Challenge. Change.

High school students have been told time and time again that they need consistent good grades and a host of extracurriculars to stand out in the college application process. This mindset, however, can lead students to fixate on quantity over quality and miss out on experiences that help develop character and values. This is why the Making Caring Common project wants to infuse messages about the co...

Throughout decades of studying relationship health, psychology Professor James Córdova has learned that couples often wait five or six years to seek help addressing difficulties in their partnership. This delay runs contrary to the attention most people give other aspects of preventative care such as annual physical exams and regular dental cleanings. Córdova wants more people to learn that r...

If love is a battlefield, evolution has given animals and insects the tools for competition. Peacocks boast flashy tails and birds sing to capture the attention of mates, meanwhile, elks and dung beetles use antlers and horns, respectively, to fight off other males during courtship. These traits, which can vary widely within the same species, have long fascinated biology Professor Erin McCullough...

Many people consider masculinity an inner essence or set of specific personality traits that define manhood. Psychology Professor Michael Addis has a different understanding. His research indicates masculinity is a performance one makes to reinforce gender in alignment with societal and cultural norms. “There's no doubt that many of the things that boys and men have been taught to do to perform th...

At his family’s Chinese restaurant, a young Curtis Chin was encouraged to talk to strangers.  The Detroit eatery, called Chung’s, was founded by Curtis’s great-grandfather in 1940 and drew diners from all walks of life, including then-Mayor Coleman Young, Hollywood stars, drag performers, and sex workers. Chung’s closed in 2000, but the restaurant comes back to life in Chin’s memoir, “Everyth...

During their first year at Clark,  political science  majors Ruthie Brian ’24, Beiyna Chaparian ’24, and Anna Walker ’24 took a course that called for comic books rather than textbooks. In the  First-Year Intensive  course Comic Books and Politics with Professor  Ora Szekely , students used superhero tropes as a vehicle to analyze historical and contemporary politics.&nbsp...

We're taking a winter break and will return with new episodes in January. We hope you have a lovely and bright holiday season. As always, thank you for listening, and don't forget subscribe! See you in 2024.

While English Professor Dianne Berg analyzed true crime’s portrayal of mothers, sociology Professor Shelly Tenenbaum taught courses on global genocide in prison classrooms, leading ethical debates amongst her students. As Rabbi Joshua Franklin ’06, M.A. ’07, challenged his congregation to guess who wrote a sermon he delivered (answer: Chat GPT) and debated whether artificial intelligence can compr...

Turn on the TV or open a podcast app and you’re likely to find true crime. Americans have a morbid fascination with these stories — The  Pew Research Center  reports that true crime is the most common topic of top-ranked podcasts in the U.S. As a trio of scholars consumed this content, they noticed a pattern: Stories about LGBTQ+ people, as perpetrators or victims of crime, were told les...

Amid an intense combat scene in the 2019 film “Avengers: Endgame,” a group of female superheroes work together to pass the infinity gauntlet across a chaotic battlefield in a desperate attempt to defeat the villain Thanos and prevent worldwide destruction. Political science Professor Ora Szekely suspects filmmakers intended that scene to be an empowering visual of women heroes supporting one anoth...

The word “utopia” comes from the Greek words for “no” and “place.” So, geography Professor Deborah Martin is intrigued by the frequency with which urban planners use utopian thinking when such a place, by definition, does not exist. In trying to create idyllic cities, planners overlook that urban areas have no singular use. Martin feels the best urban designs are the ones that don’t prescribe how...

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...

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 Lo...

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 literatu...

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-Weinst...

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 d...

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'l...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 an...

College orientation begins with a call to action: Get involved. Students are urged to try as many clubs, organizations, and activities as possible — at Clark, there are more than 120 to explore. As students find their niche, however, it may be difficult to know when to pull back and streamline their lives.  Kamala Kiem, associate provost for student success and dean of students, has some advi...

Why are humans so drawn to fiction? It’s a question  philosophy  Professor  Wiebke Deimling  has researched, and a query that applies well to “Barbie,” the summer blockbuster that follows the iconic plastic doll as she travels from Barbie Land to the “real world” in search of answers after experiencing “irrepressible thoughts of death.”  “The film gives a pretty heavy answ...

Throughout their years at Clark University, the Class of 2023 has  performed at the iconic Carnegie Hall ; brought home  two divisional championships  in the National Esports Collegiate Conference finals;  released a documentary film  highlighting the values and voices of Brazilian immigrant communities in Massachusetts; and used of GIS technology to  aid recovery eff...

With high interest rates and inflation dominating headlines over the last year, Shorena Giorgadze ’23, an  economics major, decided to do a deep dive into the Federal Reserve for her honors thesis. Giorgadze examined how the Fed communicates with citizens, including the tools and methods it favors for imparting information, such as forward guidance. On this episode of  Challenge. Change....