Humanities & Society

Winnebago Tribe member John Snowball performs during last year’s powwow.An American Indian powwow, traditional cuisine, storytelling, music and crafts will be among the highlights of the University’s American Indian Awareness Week April 4-9. The annual awareness week and powwow allow the University’s American Indian students to share their unique cultures with the rest of the campus and the St. Louis community. All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.

How unhealthy is fat?The consequences of a fatty diet may vary depending on whom you ask. A recent study concluded that reducing fat intake doesn’t necessarily reduce a woman’s risk for certain types of cancer, but WUSM lipid researcher Anne Goldberg contends that only a lengthier study could produce reliable results regarding fat’s effects on cancer risk.

Thursday, March 30 at 5 p.m., the finalists will be announced for the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition, co-sponsored by Washington University and the YouthBridge Association. The event features Theresa Wilson, founder of The Blessing Basket, as a keynote speaker. Currently there are 14 semi-finalists. The finalists will be selected based on their two-minute presenations about their projects. The event takes place in May Auditorium in Simon Hall on the Washington University Hilltop Campus.

Anthropologist Eugenie Scott has been involved with some of the high-profile legal trials about the teaching of evolution in the classroom. She is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education. She speaks on intelligent design at the Assembly Series on March 22.

She’s executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

The series will consist of four feature films and four short films from seven different African nations; all screenings are free and begin at 7 p.m. in Brown Hall.

Courtesy photo*African Middleweights*Washington University will host the African Film Festival’s renowned Traveling Film Series March 23-26. The series consists of four feature films and four shorts from seven different African nations, addressing themes on colonialism, urbanization and youth subcultures erupting from the ironies of contemporary life.

On the heels of a highly acclaimed book on the NFL comes another football tome from Michael MacCambridge. In an era of stat freaks, over-analysis and just plain numbers-crunching, the literary world — and sports world — needed a book like the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia: The Complete History of the Game (ESPN Books, 2005). MacCambridge, adjunct professor of journalism in University College in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, took three years worth of exhaustive research by several football experts and edited it into an easy-to-read format. More…

America’s conflicted cultural obsession with the gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain” might seem old-fashioned in Japan where stories of love and romance between beautiful young men have been entertaining women for more than a decade, suggests Rebecca Copeland, Ph.D., a Japanese studies professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to movies, male-male romance is a popular theme in a variety of other Japanese pop culture media, including book-length graphic novels and comics, known as manga, and an array of animated cartoons and television action series, known as anime. All of which have developed cult followings on the Internet and among fans of late-night cable television programming, including large numbers of American teens. More…

In recent years, one in five U.S. Latina teens attempted suicide. Though this rate is startlingly higher than their non-Hispanic peers, “efforts to understand the phenomenon have been hampered by a dearth of solid statistics and research,” says Luis H. Zayas, Ph.D., professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on mental health issues in the Latino community. “We have developed a new research model that will help us to understand what is really behind those statistics.” More…