Humanities & Society

Richard Chapman, senior lecturer in film and media studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is a veteran screenwriter and producer from his days in television and film. He offers advice to an animal that doesn’t yet exist because, at last reporting, the Trumps own no pets: “I know things are […]

Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, recently was elected president of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), a national organization dedicated to improving the social position of women through feminist sociological research and writing. She discusses her plans for SWS, sociology and gender research, and why academics need to engage in public discourse.

If you are on Obamacare, you are likely a better tenant or homeowner. Families who get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are significantly more likely to make their rent and mortgage payments than are those who remain uninsured, suggests a new study from the Brown School and Olin Business School.

Despite announcing in his first press conference that he would deal with a pharmaceutical industry “getting away with murder,” President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have a clear path for how he will reduce drug prices, said Rachel Sachs, associate professor of law and expert on drug regulation and health law.

The first academic study to estimate the cumulative lifetime risk of a child mistreatment investigation, completed by researchers at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, reveals that prior to their 18th birthday, 37 percent of U.S. children are the subject of an investigated child maltreatment report.

The 21st Century Cures Act, sweeping mental health legislation passed this week by the U.S. Senate, will provide necessary funding to help those with mental illnesses if signed by President Obama, but should focus more on mental health outcomes of those suffering right now, says a mental health expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Greater stress and anxiety resulting from economic insecurity may be at least partly to blame for the U.S. death rate that the government announced Dec. 8 has increased for the first time in a decade, says an expert on poverty and inequality at Washington University in St. Louis.

Despite promises made before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, will be as difficult to outright repeal as it was to pass, says a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

On Giving Tuesday, holiday donation campaigns launch into high gear. But how do people decide where to donate their money? They know that they should give to the neediest cases, but new research from Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School shows often, the donation decision comes down to something called a “charity beauty premium.”

Lately it’s been fashionable to say that hunter-gatherers lived better than we do. They had more free time, they followed more natural sleep cycles, and so on. But is our picture of hunter-gatherer society right? A giant earth mound in Louisiana suggests we know less than we think. Washington University anthropologist Tristram R. Kidder explains.