Penn Today's Understand This...

Joining for the conversation in this episode is Obed Arango, a lecturer of social work in the School of Social Policy and Practice and founder and executive director of the Centro De Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE), as well as Shelley Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicography and a Wolf Humanities Center Graduate Fellow. In tandem with Wolf Humanities’ Forum on Migration, they discuss themes of assimilation in the United States, the experience of carrying multiple identities, and how the arts function as a means of expressing existence.

In this episode about climate stories and "climate grief," Jennifer Pinto-Martin of the School of Nursing and the Perelman School of Medicine, along with Bethany Wiggin of the School of Arts & Sciences and founding director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, explore ways in which the human narratives of climate change can be brought to the forefront.

In this episode of Penn Today’s “Understand This …” podcast series, Herman Beavers of the School of Arts & Sciences and Glenn Bryan of the Office of Government and Community Affairs discuss the Year of Civic Engagement, outreach to the West Philadelphia community, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” as this year’s Reading Project selection, and the merits of jazz as a way to build bridges.

Caroline Watts, a senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Education, and Philip Gressman, a professor of mathematics, join to talk about the fall 2021 return to the classroom. This episode is both a reflection on what students and educators have experienced in learning during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, plus an examination of how lessons from the pandemic can be applied to in-person classroom settings.

In the latest episode of Penn Today's 'Understand This ...' podcast series, Assistant Professor of Political Science Dorothy Kronick and Assistant Professor of History Alex Chase-Levinson discuss the past and present of imperialism. Together, they tease out ways to interpret imperialism today, the legacy of imperial influence, and what new frontiers might be on the horizon.

In this episode, we explore the value of improving cross-cultural communication skills. Joining for the conversation is Mauro Guillén, professor of international management at the Wharton School and former director of the Lauder Institute, and Tomoko Takami, director of Penn’s Japanese Language Program in the School of Arts & Sciences. Together, they discuss the role of language in building empathy, how soft skills prepare students for a more automated workforce, and how cross-cultural understanding can improve business negotiations.

Regina Smalls Baker, assistant professor of sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Amy Castro Baker, assistant professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice and director of the new Center for Guaranteed Income Research, talk about the use of data to inform recent economic relief bills, data gaps in assessing who is experiencing poverty, and the feasibility of solutions like universal basic income in alleviating poverty. 

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, death has never been more top-of-mind during our lifetimes than it is now. Here, experts from Psychology and Religious Studies join to talk about how to cope with the idea of death and how past civilizations and cultures have examined this in religion.

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Robert Inman of the Wharton School and John Landis of the Weitzman School discuss infrastructure of the future.

The inaugural episode of "Understand This ..." features Sigal Ben-Porath from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and Sophia Rosenfeld from the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Together, they discuss how a democratic society can agree on shared facts in the age of "fake news" and social media.