Humanities & Society

The Brown School’s “Evaluation for Social Impact: A St. Louis Summit” Oct. 16 and 17 was an innovative conference designed to elevate understanding of evaluation techniques for agencies and nonprofits throughout the St. Louis region. It featured top national experts giving keynotes, spark talks and breakout sessions.

For decades, author, educator, environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben has been telling us things we don’t want to hear — presenting scary scorched Earth scenarios due to carbon emissions in the atmosphere. He also leads a global initiative — 350.org — to try to solve the climate crisis. McKibben will give the keynote address for the Sustainable Cities Conference Thursday, Nov. 1, on campus. 

That Mitt Romney, when he became governor of Massachusetts, did not know a sufficient number of women leaders in business and politics to appoint women he knew or knew about to positions in the state government is troublesome, says Mary Ann Dzuback, PhD, director of the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

The City of St. Louis estimates more than 10,000 vacant parcels have come into its ownership through tax foreclosure — and nearly 20 percent of all property within city limits is vacant. A new joint program between the City of St. Louis and the Washington University in St. Louis Office of Sustainability seeks to reframe the issue: turning vacant land into an opportunity that inspires innovative thinking and catalyzes tangible demonstration projects.

Advances in medicine allow doctors to keep patients alive longer, tackle fertility problems and extend the viability of premature babies. They also lead to a growing number of moral questions for both the medical provider and patient. “Across the country, so-called conscience legislation allows doctors and nurses to refuse to provide abortions, contraception, sterilizations, and end-of-life care,” says Elizabeth Sepper, JD, health law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “But legislators have totally overlooked the consciences of providers who have made the conscientious judgment to deliver care and of the patients who seek these treatments.” Sepper says that conscience in the medical setting needs to be protected more consistently. “The one-sided protection of refusal cannot stand,” she says. “Just as we wouldn’t say that giving students vouchers only for Christian schools furthers religious freedom, we can’t say that current conscience legislation successfully lives up to its goal of protecting conscience.

Critical data for more than 2,300 federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) cases now are available online thanks to a multi-year effort of researchers at Washington University School of Law’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law (CERL). The EEOC Litigation Project, which spans the period between 1997 and 2006, makes readily available detailed information about the EEOC’s enforcement litigation to legal scholars, social scientists, and policy-makers.

The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis commemorated World Food Day Oct. 16 by holding a lunch in Goldfarb Commons with a discussion following. Students were given “money” base on their random selection as being from rich, poor or moderate-income countries, and were given the opportunity to join with others to receive additional funds to pool cooperatively which they could then use to purchase food reflective of items available in those countries.

Smoking is both a physical addiction to nicotine and a learned psychological behavior, so the best way to quit is to attack it from both sides, says Sarah Shelton of the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. And help may be right at your fingertips in the form of your smartphone.

A scat-sniffing dog by the name of Pinkerton may be the best friend ever for a small, highly elusive group of endangered monkey and gibbon species now scrambling for survival in the vanishing forests of a remote Chinese mountain range. The high-energy Belgian Malinois is a critical player in efforts to preserve the black-crested gibbon and the Phayre’s leaf monkey.

Hailed by some as the “end of race as we know it” and the beginning of a “post-racial” America, the 2008 election of Barack Obama sparked a measurable bump in feelings of political empowerment among black Americans. But those sentiments have faded considerably over the last year or so, according to a new analysis of political survey data, with the sharpest declines in perceived political power coming among blacks who identify themselves as conservatives or “born again” Christians.​