Humanities & Society

Luis Zayas, PhD, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, will be on this week’s Latino USA program on NPR discussing Latina teen suicide in the United States. Listen to the program at http://www.latinousa.org/916-2/.

University City Council member L. Michael Glickert (left) presents Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, with a proclamation during a city council meeting Oct. 18. The proclamation celebrates Sherraden, a University City resident, being named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The four newest members of the faculty fellows program have settled into their apartements in the South 40. The goal of the program, started in 1998, is to help integrate academic and residential life by having professors live in the residential colleges with students for three-year stints.

The Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis will host a symposium titled “What Hurts, What Works, and What Have We Learned in Eliminating Health Disparities” from 8 a.m.-noon on Thursday, Oct. 21, at the Eric P. Newman Education Center on the Medical Campus.

With an election right around the corner and the media saturated with political pundits, the role of government may seem “all politics.” Students can get a fresh perspective on how government works with a series of events Oct. 20 and 21 that demonstrate how people are making a difference through careers in civil service.

“Since the founding of the Peace Corps 50 years ago, international service programs have grown dramatically across the public, private and nonprofit sectors,” says Amanda Moore McBride, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School and expert on civic service as Research Director at the School’s Center for Social Development (CSD). To date, most research on the field of international service has focused solely on the volunteers themselves. While impacts on volunteers are important, CSD researches not only the impacts on volunteers but also the impacts on the host communities and organizations that they serve. In their most recent study, McBride and colleagues looked at the impact of international service on the development of volunteers’ international contacts and how those contacts, in turn, are used to further host community development around the world.  

The world has been captivated by the amazing rescue of 33 miners trapped underground for 69 days in Chile. The miners’ survival and rescue were made possible by collaboration, says R. Keith Sawyer, PhD, associate professor of education and of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Sawyer is an expert on the science of creativity and collaboration.

Sociologist William Julius Wilson, PhD, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University and a leading authority on race and poverty in the United States, will deliver the biennial lecture for Washington University’s Center on Urban Research and Public Policy at 1:10 p.m. Oct. 19 in the Danforth University Center, Room 276.

Recent calls to cut Social Security benefits are grounded in misinformation and misunderstanding, says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, the Walter D. Coles Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “Cutting the program will lead to undiminished deficits, more poverty, less purchasing power, less business income and more unemployment,” he says.

Eric Edmonds, PhD, associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College, will speak about “Poverty Alleviation and Child Labor” at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 13, at Washington University’s Goldfarb Hall, Room 132. His talk is a follow-up discussion to Nicholas Kristof’s recent WUSTL presentation on his book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.