Veritalk

When developers try to revitalize the nightlife in Johannesburg, not everyone is invited to the party. PhD candidate Chrystel Oloukoi explores the ways that race, gender, and class shape the nightlife culture in Johannesburg and Lagos. The last episode in our series on the secret life of cities.

Everyone hates potholes – except PhD candidate Elijah de la Campa. Elijah uses potholes to understand why some citizens interact with local government, and others don’t.

One jetlagged night in Manila leads PhD candidate Justin Stern into the world of business process outsourcing. The first episode in Veritalk's series on the Secret Lives of Cities.

Why isn’t King Kong scaling the Empire State Building right now? Should we worry about Godzilla rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean? Shane Campbell-Staton, co-host of the podcast The Biology of Superheroes and Harvard PhD ’15 in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, talks about our favorite movie monsters, and some of the biological processes that could make them come to life.

Some monsters live inside us. PhD candidate in Biological Sciences in Public Health Maddy McFarland studies Trypanosoma cruzi, a parasite that transforms its shape to sneak inside our cells and makes us sick. The scariest part: Our cells can’t signal that they’re infected until it’s too late.

Mermaids: They’re cute, innocent, and great singers, right? Think again! PhD candidate in Celtic Languages and Literatures Greg Darwin explains why you wouldn’t want to meet a mermaid in a dark aquatic alley. He also talks about selkie tales – and legendary creatures that live at the edge of humanity.

PhD graduate in Sociology Monica Bell’s interviews with poor youth of color in Baltimore led her to formulate the idea of “legal estrangement.” While the press focuses on a “trust gap” between black youth and the police, Monica believes that the issue is far deeper. Her interviews revealed a generation of young Americans who feel both stateless and powerless.

Argyro Nicolaou, a PhD student in Comparative Literature, wants us to take a second look at the literature and art that displaced people produce, particularly in the Mediterranean. Can we find common ground between displaced Greeks in World War II, and displaced Syrians today?

Cresa Pugh, a sociology PhD student, visits the camps in Burma where more than 140,000 Rohingya Muslims are forced to live, and learns how a minority group became marginalized and persecuted.

Ever wonder why we think of a suit as "masculine" and a dress as "feminine?" American Studies PhD student Chloe Chapin has wondered that, too - and she's digging back into history to figure out where our ideas about human "plumage" began.