Macalester Explores Some of the Year’s Top Stories

As the school year unwinds, Macalester professors and students are finding many ways to stay on top of the globe’s most pressing stories. Following are just a few examples of how Mac people looked beyond the headlines.

Ebola

  • Institute for Global Citizenship director Christy Hanson has been involved in Minnesota’s preparations for handling a possible Ebola outbreak.
  • Anthropology professor Ron Barrett is teaching a course on infectious diseases.
  • Dr. Stephanie Walters, medical director at Mac, worked with the CDC to make sure our protocols are right should someone present symptoms.
  • Anoushka Millear ’15 did her Geography capstone on “Retelling Ebola’s ‘Outbreak’ Narrative During the 2014 West African Epidemic.
  • The Institute for Global Citizenship held a town hall gathering on Ebola in which students and faculty discussed the successes and challenges faced by the international development community, including exploring the roles of the Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization, and Doctors without Borders. Present to answer questions were Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, a nationally recognized biosecurity expert; IGC dean Christy Hanson; and medical director Dr. Stephanie Walters.

Syria

  • In a lunchtime conversation, Farah Al Haddad ’18, a first-year student from Syria, offered her perspective on her country’s struggle, and attempted to shed some light on the origins of the conflict, the current diplomatic situation, and more.
  • Some students dived deeper into issues surrounding the Middle East by adding a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies and Islamic Civilization. Courses include Peace and Conflict in Israel, Palestine and Syria; and Modern Islam and The Koran, among others.

Climate Change

  • Professors Sarah West (economics) and Louisa Bradtmiller (environmental studies) co-taught a fall semester course about how environmentalists and economists can work together to incorporate climate change science and environmental economics. Both professors felt strongly that such a course was needed. Says Bradtmiller, “Solutions to human-caused climate change have to involve both scientific and economic expertise, but when we looked for a textbook to use, there wasn’t one.”
  • Macalester remains on track to become carbon neutral by 2020.

Migration

Macalester’s annual International Roundtable looked at migration, with speakers from around the world coming for the two-day conference. Students and community members examined the historical as well as existing and emerging challenges and possibilities in migration through three broad questions: How does migration develop and transform identities, Diasporas, or cultures? How do borders limit, shape, and propel patterns and possibilities of migration? and What is the relationship among migration and economic, intellectual or technological change? Speakers included Susan Brower, Minnesota State Demographer, Aihwa Ong, professor, a sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley; John Jota Leaños, associate professor of social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and T. Alexander Aleinikoff, United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees.

Plastic surgery and body image

Psychology professor Jaine Strauss specializes in examining how what we see in the media affects how women view themselves. She is a clinical psychologist whose research focuses on women’s “body talk” conversations, self-control styles in eating disorders, developmental trends in body objectification, and the impact of diet commercials on snack food consumption. She teaches courses in clinical and counseling psychology; psychological disorders; and community psychology and public health.

World Cup in Brazil

While studying abroad in Cordoba, Argentina, last spring, political science major Jasper Peet-Martel ’14 observed some of his Brazilian classmates reacting to riots against the World Cup in Brazil. This opened Peet-Martel’s eyes to the negative consequences of development surrounding soccer’s premier international tournament. In his thesis on the topic, Peet-Martel explored issues such as population displacement and unsafe labor conditions, both of which have resulted from FIFA’s monopoly on the World Cup. The human rights abuses that Peet-Martel and others have uncovered are having consequences for both this year’s World Cup as well as for future tournaments. Since writing his capstone, Peet-Martel has presented his findings at the University of Notre Dame and had his paper published in the Journal of Politics and Society.

Human Trafficking

  • Jim von Geldern, International Studies, led a screening of Not My Life, the first film to depict the cruel and dehumanizing practices of human trafficking and modern slavery on a global scale. Filmed on five continents in a dozen countries, Not My Life takes viewers into a world where millions of children are exploited every day through an astonishing array of practices including forced labor, domestic servitude, begging, sex tourism, sexual violence, and child soldiering.
  • The International Round Table on migration looked at the plight of female migrant domestic workers around the world. Anthropology majors Rachel Ladd ’17 and Antara Nader ’15, together with Anthropology professor Dianna Shandy and the University of Amsterdam’s Marina de Regt, explored the feminization of migration through domestic workers. Human Rights Watch estimates that millions of girls and women around the world are employed as domestic workers. Despite the magnitude of this field, the private nature of the domestic sphere renders it largely unregulated as a workspace, subjecting domestic workers to exploitative work conditions and abuse.
  • A fall political science course, Gender Based Violence in Refugee Settings: A Macalester-ARC Collaborative Project, also explored these issues.

 

 

January 2 2015

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