Humanities & Society

The 22nd annual Pow Wow at Washington University in St. Louis, a festival of American Indian cultures, will be held Saturday, March 31, in the WU Field House. This event, hosted by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at the Brown School of Social Work, is free and open to the public. Visitors and participants will be able to enjoy dancing, singing, drumming, arts, crafts and food. Grand entries will take place at noon and 6 p.m. Traditional arts and crafts booths and community information booths open at 10 a.m.

Song, dance and dishes from a variety of nations represented by students at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis highlight the 18th annual International Festival beginning at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, March 25, at the 560 Music Center. Admission is $2 in advance and $5 at the door.

Experts on youth advocacy and school desegregation will come together March 22 and 23 for a series of events as part of the Youth Justice Program at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Events are free and open to the public and will be held in the Bryan Cave Courtroom of Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 310.

Smoking, the leading preventable cause of mortality in the United States, continues to disproportionately impact lower income members of racial and ethnic minority groups. In a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jason Q. Purnell, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at how perceived discrimination influences smoking rates among these groups. “We found that regardless of race or ethnicity, the odds of current smoking were higher among individuals who perceived that they were treated differently because of their race, though racial and ethnic minority groups were more likely to report discrimination,” he says. 

Participating in an online March Madness bracket or fantasy sport league is harmless fun for most people, but for someone with a gambling addiction, it can be a dangerous temptation. “Now, with states entertaining the possibility of increasing revenue through legalizing internet gambling, it is even more important to pay attention to groups that may be vulnerable to problem gambling, particularly youth,” says Renee Cunningham-Williams, PhD, gambling addictions expert and associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.

Narayana Kocherlakota, PhD, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will present “On the Limits to Monetary Policy” for the second-annual Hyman P. Minksy Lecture at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 20 in the Bryan Cave Moot Courtroom in Anheuser-Busch Hall.

Louis W. Sullivan, MD, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the administration of President George H. W. Bush and president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine, will lead a public forum on the future of health care at 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 11, at the Eric P. Newman Education Center, 320 S. Euclid Ave., at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Social Security’s cost of living adjustments (COLA) are designed to protect against the erosion of retiree purchasing power when prices go up, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). “Now Social Security self-styled ‘reformers’ seek to lower COLA every year based on their claim that COLA overstates inflation,” says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security. The proposed substitute for the current CPI formula, ‘Chained COLA,’ is based on the assumption that benefit recipients substitute lower-priced goods as prices go up. “This the assumption is unrealistic for those millions who only have access to convenience stores that typically offer fewer choice and higher prices,” says Bernstein, the Walter D. Coles Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “And, further, it is not reasonable to assume that most consumers can outwit the wiles of merchandising experts.”

Todd Gitlin, PhD, a noted 1960s cultural scholar and book author, will visit Washington University in St. Louis Wednesday and Thursday, March 28 and 29, to keynote a two-day mini-colloquium exploring the counter-cultural movements of the year 1968, including a special focus on the many literary, social, political and artistic theories spawned by these movements. 

Research has shown that youth violence is a major cause of injury and death among Latinos. However, there is little understanding of violent behaviors of youths within various Latino ethnic subgroups such as Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Mexicans. Lorena Estrada-Martínez, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, recently examined how family dynamics and neighborhood racial/ethnic composition and socioeconomic status (SES) impact youth violence among Latino subgroups. “Higher levels of youth independence can reduce the risk of violence in primarily Latino neighborhoods,” Estrada-Martinez says.