

UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Chris Beasley and UW Tacoma alumnus Omari Amili talk about their experience with incarceration. Beasley and Amili turned their lives around and are now working to build a prison to college pipeline. They discuss the challenges formerly incarcerated people face. Beasley and Amili also talk about the challenge of making college more accessible to those who served time in jail or prison.

UW Tacoma Professor Marian Harris and graduate student Zea Mendoza spent a week helping women and children held at an immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas prepare for their credible fear hearings. Harris and Mendoza talk about their experience at the facility including what they saw and heard. They also talk about how the work impacted them on a personal level.

Durante el año pasado, un grupo de estudiantes de UW Tacoma trabajó para organizar una conferencia de inmigración. El resultado es "Nuestra historia de Tacoma: Educación, defensa y construcción de comunidades”. Entre otras cosas, el evento de dos días comienza con un taller legal en donde los participantes pueden hablar con un abogado de inmigración sobre sus asuntos inmigratorios. También habrá un panel que presentará al Juez del Tribunal Supremo del Estado de Washington Steven González y la senadora Claire Wilson. Durante este episodio, Karla Michelle Vargas, estudiante de UW Tacoma, hablará sobre sus razones personales para querer organizar esta conferencia y lo que espera que la comunidad saque de ella. 

During the past year a group of UW Tacoma students have worked to organize an immigration conference on campus. The result is "Our Tacoma Story: Education, Advocacy and Building Communities". Among other things, the two day event will feature a legal clinic where participants can speak with an immigration attorney. There will also be a panel featuring Washington State Supreme Court Justice Steven Gonzalez and Senator Claire Wilson.  During this episode UW Tacoma student Karla Michelle Vargas will talk about her personal reasons for wanting to host this conference and what she hopes the community will take from it. Assistant Professor Sarah Hampson offers insight into the budding law community on campus.

En español:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/265902/1060277-constructores-de-la-comunidad

Is your yard overrun by English Ivy? If so, you should direct at least some of your ire at Edgar Allan Poe. Late in his life, the famed writer penned a series of landscape tales about what trees and plant species make a yard or a property beautiful.

UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Ellen Bayer has a passion for the outdoors. Bayer's love of nature guides her work both in and out of the classroom. She teaches literature courses at UW Tacoma and leads her students on excursions into the natural world. Bayer recounts the story of a student who'd looked at Mt. Rainier her entire life but had never actually seen the mountain up close. This experience lead Bayer to include field trips in her curriculum. Finally, Bayer discusses why she took up running in her mid-thirties and recounts the difficulties she faced while competing in her first 100 mile ultra-marathon.

UW Tacoma Assistant Professors Uba Backonja and Christopher Schell discuss their mutual love of the 1993 film Jurassic Park. Schell and Backonja credit the movie for cultivating their love of science. The pair also talk about their career paths and how students in college now can find inspiration in unlikely places. Oh, and there's at least one dinosaur impression.

UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Danica Miller and her father, Puyallup Tribe Vice Chairman Bill Sterud come to the studio to talk about the Indigenous history of the Tacoma area. Miller and Sterud provide context to our historical understanding of the area by discussing, among other things, the Medicine Creek Treaty and the Boldt decision. UW Tacoma sits on ancestral Puyallup land. Miller and Sterud talk about the campus' founding and how that revitalized the Downtown area.