Podcasts about american culture studies

In this episode, Jamal, Heph, Daniel, and Martin speak with Ben Thomason on USAID, the Middle East, the new Trump administration, tariffs and more. Ben Arthur Thomason is an expert on twentieth and twenty-first century US empire and international relations and completed his PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in 2024. […]

Episode 2 in this serial series called: Farewell Evangelicalism is here. In this episdoe we begin to peel back to layers of evangelicalism to make sense of how it’s become the broken and malformed expression it is today. When did the wheels fall off? When did evangelicals become white nationalists? It hasn’t always been this way. To get to the ‘how' evangelicals became associated with various monkers like white nationalism, we must develop cultural context, garnering information to begin naming specific components in the movement that produce harm to the neighborhood, city, and nation, and of course to those stuck within the confines of the four church walls. The hope for this episode is to help give name to cultural moments when the evil and broken pieces in evangelicalism emerged so more folks can make connections to their own church or belief systems. We go back into time connect the dots between political movements, the use of fear to sway evangelicals, and ways evangelicals have casually sided with white supremacy to inform their beliefs. Episode 2 – Show Notes (00:00) – Introduction (00:28) – Setting the Scenes (01:35) – When evangelicals lost the plot. (05:30) – Introducing Scott Okomoto including his time teaching at Aszuza Pacific. (09:00) – When evangelicals swung hard right. (10:20) – How white was APU? Explaining culture and culture shifts. (14:00) – From Bush to Obama and evangelical militancy. (19:45) – Unpacking MAGA. (26:00) – Outro and Intro to Dr. Marlena Graves (20:45) – Unpacking the connections between evangelicals, Republicanism, and white supremacy. (26:15) – History: Moments in the 20th century when evangelicals married Republicans. (39:00) – Connecting the Religious Right movement. (42:50) – Talking about the strategy behind preserving white supremacy. (54:00) – Outro and wrap. Featuring your host Rohadi Nagassar (rohadi.com) and: Scott Okomoto – Writer/Podcaster R Scott Okamoto is a writer and musician from Los Angeles. He is passionate about AAPI identity and politics, fly fishing, sex and sexuality, cooking, and religious deconstruction. Scot is the creator and host of the Chapel Probation Podcast and the author of Asian American Apostate: Losing Religion and Finding Myself at an Evangelical University, published by Lake Drive Books. Dr. Marlena Graves – Professor/Author Marlena received her M.Div. from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York and his pursuing her PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH where she is researching the influence American culture has on Evangelicals' view of immigration, race, and poverty. Marlena’s book, “The Way Up Is Down” (with IVPress) released in July 2020. Intro Music by Jesse Peters. Bumper music by Daniel Wheat.

On March 10th, we celebrate "Three Flags Day," marking the finalization of the Louisiana Purchase. Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University, joins Chris Rongey and Nate Gatter to discuss the historical significance of this pivotal event. Kastor dives into the 1804 ceremony that transferred Upper Louisiana from Spanish to French to American control and its broader impact, including its connection to the Lewis and Clark expedition. He also explores the historical context of St. Louis, including the role it played in the American Revolution and its growth in the early 1800s.

In Hour 1, Chris and Nate discuss exciting updates for KMOX Radio, including the addition of the 104.1 FM simulcast starting March 24. With multiple listening options like AM, FM, and the Audacy app, KMOX is expanding its reach and improving signal coverage. The conversation also highlights the SIUE Cougars' historic first NCAA tournament appearance after winning the OVC championship and its potential impact on university visibility. Later in the hour, Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Wash U, joins the show to discuss "Three Flags Day." Peter dives into the historical significance of St. Louis' transfer from Spanish to French to American control in 1804, and the role of the Louisiana Purchase in shaping exploration. He also highlights local historical context and its broader implications.

Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University, joins Chris and Amy to talk about the presidency of Jimmy Carter, his life after office, and his frequent visits to St. Louis.

Today on the Chris and Amy show; Amy quizzes Chris about what year it happened in Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University joins to talk about the presidency of Jimmy Carter and why he came to St. Louis area as much as he did. Eli Hoff, Mizzou Athletics Writer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch talks about Mizzou bowl game against Iowa. KMOX Sports Open Line Host Matt Pauley joins to talk about Winter Classic tomorrow and the passing of Greg Gumbel. Stuart Eizenstat, Chief White House Domestic Policy Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter biographer, currently Senior Counsel in Covington and Burling LLP's joins to talk about the life of Jimmy Carter and why do we view his presidency the way we do. Top 5 front offices in the 4 major sports

The WNBA is looking to expand to a 16th team in the coming years, and NBA player Jayson Tatum — alongside billionaire investors — hopes that team will land in St. Louis. Noah Cohan, assistant director of American Culture Studies at Washington University, talks about the effort and shares a brief history of women's basketball in St. Louis.

Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University joins Chris and Amy to discuss Jimmy Carter's life and legacy in honor of the former president turning 100 this week. Dr. Kastor also dives into the Vice Presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, and looks back at some notable VP Debate moments throughout history.

In the final hour of the show Chris and Amy talk with Maury Brown, Forbes Senior Contributor joins to discuss the news that Diamond Sports Group will not carry 11 MLB teams in 2025 which includes the Cardinals. Riverview Gardens is doing a Father's Walk. Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University joins to talk about how people view Jimmy Carter as he became the first former president to turn 100. Finally, people getting sick from Longhorn Steakhouse in Fairview Heights.

Guests on the Chris and Amy Show include John Hancock filling in for Amy Kurt Weigle, Senior Vice President and Chief Downtown Officer of Greater St. Louis INC to talk about the decision to have unarmed ambassadors patrolling the streets of downtown St. Louis and why it might work and if other cities do this. Major Garrett, CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent to talk about the election coming in just over a month, the VP debate and more. Mark Schwarz, Founder and Owner of Quarrelsome Coffee joins as we continue ‘Coffee Week' to get his story of starting a coffee shop. KMOX Sports Contributor Bernie Miklasz joins to talk about MLB postseason and Mizzou gets first road test. Maury Brown, Forbes Senior Contributor joins to discuss the news that Diamond Sports Group will not carry 11 MLB teams in 2025 which includes the Cardinals. Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University joins to talk about how people view Jimmy Carter as he became the first former president to turn 100.

 Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Washington University, joined us to discuss the dismissal of Donald Trump's classified documents case by judge Aileen Cannon, and to provide a historical context to the appointment of federal officers dating back to George Washington.  

Iver Bernstein is a Professor of History, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University. In light of Saturday's attempted assassination on Donald Trump, Professor Bernstein gave us an historical perspective on political turmoil and presidential assassinations dating back to the Civil War.

This presentation examines the 2023 alliance between Leidos, the international high-tech engineering firm, and NASCAR to build a “Next Gen” Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). The paper looks at the adaptation of motorsports culture by the aerospace industry as space exploration grows more privatized and commercialized. Additionally, the presentation looks at the history of NASA's LRV program and how astronauts saw their rovers through the context of automobile racing. Both Leidos Dynetics and NASCAR are relying on particular language, imagery, and historic legacies to justify their partnership while trying to earn NASA's new LRV contract. Dr. Mark D. Howell has been involved with motosports his entire life. As a teenager, he tagged along with the NASCAR Modified pit crew of Brett Bodine, who raced out of Howell's hometown of Dallas, PA. He earned a BA and MA from Penn State, and a Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. His dissertation evolved into From Moonshine to Madison Avenue:  A Cultural History of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, published by The Popular Press/University of Wisconsin Press in 1997. Howell is professor of communications at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. He lives with his wife and son (and two dogs) in the village of Suttons Bay on Lake Michigan. This episode is part of our HISTORY OF MOTORSPORTS SERIES and is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family - and was recorded in front of a live studio audience. ===== (Oo---x---oO) ===== The Motoring Podcast Network : Years of racing, wrenching and Motorsports experience brings together a top notch collection of knowledge, stories and information. #everyonehasastory #gtmbreakfix - motoringpodcast.net Check out our membership program and go VIP at: https://www.patreon.com/gtmotorsports Other cool stuff: https://www.gtmotorsports.org/links

Chris and Amy talk with Dr. Peter Kastor, Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Wash U. Talking about having to educate the new generation of 9/11, and how the the new generation views this day. He talks about his memories that day. 

Martin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Chair and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. Previously, he was a member of the faculty in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and Director of American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. Martin is the author of the award-winning Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion (New York University Press, 2014). The book received the 2015 first book award by the American Society of Church History. In support of his research, Martin has received a number of nationally recognized fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), The Teagle Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, and the Forum for Theological Exploration. Most recently, Martin became Co-Director of a $1 million grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to fund “The Crossroads Project,” a four-year, multi-institution project to advance public understanding of the history, politics, and cultures of African American religions. He has also been recognized for his teaching, receiving institutional teaching awards as well as fellowships from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion. His commentary and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CNN, CSPAN, and PBS. He is currently writing a book on the relationship between the FBI and white Christian Nationalism, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2022. This lecture is presented by the Association of Black Seminarians.

The finale episode of season 6 is guest hosted by Bryan Bové, a PhD Candidate in BGSU's American Culture Studies program and a graduate assistant in the Center for Women and Gender Equity. Bové talks with technology leader Lacey Tezino, the founder of the app Passport Journeys, which provides workshops, events, and teletherapy sessions with licensed clinicians. Tezino discusses the inspiration for her app, as well as how race and gender shaped her journey as an entrepreneur. Listeners can keep up with ICS happenings by following us on Twitter and Instagram @icsbgsu and on our Facebook page. You can listen to BG Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. For more information, visit bgsu.edu/bgideas. You can also find the Center for Women and Gender Equity on Twitter and Instagram @cwge_bgsu and on their Facebook page. This episode was sound edited by DeAnna MacKeigan and Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by Bryan Bové. To access the transcript for this episode, use the following link: https://bit.ly/3ppuWvS

Rebecca Wanzo (https://www.rebeccawanzo.com/) is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an Affiliate Professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She's the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, a book that thinks through the kinds of storytelling conventions that African American women, and social beings in general, are compelled to use to make their suffering legible to specific institutions in the United States. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, is a remarkable study of the many ways that Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to contest and rework constructions of ideal citizenship. Wanzo recalls being told that her subject in The Content of Our Caricature had basically been exhausted. Imagine being questioned about whether there was enough content for a scholarly book within the history of Black comics—it speaks to the ways that, as she points out, comics are still seen as somewhat juvenile, and also the ways in which Black comics, in particular, are not understood as having their own vital, varied history. It's interesting to think that Wanzo struggled to get the cover image for the book approved by the publisher. This striking image from Jeremy Love's Bayou perfectly captures the concerns of her text. As she puts it, one of the questions she's asking, again and again, in this book is: “What is this Black creator trying to do” with this representation of a figure—in the case of Bayou, the figure of the gollywog—that has “a specific racist… representational history”? In the coda for The Content of Our Caricature, Wanzo talks about the Marvel film Black Panther and its foundations in the foundational story arc surrounding Killmonger from the comics. She explains how the “transformation” and “rehabilitation” of Black Panther shows us how the history of representation and appropriation really is complex, and stresses that there is never “a homogenous black audience response. Things are not transparently always good and always bad." She argues that we really need to slow the process of interpretation and critical conversation down, and resist the tendency toward immediate condemnation. “Cancel culture,” as we've now titled it, is, in her words, “subsuming” so many different things that it's become a “useless analytic tool.” It's also a dizzyingly ironic title, given that those that frequently decry so-called cancel culture—namely those on the Right—are at the vanguard of canceling huge parts of culture that they deem threatening. Wanzo explains that, in the contemporary context, what we are seeing is the Right, in the US especially, attacking not only critical race theory, but all of “history” and “any discussion of discrimination.” The dominant form that cancellation is taking today vilifies any media that, from Wanzo's perspective, “might make white heterosexual children from heteronormative families uncomfortable.” She makes it clear that this push exposes the fact that these groups fundamentally “don't care about people who are not this ideal child that they've decided is American.” We talk about the ways that the mere presence of people who are not cisgendered and white in superhero stories still provokes strong reactions. Wanzo says that this spontaneous reaction to difference is deeply troubling, but it also shows the degree to which “the space of representation is a big battleground, and it matters,” and reveals “all kinds of conflicts that we have culturally and it's a space under which various politics around inclusion and the nation and political belonging play out.”

Dr. Elia Powers teaches mass communication research, media literacy, media and politics, news editing, sports writing and the multimedia reporting capstone course at Towson University. As a journalist for more than 15 years, he has covered higher education, health, business, sports, media and the arts for publications such as The Los Angeles Times, Inside Higher Ed and MediaShift. His research interests are audience engagement and the impact of journalism; youth civic engagement and news/media literacy; and media and disability. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and the Journal of Media Business Studies. He graduated with a Ph.D. in journalism studies in May 2014 from the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where he was named the top graduate student in 2013-2014. He earned a master's degree in American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americas-talking/support

This bonus episode features the conversation held by Jolie and Dr. Timothy Messer-Kruse, Dr. Nicole Jackson and Gloria Wu at ICS's "Politics of Teaching History" roundtable discussion. Jolie and guests discuss the debate generated by both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission and explore the difficulty and necessity of teaching U.S. history honestly, sensitively, and culturally responsively.  Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.Jolie: Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Big Ideas podcast brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS.Jolie :What follows is a round table discussion on the politics of teaching U.S history, which was hosted by ICS in April 2021 in a virtual format. This conversation has been adapted for the Big Ideas podcast feed. As always the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees.Jolie: Bowling Green State University is situated in the Great Black Swamp and the lower Great Lakes region. This land is the Homeland of the Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Miami, Pottawatomie, Ottawa, and multiple other Indigenous tribal nations, present and past, who were forcibly removed to and from the area.Jolie :We recognize these historical and contemporary ties and our efforts towards de-colonizing history, and we honor the Indigenous individuals and communities who have been living and working on this land. Stevie Scheurich, a PhD candidate in American Culture Studies and a research assistant with ICS, organized the event. They will introduce our esteemed panelists for this important timely conversation. Enjoy.Stevie: Thank you, Jolie. And thank you so much to everyone who's here. I'm so glad everyone's joining us for this conversation. And I'll just jump right into the intersections of our wonderful guests. Really honored to be introducing Dr. Nicole Jackson, Dr. Timothy Messer-Kruse, and Gloria Wu tonight.Stevie :Dr. Nicole Jackson is an associate professor of history here at BGSU and a former ICS faculty fellow. Her work explores the complexity and multiplicity of Black experiences in different historical and contemporary contexts. She is interested in the everyday experiences of Black people and their work to expand the boundaries of social and political citizenship, as well as the intersection between historical reality and popular culture representations of history. She's a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the blog of the African-American Intellectual History Society.Stevie :We're also joined by Dr. Timothy Messer-Kruse, professor of Ethnic Studies here at BGSU, and his research explores racial power dynamics at key moments in U.S labor history. He has published books on the Haymarket Affair, thinking history, and race relations in the United States. He has also published numerous articles analyzing the debates sparked by the 1619 project and the 1776 commission.Stevie :And we are also joined by Gloria Wu, who teaches social studies at Bowsher High School and Toledo Public Schools. She's taught for 20 years, primarily AP American Government. She earned her bachelor's degree in education from Bowling Green State University, so we have a Falcon joining us, and her master's from the University of Toledo. Her involvement in social studies, advocacy, and curriculum development includes serving as a representative of the C3 Framework Teacher Collaborative Council, on the Ohio Council for the Social Studies and for the Ohio Department Regional Network.Stevie :And with that, I'll turn the floor over to Jolie. Thank you.Jolie :Everyone. I've got a question that I'll start wit

In this episode, Jolie speaks with David Bixler, a composer, musician, and Director of Jazz Studies, about demystifying the process of music creation, composing through the pandemic, and the many hats he wears in the jazz scene.  Announcer:From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society. This is BG ideas.Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie:Hello and welcome back to the BiG Ideas podcast brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and Director of ICS. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we are not recording in the studio but from home via phone and computer. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Bowling Green State University, and its campuses are situated in the Great Black Swamp in the Lower Great Lakes Region. This land is the Homeland of the Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Miami, Pottawatomie, Ottawa, and multiple other Indigenous Tribal Nations, present and past, who were forcibly removed to and from the area. We recognize these historical and contemporary ties in our efforts towards de-colonizing history and we honor the indigenous individuals and communities who've been living and working on this land from time immemorial. Jolie:Today, I'm talking to composer, alto saxophonist and Director of Jazz Studies at BGSU David Bixler. In 2020, he released the album Blended Lineage with the David Bixler Bixtet and Inside The Grief with the David Bixler Trio Incognito. He is also the host of the podcast Liner Notes with David Bixler. In addition, David is a former ICS Faculty Fellow. David, thank you for joining us today to talk about making art during the pandemic. David, would you begin by talking a bit about your many different roles within the world of jazz? You're a performer, composer, educator and now a podcaster as well. How do you think about the relationship between these different positions?David:They definitely inform each other. And I think more and more, this is just kind of where we are right now, and everyone is doing it. And I think in the arts, being an educator, I believe, is part of it. There's always kind of a mentorship or giving back. And I think sometimes what that looks like is different. Going back to the history of jazz, it wasn't in an institutional setting. The way that the jazz scene has changed, academia for better or for worse has been a place where the community gathers, where some of this information is passed on. Because I think at one point like, "Why is jazz in the institution?" I think because as music becomes less popular in society, being able to gather at BGSU in the Northwest Ohio, we have a community there, we bring in people. And in this way is still incubated and passed on.David:With the podcast, this actually came about maybe five, no six, maybe seven years ago. I have a high school friend whose cousin used to work for PRI. They were looking for content. And so I met with him. And this is never anything I ever thought about. And I thought, "Well, I'll check it out." I have a friend, a former neighbor, that was a producer at 60 Minutes in 2020. So I reached out to her and asked her if she could help out, she's retired now. And she said, oh, she'd love to. And so I showed up at the place where we were going to interview the first person and she had hired a film crew and I walked in there and I said, "Man, there's no way I can do this." I just froze. I didn't know what to do. But anyhow, she put it together and made me look halfway articulate.David:It was cool. And then, since she had come from television, she was looking for a lot of money to try to get this going. We didn't get it. And then four years ago, I just tho

In this episode, guest host Stevie Scheurich speaks with Dr. Angela Ahlgren, professor of theatre and film at BGSU, and Dr. Kareem Khubchandani, professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University, about how their lives as performers and professors inform each other. Angela and Kareem discuss their research as both performers and performance studies scholars exploring how political, economic, and transnational power structures shape individual and communal performances of racial, gendered, and sexual identities.   Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society this is BG Ideas.Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.Stevie:Welcome back to the BiG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society and the school of media and communication at Bowling Green State University. I am Stevie Scheurichm, A PhD student in BGSU's American Culture Studies program and a graduate assistant at the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society. Due to the ongoing pandemic we are not recording in the studio, ultimately by phone and computer. As always the opinions expressed on this podcast are those are the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Bowling Green State University, and its campuses are situated in the Great Black Swamp and the Lower Great Lakes region.Stevie:This land is a home land of the Wyandot, Kickapoo, Miami Potawatomi, Odawa and multiple other Indigenous tribal nations, present and past, who were forcibly removed to and from the area. We recognize these historical and contemporary ties in our efforts toward decolonizing history and we honor the indigenous individuals and communities who have been living and working on this land from time in memorial. Today we are joined by Dr. Kareem Khubchandani and Dr. Angela Ahlgren. Kareem is a Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theater, dance and performance studies and women's gender and sexuality studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Ishtyle, Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife, co-editor of Queer Nightlife and creator of criticalauntystudies.com. Kareem is currently working on two new book projects, Decolonize Drag and Ontologies, Queer Aesthetics and South Asian Aunties.Stevie:Kareem has just finished a digital residency at BGSU, including a critical drag workshop and a lecture entitled Divas, Drag Queens, Aunties and other academic personas. Angela is an assistant professor and graduate coordinator in the department of theater and film at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Drumming Asian America, Taiko, Performance and Cultural Politics, which focuses on the racial, gender, and cultural politics woven into the practice and performance of taiko, Japanese ensemble drumming in the US and Canada. Her research interests include Asian American theater and performance, critical dance studies, queer and feminist theater and performance, and the politics of mourning. Thank you both so much for joining today.Angela:Thank you. Kareem:Thank you. Stevie: So we'll just start by doing some introductions. Kareem, you're a scholar of performance studies and a performer yourself. Can you give us a little background about what it is that you study, who you study, how you study and how do you see your identities as an academic and a performer sort of entwined?Kareem:So my recent book is a study of nightlife in LGBT communities, primarily gay male communities in India and in the south Asian diaspora. And it looks at how people move across national borders and are forced to move across national borders by economic projects of globalization. And it thinks about how nightlife and queer nightlife spaces offer these migrant subjects, places to practice their identities and places to feel beautiful and places to find desire and love. It's somewhat of a reenactment of my own journey moving to the US when I was 17 years old and finding these incredible spaces of dance and pleasure and play in New York city and in San Francisco. So when I moved to Chicago to start graduate school in a performance studies program, I started organizing queer Bollywood nights there. Modeled on what I'd seen in other cities.Kareem:And it was my beginning as a graduate student. It was also the first time I had lived in a big city and all of these things coming together, it just sort of all folded on each other. My research, my teaching, my study and my social life all sort of became intertwined with each other and it's hard for me to separate them. To me, I try to bring queer nightlife into the classroom. I'm currently teaching class on queer nightlife. I'm editing a book called Queer Nightlife. I wrote about this transnational Indian nightlife, and I try to practice it. And I perform in online drag shows right now in the pandemic and had performed at bars, et cetera. So for me, all of these things are laid on each other and are integrated into each other.Stevie:Thank you. And then Angie, you're also a performer, performance studies scholar. Could you give us background on your research and how your life as a researcher, performer and educator are connected?Angela:So the research that I did as a taiko player culminated in a book that you mentioned, Drumming Asian America, and this book looks at what I'm terming cultural politics as opposed to sort of international politics or partisan politics. But I'm really looking at race, gender, and sexuality, kind of both in different chapters, one or the other of those things as foregrounded, but they're really all connected across the book. I was actually a taiko player before I was a taiko scholar, but it was also actually my work in theater that put me in contact with taiko in the first place. So when I was an undergraduate student, I was a theater major and an English major in Minneapolis. And when I graduated, I was waitressing. So I started stage managing for an Asian American theater company called Theater Mu in the late 90s.Angela:And it was through my work there that A, I really got exposed to sort of Asian American history through theater. And it was also there that they had been starting a taiko group just around the time that I started stage managing. So that was really my introduction to taiko and I was really captivated by it and I really wanted to try it. And I took some classes thinking that I would have a kind of four week class and have an interesting experience and then go about my life. But I really loved it and I kept up with it. And that sort of turned into a whole... I guess I started performing with the group. It made me think about things in many different ways beyond the kinds of things that we may have learned in school. Didn't really think all that hard about race especially my own.Angela:So that really was a kind of new experience for me that I ended up exploring in much greater depth as I kind of moved into my work as a scholar. So it was really my experience as a taiko performer that when I went to graduate school as a master's student in English, led me to take some Asian American studies classes that again, accumulated and helped me think about my experiences as a taiko player in a different way. So I really knew that once I went to graduate school, I wanted to write about taiko as my dissertation project, but that I wanted to do it, not in a theater program. And I wasn't a musician. So that was never really an option, but that performance studies seemed to me to be the place where I could do that, because it thinks about performance really expansively.Angela:And because at least the things that I was exposed to there, I felt that performance studies had an affinity with critical race theory and queer theory, feminist theory and that, that would really be a field that could sort of accommodate the project that I had when I was going into graduate school. So my sort of life as a performer and my life as a scholar, especially of taiko are deeply intertwined in that sense that it's not something I ever would have written about if I never had performed it, even though I would have found it interesting, I think. In a sense, there's a way that the things that I feel most passionate about or feel that I can really get into the crevices of in a certain way are things that I have done myself and know what it feels to be in that world.Stevie:Kareem, yesterday in your talk you partially focused on academic personas and you detailed how your drag persona, LaWhore Vagistan, occasionally visits your classes. And so to both of you, since you're both performers, you're both in class, right? Could you both speak to how you use your experience as performers, your knowledge of performance and navigate the classroom, which is really right in an environment built by and for white cisgender or straight men?Kareem:Yeah. I mean, my second year of graduate school, I was really intimidated to teach the sort of core class in our performance studies department at Northwestern, because I didn't know how they would react to a small brown queer person teaching them about performance, right? I was really self-conscious about what especially straight men would think of me trying to teach them how to use their bodies and turn poetry into performance. In retrospect, I realized I needed to take control over myself and my body to enter that space and to feel like I had some command over it. Again, performance studies is a place that accommodates issues of gender, sexuality, race post-colonial histories, things like that. So it is a comfortable space, but in general, the academy doesn't.Kareem:So when I teach these kinds of core classes that expose me to students that I don't already know or don't have affinities with, I feel like I have to put on a persona, right? I have to lean into things I'm good at to feel confident in front of students and to do new things in the classroom. And one of the ways I've done that is doing drag and bringing my drag persona, LaWhore Vagistan to teach classes. And what that has done has made me realize that I was right all along that students are seeing me through my body. It matters who they see in front of them. And women of color have been telling us this for a long time. Women of color in the academy have been telling us this for a long time, that their labor is devalued because of their race and their gender and their sexuality.Kareem:When LaWhore walks into the classroom, I'm treated differently and it brings out a different reaction, but really drawing on drag's history of playfulness and camp and lack of sincerity, I get to be as boisterous as I want, right? So really leaning into drag as a tradition, I get to make fun of my students back to their faces. And we all laugh together because they're in on the joke in that moment. But again, it makes me realize that performance can really work for us in the classroom to defamiliarize the space and say, "Last week was a whole other moment when we were talking to Kareem. How do we talk about that moment as a time where we learned something very specific?" How do we re-explain it now to LaWhore who "doesn't know" what's going on here, right?Kareem:So being authentic isn't what I'm most interested in. Creating opportunities for learning and discussion and troubling what we think we already know is what I'm actually most interested in. So performance can do that. And then there are other ways that I use performance in the classroom asking folks to interpret ideas through gesture, or asking them to develop their own drag personas. So I think there are other ways that we can use performance in the classroom. But bringing my drag persona into the classroom is this way of appending what they think they know the classroom is supposed to be doing and appending who they think I am. And making them realize, and myself realize that it matters who you're learning from and asking as to interrupt our biases as well.Angela:Yeah. I think that's really awesome and I love that idea. I feel like hearing you talk a little bit about that at the talk yesterday too made me think about sort of developing personas in a way that I think that we sort of do it in a half conscious way in certain ways, but really taking that to another level and using it to be able to destabilize identity. I think that's really awesome. One of the wonderful and tricky things about teaching performance studies is that it's sort of everything and also nothing at the same time. It's so capacious and flexible, which is awesome. But it also, I think, thinking about when I first started teaching this class at BGSU, I also had a certain trepidation more because there's a sense of, "Well, what is my performance studies understanding?"Angela:Because I think that everybody could teach it in a very different way and still be right or correct and within the boundaries of what it is. Because it's also made up of so many different lineages from sociology, anthropology, theater studies, ethnography. I felt like especially the first couple of times that I taught this classes that students would continually ask, "But what is performance studies?" Or, "Is this thing we're doing performance studies or is that thing performance studies?" And I think that that is a little bit of a tricky line. But I think that ultimately my own, I think sort of as I'm continuing to teach it is to really rely on my own lineage in performance studies and theater studies to be able to bridge that sort of perceived gap, I guess.Stevie: I was listening yesterday, I was thinking about my first time as instructor of record. I was sort of like, I'm all over the place on how I present my gender and I was immediately navigating all of these assumptions that I hadn't really thought about, about sort of who the professor is and how they sort of present themselves. The first time I taught I skewed towards sort of the traditional sort of set up and it didn't work. It didn't work. This time, teaching this semester, I just worked something I thought it was neutral and I had a student be like, "You're not buying it, right? I can tell."Stevie:And I was like, "Okay, they know." They're going to know. That's the second time I showed up and I was like, "Just put it all out on the table." And the response to me being like, "Y'all know I'm a queer non-binary femme." The response was so much more positive and so much more when I was able to just kind of like... it was just so much more. You're being read. I definitely think of professing as a performer.Kareem:Well, you're making me think of my early days as a graduate student who was solo teaching classes. I went out and bought khaki pants and belts and ties just to feel professional, but also I would end up awkward sweating into them because they're just not what I used to wear. But I think that we understand the professor as this straight white man with elbow patches on his tweed blazer, but femme embodiment in the classroom is just not in our public imagination. And so just taking seriously gender, race, sexuality altogether can help us reflect on how we want to bring our bodies into classroom spaces and what that can do to distribute power. The way you were talking about a student seeing you as non-binary and what that does for them to feel like they're inside of the... that they belong, I think it matters.Stevie:We're going to take a quick break. Thank you for listening to BiG Ideas podcast.Announcer :If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu.Stevie:So you both are studying at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality performance. Performativity is a big word that gets thrown around in our field. So I was wondering if we could all take a shot at unpacking both the difference and the connection between performance and performativity, and also thinking about how performance helps us understand the ideas that are performative.Angela:Sure I can say, I can take a stab at this. I mean, I want to echo what I said to the last question is that these are both really capacious and flexible terms and that there are ongoing conversations and debates about what each of them means, but I'm thinking on one level, that performance is something that happens all the time on stages, in the classroom as we were just discussing, in a wide variety of social context like sports, religion, digital space. But I think the word performativity can be a little bit more slippery. And in particular, because I think that recently it's become a pejorative term for showy, fake, theatrical. And that this in some ways runs really counter to the way that performance studies have theorized the term performative or performativity, which is often based on JL Austin. Angela:The linguist, JL Austin's idea of the performative utterance, a thing that you say that makes something happen, right? I do. When you're married means that you're placing a bet. And that a lot of scholars have taken that in different ways to mean that if something is performative it's something that actually causes something to happen or make something new happen, or urges an audience to do something. There's a lot of different ways that this kind of takes shape in scholarship. So in that sense, the term performative in the way that people in the field use it is really different from this sort of more colloquial understanding of what performative means, which often I think comes to mean theatrical or dramatic. I mean, these ended up all being such terms that people in the field have problems with.Angela:But in another sense I think the term performative it sort of means both fake and real in the sense that if we think about the way that Judith Butler talks about gender as performative, she's saying that gender is a kind of series of acts that happen and repeat so much that we take them to be natural or to have an origin and some biological fact. That in fact, gender is performative because it's actually fake, but it has real effects on the world. So there's sort of this tension, I think in thinking about that word between what is real and what is not real, and whether it's fake and showy. I'm thinking about the ways that people are using performative as performative allyship, like when you just post on Facebook a lot, but you don't actually get out there and do the work.Kareem:You hit the nail on the head. It is shocking to me to hear the word performative said so often outside the academy, but especially since last summer during Black Lives Matter protests, a lot of people were also calling out what they saw as insufficient activism as performative allyship or performative activism, where performative is assumed to be the adjective of performance. Friends of mine like to say... Actually, I think what you're trying to say is performancy, performance like. But it assumes that performance is a bad thing. And that to me is really dangerous because so much activism has actually relied on performance to have its effect in the world. When we think about the role of dress in civil rights activism, or even the hoodie in the Black Lives Matter movement and the hands up, don't shoot gesture, right?Kareem:All of these are performance practices and they're not fake, right? They have this viral effect of inviting more folks into activism, allowing them to be legible to each other. The public conversation doesn't take account how powerful performance can be, whether it's how people present themselves in the world every day. But one of the ways I think the field has shifted a little bit through the work of critical race studies scholars like, Saidiya Hartman and E. Patrick Johnson and Joshua Chambers-Letson and Jose Esteban Munoz is to say, actually performance is also something people are compelled and forced to do, especially minoritarian subjects are required to use their bodies in particular ways. Kareem:And how do we take stock of the ways that performance is actually a means of managing labor, managing life, and therefore takes serious of the way people use their bodies to survive, to find pleasure, to access wealth in ways that they're denied, right? I think it's important to take performance seriously and a deeper understanding of performativity, which I understand is, performance is ability to work in the world. Can really help us understand performance is power. Stevie:What does your research and performance work reveal about the ways in which race, nationality, class shape the way we understand and perform our gender and sexual identities?Kareem:So maybe one of the simplest ways I'll put it is in the nightclub, we think we're going there to dance and be free and feel the music. But in fact, there are very regimented rules to how we're supposed to be in the nightclub. All of those things are being controlled from the bouncer to the DJ, to lights, to what's on the walls, to the size of a space. All of these are cues that are telling us how we're supposed to be in those spaces. So we think we're going into the nightclub to feel free and feel the music and in fact, we are going in there to follow a bunch of rules. What I found is that folks who are migrants to the city whether it's from the small town in India to a bigger city or folks who are migrating from south Asia to the US, suddenly find themselves not knowing the rules when they enter the club.Kareem:The way they move, the way they dress, the way they style themselves runs up against the dominant aesthetics, right? And what I'm saying is that these aesthetics are in fact controlling devices. The donut aesthetics are what gives us capital. So if we look like what the club is supposed to be, we're great. People might talk to us. When we start thinking about what are the dominant aesthetics, we start to see how people of color, sexual minorities, gender minorities don't always fit with that dominant way of bringing your body into the world and fitting into environments. That's sort of the method that I take to my research is to ask, well, who's doing the wrong thing in the club? Because we think that just sort of stepping side to side is the natural way we dance. But in fact, people only started dancing solo in club environments in the '60s onwards with the rise of disco.Kareem:So the ways that people move in clubs together is actually quite organized. So who's going to change the layout of it. So one of the things I write about is how South Asian dancers in Chicago clubs bring their Indian dance styles like Panera or Bollywood to disrupt what is expected of the space. They don't necessarily know they're doing the wrong dance, but in doing the wrong kind of movement, they help us see what the dominant movement is. You suddenly see the contrast and you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that this is what the dominant was until I saw the contrast." And what else is possible when you have these kinds of frictions inside of the club, it's sort of thinking about dominant aesthetics as they're tied to race, gender, coloniality that rub up against minority practice of the body that people just come in wanting to practice because it's what they know.Stevie:Thank you. And for you, Angie, what have you learned from your research and performance work about how racial identity and gender norms are negotiated by the different groups of people participating in taiko drumming?Angela:I mean, one of the things I would say is that there's not a really neat way to sort of define how sort of taiko is practiced or thought about. The kind of responses that I had from people that I interviewed, especially when I was asking them specifically about how race or gender or other aspects of their identity sort of inform their practice of taiko or perhaps instigated their practice of taiko, it was really quite diverse. And part of this I think is because Asian American itself is a contested term and it's always being negotiated. But I guess the best way for me to answer this is maybe to think about a couple of specific examples. So one of the examples that I kind of point to is in Minnesota, in the group that I performed with.Angela:Because of the sort of geography and history of Asian America in Minnesota, a lot of the participants in my group were Korean adoptees. That's because there is a high number of Korean adoptees in Minnesota for reasons that to do with Lutheran churches and the sort of way that social welfare works in Minnesota as a state. But nonetheless, that's a significant population. So in my interviews with this particular couple of people talked about how Asian-American identity worked with them was often quite compelling because they were people who were mostly raised by white Midwesterners. So in some ways, taiko was a way of practicing Asian-American identity.Angela:That was I won't necessarily say new, but that was an intentional choice as a way to sort of forge community with other Asian-Americans. And I think that isn't that necessarily different from the ways that other, maybe Japanese Americans in California, for example, practice. But it has a sort of different context because of the ways that there are not sort of long established geographical enclaves of AsianAmerican communities in Minnesota the way that there are in California and New York, for example. Stevie:Another question for both of you, and we've kind of hinted at this, right? Talking about power and performance. So some people might think that drag, dancing, drumming are activities that are just recreational fun outside if they're all in politics. How does looking at performance help us identify how power that work in these almost invisible ways that we navigate our everyday life that we're not necessarily thinking about when we're in the moment, right?Angela:Yes. So I think one of the things that I would think about is this sort of ability to participate based on money and access for certain people. Another scholar of taiko, Debra Wong said to me once that, "Taiko is really an elaborate leisure activity for people who have the means to participate in it." She and I are both taiko players and very passionate about the way that it can be so powerful visually sonically in its embodied form. But I think to be able to acknowledge that starting a taiko group, for example, you need drums and those drums are quite expensive, at least $1,000 for each one.Angela:And if you are wanting to have a group, you need a lot of drums. But not only that, the sort of space that you need to be able to practice in, the space that you need to perform, or even just having the time to have a leisure activity like that, that requires a lot of practice. So thinking about the ways that leisure itself is very much tied up in class and therefore power is one of the things to think about. I think I'll pause there.Kareem:That's a perfect place to pause, because that's where I want to pick up. Fun is always measured in relation to work. I don't deserve to go out because I haven't done enough, right? And that's precisely what I'm thinking about in relation to nightlife is that I'm thinking about these global laborers who one, are only in nightlife spaces because patterns of globalization have given them mobility to enter these spaces. But again, like I was talking about before, they're not aesthetically trained to be inside of them, right? So now they're made precarious subjects. They're made to feel awkward. They're made to feel shame.Kareem:All these larger political economies that produce the very small encounter in the club where you're like, "Oh, my hair is not cut like that. I feel awkward about myself," right? Even the most minor transactions in these leisure spaces actually have to do with processes of global labor, if we look closely enough and if we think historically enough. Also, when it comes to drag. One, drag is a leisure practice for a lot of people, but for a lot of folks it's also work, right? So we go to the club to have fun, but they're actually bartenders and bouncers and bar backs and drag artists and go-go dancers working, right?Kareem:Trying to get paid in that time where we are having our leisure moment. So work is always at play in those contexts. And lastly, I think any conversation about drag in gender binaries and gender in general, has to think about the history of managing gendered bodies. That is massive economy from advertising to medicalization. When we're talking about how people dress, how people present their bodies in the world, we're actually talking about all these industries that have tried to produce gender binaries and sell the gender binary as attractive. I want to add also, so I'm working on this book called Decolonized Drag, and there are so many drag artists who are making performance about colonization.Kareem:So they're responding to political and economic violence through performance in very explicit ways. One person, Ms. Shumai in California takes Britney Spears as a womanizer, womanizer and turns it into colonizer, colonizer. I think that, again, these spaces of leisure are considered apolitical, but in fact there's so much politics being practiced in them and I think that that's important to recognize.Stevie:And in a way, I think it makes it so much more effective when you make those politics explicit and giving people an opportunity to see like, "I am participating in these power sectors in ways I didn't necessarily know." So maybe we can answer this question in a way that doesn't feel prohibitive, but enabling and encouraging. Do you have any tips for our listeners on how they can be engaged in critical audience members? And really thinking, what does it mean to be a critical viewer? Since a lot of folks might just assume that that's just looking for flaws in the performance so to speak?Kareem:I think a couple of things, one is that audience members can learn that they're also performers. So I think what I would say is, as an audience member, especially when you're entering new kinds of performance spaces, is to really watch other audience members to get a sense of what is a good respectful way to be in conversation with that art form, right? I guess alongside that research the form that you're an audience of. Get a sense of how much actors and performers get paid. Understand the economy behind it and that might get you to this place of being like, "Maybe I should mediate my criticisms." Kareem:This person wasn't working with a lot of resources. Isn't getting paid, even if they're being given a platform to do X, Y, or Z show or podcast or interview. So I think that these are some of the ways I think folks can be aware of how to be critical listeners, audience, members, witnesses, and remember that they too are in their bodies much like other performers and artists.Angela:I love those suggestions and I think that some of mine kind of overlap, but one of the things to put this from a slightly different lens, this idea of audience convention. So I teach theater history for undergraduates. One of the things I love teaching about is that the kind of conventions or rules or etiquette of being in an audience or being a spectator changed drastically based on time period, and geography and form and context. So I'd like to think about unruly, very vocal audiences of Japanese Kabuki performance versus standing in an Elizabethan theater versus maybe the kind of much more buttoned up sort of darkened theater.Angela:You have to be quiet, you have to put away your cell phones, sort of conventions of attending maybe a national theater today. So I think paying attention exactly to what are the rules and conventions of how you conduct yourself in various spaces. And I think that's its own kind of pleasure in thinking about what's expected of you and what do performers want from you. And I also wanted to echo this idea of let performances make you purious. So thinking about like, maybe find something out about the performer. What are their politics?Angela:And then thirdly, just that, I think that that moment of being a student, especially a student of theater, performance studies, cultural studies that sort of period of being like, "Oh my gosh, I can't watch everything. Everything's terrible." All I can do is see everything wrong with it. But I think just thinking about the fact that we all have really complex engagements and relationships with the world in so many things. I mean, often with our own family members, why not remember that you can have a kind of complex multilayered relationship to performance too.Stevie:Thank you so much for joining us today Kareem and Angie. Listeners can keep up with other ICS happenings by following us on Twitter and Instagram via @icsbgsu. You can listen to BiG Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcast. Please subscribe to us on your preferred platform. Our producers or Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza. Sound editing by DeAnna MacKeigan and Marco Mendoza. Stevie Scheurich researched and wrote the interview questions. 

For transracial adoptees and people of colour, the past 18 months have felt like an emotional gauntlet. At least, they have for us. From the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which saw a surge of the Black Lives Matter movement, to rising anti-Asian racism and the Atlanta shootings, to the disparate impacts of COVID-19 due to systemic racism and chronic underfunding in public health, there's been a lot to reckon with. To keep educating ourselves, and in the hopes of continuing and deepening some of our earlier conversations on race and the fight for racial justice, we reached out to our friend, Korean American adoptee Rebecca Kinney. Rebecca is an Associate Professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She is the author of numerous articles and the book Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America's Postindustrial Frontier (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). She is a Fulbright Scholar Korea (2021-2022) and currently lives in Seoul. This is a thought-provoking, in-depth conversation that traverses the historical, personal, and political. First, she starts with a 20-minute primer on Asian American racial formation and settler colonialism - kind of like an audio lecture. Then Rebecca talks about finding her own ethnic identity as a Korean adoptee from the white working class suburbs of Detroit, before we discuss the barriers to solidarity amongst Asian Americans and POCs, and how we might confront anti-black racism as Asian adoptees. Finally, Rebecca talks about living in Korea and her current Fulbright research, before we end with an extended random question segment. We learned a lot from Rebecca and we hope you do too. To learn more about Rebecca's work, visit https://bgsu.academia.edu/RebeccaJKinney or get in touch at rkinney@bgsu.edu Donate to the Black Lives Matter Movement here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019

In this episode, Jolie speaks with Nicole Robinson, keynote speaker at the 2021 Black Issues Conference, and Ana Brown, the Director for the Office of Multicultural Affairs at BGSU. They discuss how to ensure equity and accessibility for marginalized groups through their work in digital marketing and academic administration respectively. Announcer:From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.Jolie:You're listening to the Big Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we are not recording in the studio but remotely, via phone and computer. Our sound quality may differ as a result. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Bowling Green State University and its campuses are situated in the Great Black Swamp and the lower Great Lakes region. This land is the homeland of the Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Miami, Pottawatomie, Ottawa and multiple other Indigenous tribal nations, present and past, who were forcibly removed to and from the area. We recognize these historical and contemporary ties in our efforts toward decolonizing history.Jolie:And we thank the Indigenous individuals and communities who've been living and working on this land from time immemorial. Today, I'm joined by two guests, Nicole Robinson and Ana Brown. Nicole gave the keynote address at BGSU's 2021 Black Issues Conference. Nicole is a marketing and media strategist and has advocated internationally for accessibility and human rights. She specializes in integrated marketing strategy, web design, script and copywriting and she serves as an accessibility consultant to individuals and businesses. Ana Brown serves as the Director for the Office of Multicultural Affairs at BGSU, where she oversees diversity education, cultural programming, retention initiatives and belonging spaces for faculty, staff, and students. Her responsibilities include designing educational sessions, facilitating trainings and moderating panels on campus and in the community. Ana is also a member of the ICS executive board. Thank you both for joining me today, I'm really happy to have this conversation with you. Before we jump into discussing, sort of, the individual projects and initiatives you're working on, around diversity, equity and inclusion, I'd like to start with a question about terms. What does accessibility mean to you? So, Nicole, will you go first?Nicole:Accessibility, to me, means meeting people where they are. So, it really is as simple as, the more people can access your work, the more people can see it, hear it, feel it, however they need to sense it, the more people you can reach. So, I know some time it's looked at as a task or as a chore but it really is an asset to be able to touch people or reach people, speak to them, however they're able to receive it. So, it really is as simple as, just meeting people where they are.Jolie:And what about for you Ana?Ana: I tend to think of physical space but as we do more and more virtually and more and more online, I think that accessibility has become a broader term, not only about being able to read or hear or see the content but to actually access it. So, in terms of having a reliable internet connection, in terms of having the tools necessary to get to that internet connection, I think that those things, as we're broadening the scope of what accessibility means, I think that those things need to be included and discussed as well.Jolie:And as a follow-up to that, how do we address issues of some of the invisible disabilities into that definition of accessibility? Because we've talked about, sort of, the physical barriers, we think, on campuses, about wheelchair ramps and curb cuts. You and Nicole have talked about the importance of closed captioning and, sort of, making sure that the information is accessible. But how is the, kind of, evolving language around cognitive and neurological differences, kind of, broadening that definition and the work that you're doing?Ana:Absolutely. I think that understanding what these cognitive disabilities are is critical because a lot of folks are just now beginning to understand that these are disabilities, that it's not just a personal quirk or a personal failing, in some cases, is the way that it's been described as a lot of time. Well, you just need to do this better or you just need to work a little bit harder. It's like, no, it's actually an actual disability and so, as such, it's part of being a protected class. And so, we have to do better at making sure that we are addressing those needs and knowing it is part of our responsibility to find those communities and be aware and understand and grab resources that they're out there providing for everybody. They're like, look, we do this, we provide this, just read, just learn, just listen and you'll gain, kind of, some of the knowledge that you need to do better by us. And I think that that's one of the key pieces.Nicole:Back when I used to work for the state hospice association, I did media relations and web development and we developed a whole website that was based on being able to help Floridians locate hospice, end of life care or palliative care services. So, I was part of making the map. So, if you click in a city or county, it will direct you to the hospices in the service area. But we realized pretty early on in development that, there were some people who couldn't access the site, whether it was, there's a lot of people who might be looking for a hospice facility for themselves or for a loved one who might have sight issues or they can't see the text on the website, it's not large enough. I don't want to put it on them, it's on us to make it so that it's accessible.Nicole:So, that was when I started to really think about it and be like, especially because if we intend to use the internet as much as we are now, well, we're not always going to have the same level of site, we're not always going to have the same cognitive abilities but we should still have a good quality of life. So, if we don't develop these websites to have accessibility, millennials, gen Z, we'll all essentially develop ourselves out of use of the internet. That's what it really got me thinking about but also in that period, the immediate issue of making that website as accessible as possible. That's what it really... my wheels really started turning. And the folks there at the hospice association were really supportive and gung ho about developing those skills. And I ultimately went and got certified by the international association for that the IAAP for accessibility, for web accessibility, to accommodate those issues. Jolie:As a follow-up to this question, I'd love to hear each of you talk about the ways that you think about diversity and accessibility as being connected. What is the relationship between those concepts and how does your work touch on both concepts? Ana, you want to go first with that one?Ana:It's part of, for me, looking at the whole person and looking at the intersectionalities that we all have. I think that if we're going to say Black Lives Matter, then we have to look at all Black lives mattering. So, we can't just say that this certain set of Black lives matter, we have to look at disabled Black lives, we have to look at incarcerated Black lives, we have to look at all the other intersections of identity. And so, it's a critical piece, if you're going to talk about inclusion and belonging spaces, you have to look at not just one identity. And I think that that's one of the things that we have to be more aware of is that, whose story is being told, whose story isn't being told, who has access to tell their stories. And I think that that's also part of the issue is, if we're looking at accessibility as an issue of diversity and inclusion, it's like, we need to make sure that the people actually have the access to tell their stories, in a way that works for them.Nicole:Well, that campaign I was talking about, part of that website development, launching a hospice locator system on the website, was part of trying to reach minority communities who are underserved. Accessibility and race and diversity definitely intersect. We already have standing issues, for example, in medical care access and we have issues with food deserts. So, when you're rolling out the COVID vaccine or COVID testing and you only put COVID testing, like in Florida, is great that we're having people have more testing sites and everything like that. But if you're prioritizing grocery stores and you have a standing issue with food deserts, then you run into the same issue. Now you're compiling on it on a standing issue of not having access to fresh foods and foods that are good for your health, not just processed stuff but now you're limiting the access that people with that standing issue, due to red lining and all kinds of discrimination, have accessing relief to COVID.Nicole:And there's already a disparity in who is dying and living from that same disease. So, I would say, in the sense that accessing the vaccine, it must consider standing issues of just accessibility to food and grocery stores. The same thing in turn is applied to accessibility with cognitive disabilities, when you look at the education system, you see a great disparity in who is accommodated and how for cognitive disabilities and what is qualified as bad behavior and what is qualified as something that needs to be addressed with psychiatrists and psychologists. So, it intersects and we must be mindful of those things so we don't make issues worse, instead of seeing a path forward and making them better.Jolie:Ana, you're working in a different setting than Nicole but you are also thinking about meeting people where they are and increasing diversity, equity, inclusion and access. Could you talk a little bit about some of the key programs or initiatives that you're involved with on our own campus?Ana:Oh yeah. We do so much with the Division of Diversity and Belonging, which is where the Office of Multicultural Affairs is housed. And everything from looking at how to best reach students where they are and looking, again, across identities because we need to provide open and safe and welcoming spaces for our marginalized students. But also, we need to provide education and support for our students who have privileged identities so that they can understand what it means to be a marginalized person in these settings. So, providing educational opportunities for those students and the community as well, we do a lot of work partnering with Not In Our Town, with Welcome BG, other entities in the community. We've done a lot, especially after the activism of this past summer, we did a couple of common reads, moderated quite a few panels, created some days of dialogue, so ways to reach out to different communities within our community.Ana:So that we're expanding the definition of what inclusion actually means to these folks and helping them see that they're a part of that and part of that process. In terms of access, we are working on the diversity and belonging council for the AURGs, which are resource groups based upon different identities. And so, looking at the disabilities resource group, looking at the racial ethnic marginalized resource group, looking at the LGBTQ+ resource group and understanding that folks are going to be part of maybe more than one of these and the allies and advocates are going to be part of these as well, so it's not just for the folks who identify within those identity groups but also for folks who want to come and support and learn with them and grow with them.Jolie:We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas podcast.Announcer:If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu.Jolie:And we're back with the Big Ideas podcast. Nicole, you are obviously working a lot in social media, among other media spaces. There's wide spread concern, especially of late, about social media's harmful effects on society. And we've seen the spread of hate speech, conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation but we've also seen how social media has been crucial in building social movements, creating awareness and spreading more inclusive messages. We think about both QAnon and Black Lives Matter, are the products of social media networks. So, how do you see social and digital media being used as a force for good? Or how would you like to see it used as a force for good? And what steps can we take to make sure the benefits of these platforms are greater than their harms?Nicole:Well, I'll say, first, social media activism with Black Lives Matter, some people don't know, Black Lives Matter did not start last year during the summer, it's been around. So, I was actually around during the Trayvon Martin protest here in this lower state Capitol, we were in a sit-in at the Capitol, to protest the verdict in that case but it started a while back but that was using the internet. And I worked in communications with those folks, that sent me all the ways to the United Nations for the human rights council to talk about human rights issues, as it concerns stand your ground laws. It was an honor of my life and I'm still in contact with them and I can't wait to go back to continue doing those fights. But without that, without social media, that was a ladder to be able to have such an honor and be able to have the honor of standing up for human rights internationally as well. Nicole:So, that was a way that we use hashtags, we use Black Lives Matter, we use Stand Your Ground and all of that, to reach a wider audience. But I talked about this in my talk for the telling our stories, that when you are, from a creative marketing standpoint, when you're telling your story authentically and you're being authentic to yourself, it's better to be authentic to yourself and use it for good because though it might be a longer path, it will ultimately lead you to a better place. And I guarantee you, I never thought that protesting in Florida, Tallahassee, Florida, would lead me all the way to Geneva, Switzerland, on the floor of the United Nations. But I really implore people to stay authentic to themselves on digital platforms because you might not get recognized but some people are not looking for the biggest platform, they're looking for authenticity.Jolie:Ana, I think there's a corollary in a lot of ways, that the same way that social media can be an equalizer, it can also be a force for creating these media bubbles, for reproducing a set of beliefs without challenge. We also see some of those conversations around higher education, is higher education a site of conservatism and elitism, where we are reproducing white supremacy and other forms of inclusion or is it this social leveler? What do you see as the challenges of working within a structure like the university? Which wasn't built for inclusion and accessibility, in the way that we're thinking of it today. What progress do you see being made, either here at BGSU or more broadly, across the nation?Ana:Well, I think that a lot of progress has been made. I think that the fact that an office like mine exists because progress has been made. But also I think that we, as people, have a tendency to get complacent and so, it's like, okay, well, we hit this level, we're good. We don't need to do anymore, we're good. But one of the beauties of working with students is that, they hold you accountable to their expectations, their hopes and their dreams. They said, you told me that I could come here and be anything I want to do. Well, this is a barrier to it and how are you going to help eradicate that barrier? Hmm, that's a good point, that's something that we weren't thinking about, so thank you for bringing it to our attention. And sometimes they do it in those individual conversation ways. And sometimes it's a protest and is like, no, we will be heard, you will hear us, you will see us and you will acknowledge the damage that has been done to us.Ana:And so, one of the things I always tell the students that I work with is that, it takes a lot of different avenues, it takes the outside protests but it also takes the people who are laying the groundwork on the inside. And so, folks like me who are like, okay, I'm listening to what you're saying, let me do some prep work so that when you bring these concerns up, people are a little bit more prepared to deal with them. And so, when we're looking at the institution as a whole, in higher education, I think that we have a long way to go, in terms of reaching true equity, in terms of reaching true inclusion.Ana:There are a lot of built in challenges that we want to pretend are not challenges, in the sense of economic disparity, in terms of opportunity gaps that are disproportionately impacting lower socioeconomic, racially ethnically marginalized students, students who are immigrants, in many cases. And, again, our students with disabilities who are oftentimes not even... their voice is even at the table, when we're talking about how they need to be served. So, I think that higher education, in some ways, has done a really great job of moving forward and in some ways, we're kind of dragging our feet. I'm grateful for the students who hold us accountable to that.Jolie:Bringing the conversation back to technology and the digital sphere. With the pandemic, we've seen more and more people are using technology to conduct their daily lives than ever before. Whether we're talking about remote learning in K-12 environments, working from home, Zoom social hours, all of these things have reached a degree of saturation in our daily lives, that probably seemed almost impossible a little over a year ago. So, I'd be curious for each of you to answer, what are some of the ways you've seen technology manifest in this time period, in particular, as both a solution and an obstacle? Or examples of each, for increasing accessibility and racial equity or where you've seen kind of issues compound because of our reliance on technology. Nicole, will you go first?Nicole:Well, I think the best of it is really being able to even the platform, to give people a voice. Especially, I spoke about Black Lives Matter, everyone talks about the seat at the table but it also a matter of who's speaking, it's not enough. I'm not content with just having a seat at the table and being a black face at the table so everybody feels better about it or being a woman at the table so they're like, look, somebody wearing a dress, that's great. And they get to high five one another and they don't listen to what I have to say. So, I think technology has, kind of, even that playing field a lot, so that I don't have to be filtered through somebody who doesn't know my experience, as a purpled hair, black woman navigating the world.Nicole:And people can access that directly. I can put my means out there, I can put my writing out there and it can go direct to the source, nobody has to filter it. There's thousands of women out there who are expressing themselves every day and it's a beautiful thing and technology has allowed that platform and I think it's beautiful. But right before the pandemic, we were told that, it is impossible, it's too much of a chore, it is too much of an ordeal, to work from home. And I had several of my friends who were affected by that, were women who were pregnant. I had several close friends who were admonished for wanting to take off of work, while their male counterparts had a headache they could take off. But if you're passing out from growing a child, a human being, that's not an excuse to be able to work from home.Nicole:But it's thousands, millions of people who, with invisible disabilities and visible disabilities, were told that, no, you cannot work from home. So, imagine you have chronic pain, you have to just tough it out, that's not equitable, that's not fair. But in a matter of weeks, in a month turn around this time last year, the whole United States was working from home. We're talking on Zoom, which is a result of being able to do that. So, where it's such an asset and I hope that it continues over time. I think even major social media, I know Twitter, they announced that they're never going to go back to full office capacity because, I mean, I think there's a calculation in that they don't have to pay as much for office space. But as long as it results in more accessibility from the workplace, some people aren't going to be working from home in perpetuity, which is great.Nicole: But in that same vein, it also causes certain obstacles for people who were being overzealous in how they are upholding how people can work from home. So, the requirement of cameras being on the whole time. You might have people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who don't have a Martha Stewart background. Not everybody has it, some people have kids that are running around and they don't want you to see all of that. And that cannot be used against people, especially as you're asking them to work from home. And also, you have to consider who can afford. When we're working in the offices, all that is paid for, all that is covered. Wi-Fi, high-speed and everything like that, you have to consider that maybe not everybody has the capacity to pay for that type of bandwidth, that type high-speed internet at their home, so that needs to be accommodated and covered by employers who send people to work from home.Nicole:I even saw an article saying that, we're spending more on office supplies. That presents an issue for people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. That can be a compiled issue for people who are not astute on diversity and inclusion, to make certain comments about traditional, whatever artwork or whatever in the background of someone's home, it can be a detriment as well, as you force people to keep on the cameras. But I genuinely hope that we really don't make excuses for avoiding accessibility because we're too lazy to and uphold the accessibility that we really broken through to. So, I truly hope that this remains, which, I mean, it provides so much opportunity and prosperity to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it, when we were accommodating. And we must do that and must continue to do that.Ana:And I really want to go back to one of the points that Nicole made, about how we were told that all of the remote working was impossible. We have people with disabilities who would thrive in a work from home environment, who were told, no, we can't make this accommodation for you. And then, literally the pandemic hit and suddenly now, oh, well, yeah, of course, we can Zoom in, of course, we can Skype in, of course, we can do all of these things. We can provide VPN access for everybody so that you can have the server access that you need. One of the great things about social media, that I will go kind of get back to that as well, is that I'm able to access the conversations that are being had within communities, without having to insert myself into the conversation.Ana:So, as I follow different people and I follow different communities, I'm learning more about the struggles that they're dealing with and then, being able to go research for myself. So, I intentionally follow a diversity of people on Twitter. And so, listening to the frustration of the disabled community saying, we've been asking for this for years and now all of a sudden, magically, we're able to do this because ableds need us to do it. And the frustration that goes along with that. So, that inequity and that chasm that was there and it's still there now, because now the ableds can work from home, the disabled community is, again, being left out of the conversation and being left out of the opportunity. So, it's really interesting to see how some of the gaps have closed and how some of the gaps have been widened.Jolie:As a final question. I'd like to ask about moving from those, sort of, big picture, long-term changes, the things that feel like they're the domain of large technology companies to change their practices around captioning or corporations with thousands of employees, do you have suggestions to our listeners for small changes they can make in their day-to-day lives to ensure greater access, accessibility and equity for the communities they are a part of or contribute to?Nicole:That's a really good question. And I would actually say that, a large group of people making small changes is what can really move the tide, in terms of moving into more accessibility. Because if social media companies realize that, you're on Twitter and you have a photo, you can add alt texts, it really takes just a few seconds. And at first it may seem like, oh, I'm adding a picture, I'm doing all this but when you think about it, once you get into your routine, okay, I'm going to take a picture, I'm going to crop it, add a couple of alt texts then post it, it's like second hand. But social media platforms, they actually, though they set certain tones, they do follow the users. So, they're little things like adding alt texts, adding captions to your Tik Toks, which I'm learning right now, is really going to help make things accessible for people and make it such that well, all the people I follow on Twitter are adding alt texts.Nicole:All the people I follow on Tik Tok are adding subtitles, why can't you Twitter? Why can't you? I've definitely seen an uptick of people actually investigating into accessibility technologies. And, again, I'd like to say, start small. Even with me, in the higher level, I started small, I started with doing alt texts, I started with making images accessible on websites. Then I started captioning, then it expanded. But every day you can learn something that's going to help somebody meet you where you are and help you meet others where they are. It only helps you and it only helps businesses, it is not a chore. It is an essential task and it's a beautiful thing to be able to reach more peopleAna:And the normalization of it all. And not doing it in a way that is shaming other folks who join in with you. But, for example, when I introduced myself, almost always now, I just use my pronouns at the end, just to normalize the fact that, yeah, this is how I identify and I recognize that, so that if there are those who are non-binary that they feel comfortable saying, oh yes, thank you, my pronouns are this, without having to say, please use my pronouns and recognize me as a whole person. And so, the same is true with access. Alt text is something that is really not that hard to do and yet, so few people do it. And, again, the normalizing of it. It's hard at first but if we do it little by little, individual by individual, group by group, it becomes a thing where the bigger companies, like Nicole said, will follow suit because it's the thing that everybody does just out of hand.Jolie:Thank you both so much for talking with me today. If you're interested in learning more about what Nicole is up to, you can visit her website, nicolemichelle.com and follow her on social media. For information about ICS happenings, you can follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, @icsbgsu. You can listen to Big Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound editing by Ryan Cummings andMarco Mendoza. Research assistance for this episode was provided by Stevie Scheurich.

In this episode, Jolie interviews Natalie Orslene, a BGSU graduate student and ICS Student Research Award winner, and Dr. Shannon Orr, Professor of Political Science. They discuss factors impacting food pantry access and the social stigma associated with food insecurity. Announcer:From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas.   Musical Intro:I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment.   Jolie:Hello, and welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast, brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS. Bowling Green State University and it's campuses are situated in the Great Black Swamp in the lower Great Lakes region. This land is the homeland of the Wyandotte, Kickapoo, Miami, Pottawatomie, Ottawa, and multiple other indigenous tribal nations present and past who were forcibly removed to and from the area.Jolie: We recognize these historical and contemporary ties in our efforts towards de-colonizing history. And we thank the indigenous individuals and communities who've been living and working on this land from time immemorial. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees.   Jolie:Today I'm talking with Natalie Orslene and Dr. Shannon Orr. Natalie is a master's student in the public administration program at BGSU. She's the recipient of an ICS Student Research Award for her project, researching food pantry access, food insecurity, and social stigma. Shannon is a professor of political science, Director of the MPA program and an expert in environmental policy. You may remember her from a previous episode on water quality in the Great Lakes. Shannon serves as faculty advisor on Natalie's project. Thank you both for joining me today.   Jolie:Natalie. I'll have you start, could you tell us about your project and what motivated you to do more research on food insecurity and food pantries at BGSU?   Natalie:Sure. So it started actually over the summer and really before that, when the pandemic began. I became interested through work Dr. Orr was doing on food insecurity and food pantries. And one of the topics that I found particularly interesting was the sort of management of it all because food pantry we talk a lot about the passion and the excitement, but the management and the work that goes behind it is very labor intensive, and also really interesting from a public administration standpoint. And something that I found interesting in that was sort of managing the behind the scenes information. So the volunteers, the organization, all of that. And so my research began in trying to understand if you were going to start a food pantry, if you're going to run a food pantry, how do you best start from the beginning? And how do you best manage volunteers from the beginning?   Natalie:Because it can be easy to start and not have all of that figured out and not kind of lay the groundwork to have a great program and a great volunteer management system. And so what I wanted to do was find out from volunteers themselves and from people who run food pantries themselves, what goes into good management and what goes into being a good volunteer, because it's really important. And it really helps to ensure that the work that you're doing is beneficial to everyone, to the community and to the people who are using the food pantry. Jolie: Can you talk a bit Natalie about the specific need for food pantries and how that particularly works on college campuses like BGSU and how that might be different from what people might be thinking about food pantries in community settings?   Natalie:Sure. So we know that food insecurity is a huge issue nationwide. In 2019, about 34 million people were living in poverty. And before the pandemic, about 35 million people faced hunger in the United States, including 10 million children, that's from Feeding America. And children are more likely to face food insecurity. And that includes young adults who are entering college, maybe entering a time where they're having to feed themselves for the first time, they're having to manage their own funds for the first time. So it's a particularly interesting kind of transitional period of maybe they experienced it at home, or maybe they didn't, but now they're coming to college where they're living on their own for the first time for many of them, and also facing having to manage their own finances. They're having to go to school and manage school and also home life.   Natalie:But it's particularly interesting for college students because the ways in which they have to utilize food pantries are different, right? Because it's on campus, the resources aren't as accessible to them. And they're facing a little bit of that stigma by having to use resources that are surrounded by their fellow students. So it's not just going to a food pantry, you can drive up and kind of leave anonymously. In some cases, they're feeling a little bit like, well I don't want to ask for services on a campus where I know people. I don't want to ask for help when other people that I know aren't asking for help. And also I'm trying to be an adult for the first time. So having to say I'm struggling a little bit, and maybe I don't know how to ask for help and I don't know how to get support is a difficult process. So colleges in particular face kind of a interesting topic of trying to support students who are in that transitional period. Jolie: It reminds me a few years back when division one NCAA athletes started talking about the fact that on Sunday nights, for example, if the dining halls were closed or depending on their intense practice schedules, they would just go hungry. And especially as athletes sort of needing a lot of food to compensate for hours and hours of practice or games that it doesn't look necessarily the way we think it's going to look. And it could be sort of hiding in plain sight right around us.Natalie:Right. And I think also it's hard to have that conversation because in the midst of everything, when we talk about food on campus, the kind of messaging you get is, well, you have dining hall plans and you have options and there's always options around, but those options aren't accessible to everyone financially. And not all students are facing the same traditional student experience. So to kind of say, oh, well, you go to school at 18 and you have your food plan and you have the money to maybe buy food on the weekends. It's not true for everyone, but that's not the conversation we have around food and we have our own college life. So to broach that topic and to say, actually, I'm not experiencing college that way. And it's not like it is in the brochures or on TV for me, I think is a difficult topic to start for people.   Jolie: Shannon, could you talk a bit about what qualities Natalie brings to this project and make her such a good fit for leading this and in doing both research and kind of outreach.   Shannon:So it's been such a pleasure working with Natalie for the last two years. She's been my graduate assistant and we went through COVID together as a research team. And what we had started doing for our research in Fall of 2019, we suddenly switched when both of us started to get really interested in the topic of food insecurity in the Spring of 2020 and with the started COVID. And that went through the summer. So together, Natalie and I launched a national survey of university and college food pantries.   Shannon:And so Natalie brings this enthusiasm for the topic and a willingness to do anything. To try new things, to take big risks. We've learned so much together. We both started this food insecurity journey together. So it's been really fun. And we've been debating and talking about ideas and trying to unpack particularly around the administration and management side of running food pantries and getting them started together. We wrote a grant for a local food pantry that was successful, they've been able to spin off into a few other grants and her project management skills and time management skills are fantastic. And she keeps me on my toes and really pushing forward. And knowing that we have been able to do this as a team has really, I think, meant that we've been able to do a lot more things than we would've normally done given a pandemic. Jolie: And that leads into my follow-up question, which is, tell us about the process for the project. So what were the questions you began with? How have you gone about gathering data? And who are you talking to to learn more about this problem and to find solutions? So, Natalie, do you want to start that off?   Natalie:Sure. So I think one of our first questions is kind of... It was very broad. It was very basic, but it was, how do you do this? How do you start? Because I think like most services, most non-profit work, you kind of see the end result, but the beginning and the process, you don't get the background of, especially if you're using the services, you kind of walk in and if you walk into a food pantry, you don't necessarily see all the behind the scenes work. You don't see all of that goes into it. And so our first question was, how does this work? But especially from a management side, how do you work sustainably? So how do you make sure it's not just kind of a great beginning and then peter's off after that? How do you make sure that the work that you're doing is sustainable? Natalie: How do you make sure that you're actually meeting your goals? We talk a lot about what are our actual goals? Because your goal could be to hand out food and that's great. And it's a useful goal, but is your goal bigger than that? Is it talking about working to end hunger on campus? Is it supporting students in more than just one way more than just food? Is it helping them find other services? So kind of what should our goals be? And through that, we've talked to a lot of people like Dr. Orr said, we sent out a nationwide survey where we talked to universities or food pantries at universities across the country and the people who run them and ask them what are your best practices? What do you do best? But also what do you struggle with?   Natalie:What's hard? Because we wanted to find out kind of where those common issues were and how we can meet that from day one. And then we've also been talking to volunteers at college campuses, volunteers at food pantries and asking them what's it like to be a volunteer? Is it what you thought it was going to be when you walked into this, do you know something different now than as you volunteered? As a student who could also be facing food insecurity and a volunteer, where does that kind of overlap lie? And how do you feel about using services, but also providing services and kind of creating a comfortable space on campus for students to get support with along your fellow peers, because they're peers, as well as being volunteers.   Jolie: And Shannon, could you talk a bit about how this project brings together a qualitative and quantitative research? Because that's obviously something that we care a lot about at ICS, not just sort of doing the research, but how do we talk about that research? How do we communicate and collaborate with others?   Shannon:So for our research project, the bigger project that we started with, which was this national survey of campus food pantries, a lot of that was quantitative data. So we were asking food pantries to tell us how many clients do you serve a semester? How much food do you give out? How much does each client receive per visit? How many visits a semester can a client receive? So lots of quantitative data that we pulled as a result of that survey. But then as Natalie started in particular, started to get interested in the idea of the stigma and research into volunteers. One of the things that we realized that was missing from our survey, although we did ask some open-ended questions, but was the stories and the lived experiences of these volunteers. And so Natalie's work is focus groups. And so she's engaging in conversations specifically with volunteers at campus food pantries and to talk to them about their experiences. So we have a really mixed methods approach for our kind of bigger research project on food insecurity.   Jolie: Natalie has this project, where you are taking together both quantitative and qualitative methods, how has that shaped your understanding of the issue from where you started to where you right now?   Natalie:It's been really interesting because with the quantitative, you do get that number and you can kind of see the staggering results in some cases, and the sort of similarities between programs to how much they give and how they support. But the stories I think have been particularly poignant and interesting because everyone who volunteers has their own reason for volunteering, everyone who's involved in this has their own reason for doing so. And I think it's really impactful to hear why they started, how the conversations have affected them. And also what they're passionate about about helping their fellow students, helping their community and the sort of drive that happens. It's very inspiring to hear those stories and know that there are people who care about this, because when you look at the numbers, it can feel almost like it's insurmountable that you can't get over it.   Natalie:It's a hard process to face and a hard issue to face, and that maybe there's not a solution. And then you hear stories from people who are working on the solution and how much they care about it. And also that they understand the struggle, but they also want to continue on, I think has been really impactful. And it kind of it lessens those numbers, the impact of those numbers a little bit and makes you think I'm not the only person who cares about this and we're all working on it together.   Jolie:Shannon, how do you see your background as a researcher on climate policy and competing interests amongst stakeholders coming into play as the mentor for this project?   Shannon:So as the mentor for this research project, I'm bringing that background in mixed methodology. So my work on climate policy in particular at United Nations climate change negotiations in always involved, large scale international surveys of interest groups, nonprofits, organizations, businesses who are participating in the climate change negotiations. As part of my work, I was always able to attend these climate change negotiations and do field observations and lots and lots of interviews. So, being able to use the results of an international survey to get the data about why organizations are participating in United Nations treaty negotiations, are they there to influence policy? Are they there to network? Are they there to learn? Are they there to make their own organization look better? So I can get that from an international survey. I can get that kind of data, but being able to be there and watch it all play out and observe the activists doing their engaging in street theater and doing protests.   Shannon:But then at the same time, seeing other organizations really engaged in attempts to do policy analysis and to dive deeper into the issues and to look at the science of climate change and then being able to do interviews and having people tell me their stories about why they participate and what it means to them. And what do they think about climate change and how much of a priority is it for their organization, how does it drive the work that their organizations do, whether it's an oil company or an environmental activist organization?   Shannon:So that work that I've done on climate change has really been mixed methods from the very beginning. So combining the international surveys with field observations and interviews. And so it's pretty exciting then to be able to work with Natalie and do kind of those same mixed methodology approaches, but looking at more local experiences and particularly to be able to do this during the pandemic. And for us to be able to really dive into it, but at the same time trying to do work that will make a difference. So the results of the national survey, we packaged them up into a report and we've shared them with campus food pantries, and people have been really interested in looking at different models of operations and that of stuff that we discovered from our survey. So I guess we've been able to add in this really practical and applied piece and kind of us trying to do our best to help other organizations through this pandemic and beyond, and to our new normal post COVID.   Jolie: With that in mind, thinking about not just sort of your process, but also kind of how you're sharing your results, Natalie, would you talk about how you think about collaboration as a result of this project?   Natalie:Sure. I think the collaboration part it's been really interesting because like Dr. Orr said, we don't want this just to be kind of a report that we finish and we package up and it goes out and it has no use to the world. We really want what we're finding, what we're talking about, to be shared. And I think food pantries in particular already they're very good at that. And it's a big part of their work is sharing tools and resources and collaboration. So I think we've been really talking to with other universities because they all have their own experiences. And they're all so different. You would think that running a food pantry would be kind of the same at every university. It's absolutely not. And they have been sharing, particularly with the volunteers that I've been talking to have been sharing such different experiences and viewpoints that have kind of shaped each other's understanding of what's happening.   Natalie:In focus groups, you get that added benefit of hearing other stories and hearing the experiences of universities. And so talking to a university that's in New York is really different than talking to someone who's volunteering in upstate Washington. And it's very different than talking to someone who is working in Bowling Green. And so understanding kind of the experiences that we can share in saying oh, we do that too. We have that issue too. We face that as well, but also I've never heard of that before. And I would love to bring that back to my supervisor and my team and say, we should be doing this. Another school is doing this, and it's really beneficial. And then the idea of, I think stakeholder engagement is a big part of that too, because running a food pantry isn't just done by one group and especially on campus, it's not done just by one department or one kind of person.Natalie:And so kind of understanding the work that's done at the university and how you can utilize the services and the people that already exist here and already have the passion. Talking to people at volunteers out of the universities who are social work majors and saying we get our internship hours from doing this volunteer work. So not only am I involving my degree in my department, but also I'm being able to help the food pantry and I'm able to provide more services than just packing a bag of food. I can talk to them about, do you know about this service? Do you know about these things that are happening? And I think that's been really important and certainly something that has impacted how we're asking questions, because once you realize what other people are doing and how other people are helping you kind of ask, well, how do we do that? How do we take that further? How do we make sure that's included in all the work that we do?   Jolie: Natalie, what are some of the specific stigmas that food pantry users endure and how do those negative stereotypes impact people's access to food pantries and to quality food?   Natalie:One of the biggest stigmas they face is that it is really difficult for anyone to ask for help. I think, especially in America, we have a very... Everyone wants to do the work themselves and it's kind of an individualist society. So when we talk about asking for help, that's a hard thing for people to do. And it's especially hard when it comes to food, because that's seen as something that you're supposed to be able to provide yourself and your family and particularly for families. And so I think that's part of it, but also the stigma of continued use. It's easy to say, okay, maybe I need help one or two times, but having continued support can be difficult to ask for and can be difficult to manage because it's not a simple process. And food security also is not a binary experience.   Natalie:You're not food insecure or not food insecure. You experience it on different levels. And so I think there's that stigma of saying, well I can provide some food for my family, but I can't provide a lot. And so that stigma of saying, do I actually need the help? Do I need as much as I say I do, or as much as other people do is a big stigma to face. And also particularly on college campuses that stigma of, I know people here and when I walk to classes and I walk to the food pantry, am I going to see someone I know? And I think that can be a difficult hurdle to jump because you don't want anyone to recognize what you're experiencing. And you also don't really want to recognize other people experiencing that because it kind of breaks down the community aspect we have of everyone's kind of living the same experience and we all have the same resources here, which aren't true, but you don't want to kind of experienced that firsthand.   Natalie:So it's difficult to get people to ask for help because it's not easy. And also it's difficult then to having them continue coming for help because after that first experience, they may think, well, I've had my one bout of help, I don't need anymore. And for them to see the pantry is for continued use and it's for continued support and it can provide more than just one instance of help I think is really important.   Jolie:So what are some of the ways that you you're learning you can reduce that stigma and make it easier for people to access those resources and to do so in ways that aren't re-stigmatizing?   Natalie:I think the biggest one is just the conversations you have about the food pantry on campus. When I talked to students is that word of mouth is the biggest way to sella food pantry. You can ensure that students have a positive experience for the 10 or 15 minutes they're in your pantry a week, but for the rest of the time, that's kind of the problem of the campus. And so you need to make sure the conversations that are being had on campus, whether that's through your own volunteers or people who used the pantry, but also through advertising and the way the administration talks about it and the way that university employees or faculty talk about the pantry has to be positive as well, because it has to be a continued process of talking about why it's important and why it's vital, but also kind of talking about it less as something that you need help with and something that you're struggling with.   Natalie:The word struggle is a big one because you don't want to talk by people are, it's a negative thing to face food insecurity or that you're doing something wrong if you're facing food insecurity, because in the reality it's so much more common and so much more complex than just it's a problem. It's bigger than that. So I think talking particularly about the way you talk about people who come and use your food pantry, they're not people in need, they're clients. They're people getting a service. And that if the food's there, if the food exists, it should be helping people. So I'm talking about an abundance of food, talking about it's there people to help and that you're not wrong or bad or failing for needing that help. You're just someone who is going through an experience that millions of people face. And if the services are there, you might as well use them.   Jolie:We're going to take a quick break. You're listening to the Big Ideas podcast.   Announcer:If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program to have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us ics@bgsu.edu.   Jolie:Welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast. I'm talking to Dr. Shannon Orr and Natalie Orslene about food insecurity and food pantries on college campuses. This is a question that sort of more about process. And either of you can take this up. What are some of the obstacles that you've faced with this project and how have you had to adapt your methodology or your approach based on some of those challenges?   Natalie:I think in particular one of the hardest things is getting people to talk about this topic in a both positive and negative light, because we talked about the passion people face with it. And sometimes for them to say that a food pantry has struggled or they themselves as volunteers have found something difficult to manage or difficult to talk about can be hard because you want to talk about food insecurity in the work in a very positive, reflective light, because it's supposed to be a good service and beneficial. So getting people to say actually I think our food pantry could be doing this better, or actually we're facing this issue with our community or with getting people to visit or any kind of management issue. That can be really difficult, especially when pantries or volunteers are kind of in the middle of all of it, because when you're working and you're doing your services and you're helping and providing, it can be difficult to look at the bigger picture and say, what could we be doing better?   Natalie:Right now we're in the throes of it. Right now, we're doing all this work and it seems like it's going well, but could we be doing something better? And I think that can be difficult for people to kind of take a step back and self critique and critique the work they're doing. And particularly in the middle of COVID, because everyone's kind of been in all hands on deck panic situation and food pantries are getting more requests than ever, they're having to adapt a lot of their systems. So having to ask them is this a symptom of COVID or is it a symptom of a larger program issue, is this a symptom of a management issue? And how do you reflect on that and decide how to fix it in the long run?   Shannon:With our national survey of campus food pantries, one of the things that we discovered... So we sent it out, we put together an email list of 200 campus food pantries across the United States at universities and community colleges and a number of them we got automated responses saying that due to COVID, the food pantry had been shut down and the email wasn't being monitored. So from a research standpoint, that's frustrating because those are responses that we're not able to get, but from a services perspective, it was heartbreaking to see that because students were facing escalating need with residences being shut down with job losses, wages being cut, all of those that the need for students has never been higher, but for many of these campus food pantries, they had to shut down their operations. So from a research perspective, it was somewhat frustrating, but just when you think about the impact on the students, that matters far more.   Jolie:Shannon, could you talk about what impacts you see this study having potentially at BGSU?   Shannon:Yeah, so there's a really strong community of people at BGSU who are engaged in work around food insecurity. And so we really hope that the work that's happening here and Natalie's, particularly with these focus groups of being able to better understand how to meet the need for food insecurity on campus, the different options that exist out there, the different services that can be provided. So, it's pretty consistent. The studies that have been done of BGSU students at food insecure about 30% of the students say that they have experienced some form of food insecurity.   Shannon:And so that might be anything from the day before my paycheck I don't have any food. Anything much more significant from there. But that's a pretty high number. And so being part of this conversation and being able to understand... I think particularly one of the things that we've really focused on has been best practices and trying to understand what are the best ways to meet the needs for students related to food insecurity, because if we can do that and the quality of life of the students gets better. So a campus food pantry doesn't just provide emergency food. It provides the support for many students to finish a semester and to persist to graduation.   Jolie:This project looks at food insecurity at BGSU, but as you've alluded to, we know that this is a much larger national and even international issue. And it's become particularly clear over the last year with COVID that hunger and food insecurity have really disproportionately impacted black, indigenous, and POC communities. Food pantries address the symptom of a problem, but what are some of the larger roots of the problem and how can we begin to address it, especially to reduce some of those racial disparities?   Shannon:Yeah, so the roots of food insecurity are rooted in poverty. And so looking at food insecurity from this much bigger picture and looking at things like the provision of food stamps, looking at wages, looking at employment availability. The pandemic has amplified all of the challenges that we face as a society. Looking at food deserts is another one. So particularly in low-income and Black neighborhoods, where there tends to be fewer numbers of grocery stores. And so then people are forced to rely on things like convenience stores and dollar stores for their food. And so that means you don't have access to healthy nutritional food, basic produce even. And so thinking about food insecurity is part of this much, much bigger issue of poverty in the United States.   Jolie:One of the phrases that really rings in my head that have come out over the last several years and trying to understand the root causes of poverty and food deserts and these things is that idea that it's expensive to be poor, that if you are forced to purchase food within walking distance at a convenience store, you're going to pay two or three times as much for every item. I can go to Costco and get a big thing of toilet paper and spend very little per roll, but I have to have a membership. I have to be able to have the resources to buy in bulk, if you are living day to day, or week to week, paycheck to paycheck, everything costs more. And so it seems like that's one of the key things you're talking about here is that sustainable model that these are not things that one bag of groceries often isn't enough because it's a cycle that will continue.   Shannon:Yeah. So, one of the things that we talk about food pantries as being part of the emergency food system. And so the idea is supposed to be that these are short-term kind of solutions. I need food now, but the reality is that more and more people are relying on them for long-term use. And so we have some big issues that we really have to deal with and governments have to engage with and try and figure out how can we better support people?   Jolie: Anything you want to add to that question, Natalie?   Natalie:No, I think like Dr. Orr said this idea that it's an emergency situation I think is one of the reasons why people don't want to utilize food pantries and there's sort of a stigma against using them because you feel like you have to be in an emergency situation to utilize a service like this. And people are... They say, well I can, I guess, afford to go to these expensive stores and shop week to week and buy things that aren't necessarily cost-effective or healthy or nutritious to providing myself and my family the best options. And so people say, I don't need that service, or they think I can only use it every so often.Natalie:And so we want to provide services for people who need the long-term help, but also having a conversation around what are those root causes of the need for long-term help and how can we meet them at the beginning rather than the end, because food pantries often we're helping the symptoms of those causes, but we're not talking about the root of those causes. So saying, where can we go and help? How can we ensure that people are getting support from the beginning so we can address these issues head on.   Jolie: As we've been talking about COVID has just revealed and increased the disparities and the need, especially around food. What are some lessons that you hope we will take away from this pandemic? What can we learn from this past year to do better or differently in the future?   Shannon:I think there's been a lot of really good conversations that have come out of the pandemic, particularly around the recognition of how financially unstable many families were. And I've been involved with the Natalie:And that help may just be being better in conversation about it, being more mindful about how you're talking about food, how you're talking about resources, the services that campus' provide and how you're talking about the issue itself in the greater context of the world, because you never know what someone's going through, especially with the stigma students face, you never know what they're hiding from you. What they're trying to seem as normal as we expect students to seem. And so the kind of kindness you can provide a student by talking about this issue in a positive light or talking about it in a more normal light can go a long way to students and people actually getting the services they need and not being so afraid to say, I need help and it's not a bad thing.   Jolie:Thank you both so much for joining me today. Listeners can keep up with ICS by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and you can listen to Big Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Research assistance for this episode was provided by Ryan Cummings and Stevie Scheurich. Sound editing was by Ryan Cummings and Marco Mendoza.

Noah Cohan and John Early who are on the show to discuss their project Whereas Hoops. Noah Cohan is the Assistant Director of American Culture Studies at Washington University St. Louis and is a previous Dear Adam Silver guest from Episode 22 where he joined the show to discuss his book on fandom entitled We Average Unbeautiful Watchers. John Early is an artist and senior lecturer at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington university St. Louis. Their collective project Whereas Hoops was created to draw attention to the lack of basketball courts in Forest Park, which is located in St. Louis and is one of the biggest urban parks in the country.....but with all that space, there are still no basketball courts. Noah and John are working collaboratively to highlight this issue within its' proper historical context and hopefully correct it in the long term. Follow Whereas Hoops on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you to John and Noah for coming on and thank you to you all for listening! Please subscribe, share, rate and review Dear Adam Silver wherever you get your podcasts.

Dr. Ed Uszynski currently serves as Senior Content Strategist for Family Life Ministry and as a Oneness and Diversity Consultant for Athletes in Action, with whom he has been training staff and ministering to college and professional athletes since 1992. He has an MA and M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. He and his wife Amy have four children and live in Xenia, OH. Ed is also an expert in CRT and has some super nuanced and wise thoughts about race relations in America. This is a super raw and uncut convo, y'all. Bear with us. We're all on a journey. Support PrestonSupport Preston by going to patreon.comVenmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1Connect with PrestonTwitter | @PrestonSprinkleInstagram | @preston.sprinkleYoutube | Preston SprinkleCheck out his website prestonsprinkle.comIf you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Bryan is currently pursuing a PhD in in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. His areas of interest include comics studies, queer and femninist studies, gender & sexuality, disability studies, YA novels (specifically queer YA and 1990s supernatural romance), and pop music of the 1990s and early 2000s. Read about him and see his artwork at www.nerdbove.com Find him on Twittter and Instagram as @nerdbove Book: http://andreweliopulos.com/new-page-1 

Jolie is joined by Dr. Lucy Long, director of the independent Center for Food and Culture and an instructor of American studies, ethnic studies, folklore, and nutrition at BGSU, and Jerry Reed, a recent graduate from the MA program in popular cultures studies at BGSU. They discuss their “Finding Comfort/Discomfort Through Foodways” project that examines how comfort food can be meaningful and create meaningfulness in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.   Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie: Welcome back to the BiG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies, and the Director of ICS. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we are not recording in the studio, but remotely via phone and computer. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Jolie: Bowling Green State University is located in the Great Black Swamp, long a meeting place of the Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Fox, Pottawatomie, Erie, Miami, Peoria, Chippewa, and Seneca Indian tribes. We honor the rich history of this land and its indigenous inhabitants, past and present. Today we're joined by two guests, Dr. Lucy Long and Jerry Reed. Lucy directs the Independent Center for Food and Culture and teaches in American studies, ethnic studies, folklore and nutrition at BGSU. Her research focuses on food, music, and dance as mediums for meaning and community. Jolie: Lucy served as the Director of "Finding Comfort/Discomfort Through Food Ways," a project that examines how people are living and eating in these difficult pandemic times. Jerry Reed earned a BS in Education and an MA in Popular Culture Studies from BGSU. He completed an internship with the Center for Food and Culture, working to develop a curriculum that uses food to help children understand cultural conflict. Jerry worked as the Assistant Director of the Food Ways Project. Thanks both for being with me today, I'm really excited to talk about this with you. To get us started, could you tell us a little bit about the Food Ways Project and how it came about? Will you start us off, Lucy? Lucy : Okay. When the pandemic first hit, I started noticing that food media was publishing recipes for comfort food. And this is a stressful time for comfort food. So I actually edited a volume and published some articles in 2017 on comfort food, so that automatically grabbed me. And my initial response to some of these publications, particularly-there was one for the New York Times, and it was comfort foods of famous chefs. And it was all these specialty ingredients and things that, probably, the average American would not have in their pantry. And I realized, first of all, these foods are not things that I relate to, personally, as a comfort food. And they probably are not relevant to many people who are reading this. But also, the idea of having to go out and find these ingredients, some of which are very expensive, but many of which, you would have to go to different grocery stores or try to find them. Lucy : And I realized, that's going to cause a lot of discomfort. So that got me thinking a little bit more about at how, during this time, it's not a simple thing to say, "Here, eat some comfort food and calm down." And then also, comfort food itself as a very American concept. Every culture has food that is comforting, that reminds people of their childhood, and things like that. But it's uniquely American in that there is a particular sort of morality attached to food in America. That different foods are good and bad, depending on what they do to your body, physically. And we're not even talking about health, we're talking about whether or not those foods make you fat or whether they make you kind of sluggish or whatever. Lucy : So, so much of our morality around food is tied to how that food impacts your body, your body image, and whether or not you have the proper type of body. So therefore, Americans talk about good foods and bad foods in terms of, good foods are ones that are healthy for us, will keep us nice, fit and slim. Bad foods are the ones that really tastes good, lots of fat, lots of sugar, salt, but we all know that they're bad for us. That they have negative impacts on our weight, on our body shape, and on our energy levels. Lucy : So that grows out of a very distinctive, American attitude towards food. And the phrase, "comfort food," was invented in the US. Dr. Joyce Brothers used it in the 1960s as an explanation for why so many Americans were starting to be obese, said that people are turning to comfort foods. They have stress in their lives or they need comfort for some reason, so they're using that as an excuse to eat these fattening foods. And then the food industry picked up on that and said, "Oh, okay, here are some comfort food dishes," and they started using that concept to market these dishes. Saying that, "Oh, everybody needs comfort, so here, eat some macaroni and cheese." So it turned into a marketing category. Jolie: Yeah, it's so interesting because, two thoughts. One is that, the opposite of comfort food is discomfort food. The things we're supposed to like are the things we're not supposed to enjoy. That there really is this idea of, maybe that is also a very American thing, that Protestant work ethic, that we're suspicious of pleasure, in some ways. Jerry, what was your particular interest in some of these issues in this Food Ways Project? Jerry: Especially as we dug deeper into the interviews that were conducted, I think one of the most surprising and interesting aspects for me was this idea of food of discomfort. Because we focus so much on this idea of comfort food as this a very individual experience to help one self feel better. Which is incredibly relevant during the time of pandemic or even during a time of stressful elections. So when people start talking about foods of discomfort, there's two major things that I've noticed. One is there are foods of actual physical discomfort, foods that you just can't eat for dietary reasons. Whether you're lactose intolerant, PKU, et cetera, that your diet is limited. Jerry: And then there's also foods that, it's not so much that the food itself causes discomfort in some way, it's the concept of food as a whole. Some people have turned their minds now to that ... Let me redo that. A number of people have realized that, "Oh, now I happen to work at home or not work for a while. I'm living well within my needs." And they can see that, now that they've stepped a little bit outside of that daily work that they do from 8:00 to 5:00. So to be able to realize that, oh, there's got to be a number of people who are not able to live within their means. Especially during a time like this, where even as I'm struggling, I'm surviving. And so that's brought a number of weird pieces of discomfort, just conceptual discomfort, to people. And that has caused some to act, some to not act, at different levels. Jolie: I'm curious, in terms of this project, because of the pandemic you had to really work remotely. Entirely, I imagine, including with the number of international collaborators. So how did that affect the way you collaborate and conduct research? Lucy : We were able to actually extend this project much further than most oral history projects. We frequently did not even know where people were when they were responding, initially. And then it does kind of happen, I also was using social media, LinkedIn and the Center for Food and Culture has a website. And that goes out to anyone who's interested, anywhere in the world. And then I was also using Facebook. And so when I was sending out information about this, and people were responding, and then they would tell their friends about it. So I also do a lot of work internationally, especially on culinary tourism, so a lot of my international connections were seeing this, "Oh yeah, this is really interesting." And so they were sending me things. Lucy : Some of those people would just send me a little paragraph, this is what's happening here. Other times, there are people who are using this ... I developed it first as an assignment for an undergraduate class, and then realized, oh, this would actually be very useful to do on a larger scale. I should mention here, too, I did get a little bit of funding that helped to cover honoraria for the researchers. Minimal honoraria, I should say, from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. And then also humanities, the Ohio Humanities. Formally the Ohio Humanities Council, now it's just called the Ohio Humanities, and then also from the Elliot Torium Foundation, a private foundation. Lucy : So when this started, it was just like, oh, this is interesting. Let's see where we can go with it. And then, because of my international work, various colleagues in different places were picking up on it and extending it. And then the researchers themselves, one of them, who also happens to be my daughter, she teaches in Ireland at a university. So she's having some of her students do the project. And she was interviewing some of her colleagues and friends, who tended to be very international. So we're hearing from people who lived in Israel or who had parents in Israel, Norway. And then another one of the researchers is Chinese studying in the US. So he has access to a different group of people. Lucy : So, it's not a model for a social science ethnography. A lot of it was serendipity, but everything was so sudden and unexpected, we just took whatever opportunities there were. I had worked previously with Jerry and so when I started getting this idea, I approached him. I said, "I don't know if there's going to be any funding, would you like to sign on to be the assistant director of this? There's a lot of administrative stuff that I'm going to need." And he said, "Sure." I said, "Now, I don't know about funding, but ..." So I know that Jerry was committed regardless of funding. So he's been a tremendous help through this. Jolie: And Jerry, could you talk a little bit about some of the tasks that you were working on and how the pandemic may have changed the way you had previously worked on projects or worked specifically with Lucy and your relationship prior. Jerry: I guess, for my tasks, there's two halves of it. There's the largely administrative half that, it was at home or not at home. It didn't really make too much of a difference, really, just depended on which wall I was staring at. But then came the other half of it, which was doing interviews and conducting these interviews with all of these participants. Which was a very different way than I'm used to doing field work. My field work that I did for my thesis, I did at a middle school in the area. And I was there with the students for a large portion of the day, and that's what I was used to, is just being around the people. So now all of a sudden, doing these cold calls to people I don't know to say, "Hey, I want to talk about food for awhile," was a very different setting. Jerry: But because people were already isolated and wanted that contact, they were happy to talk with any stranger about anything. Just that piece of human contact was so valuable to everybody that we talked to, and it made some of the conversations we've had absolutely fantastic. And yet my work with Lucy prior, because of the nature of building curriculum, the only real thing that changed was that we couldn't really meet face to face. Which can be, I guess, somewhat solved via Zoom, WebEx, whatever your medium is. Jolie: I think it's interesting that you're talking about, in addition to comfort food, the comfort of community. And even having the occasion to talk about these things is also a real balm in these challenging times. Can you talk a little bit, each of you, about how this project created or changed your sense of community? Lucy : I think for me, I really enjoyed getting to know the different people who were working with me. They're all either master's students, PhD students, or they had recently completed masters. I was able to learn things from them, and that was really nice. I was given a whole different perspective on things from them. And then a lot of people were sending me emails with just brief snippets of their thoughts about comfort food. And some of those really challenged the assumptions that we all have. One of them that I always point out, a woman contacted me and said, "I just wanted you to let you know that my husband and I are both disabled. We've had to live off of food stamps for the last 20 years. We are eating better now than we ever have because the food stamps were expanded," and they were able to go to the farmer's market. Lucy : They were able to use them for fresh produce. And she said, "This is wonderful. I'm healthier now than I ever have been." And that was completely the opposite of what we expected. That's not to paint a rosy picture of this all either, but it automatically challenged some of my assumptions about class in America, and how class is then tied to community. Similarly, someone else, they actually came from an upper middle class background and they lived out in the suburbs. And they said that in order to go shopping, they had to drive to a supermarket. People didn't usually go out walking in their neighborhoods. They had all this money, but they didn't have that kind of casual contact that you could get in a city or in a very small town. Lucy : And they said getting food meant they either had to drive somewhere or have it delivered, and they could afford to do that, and they recognized they had a lot of privilege in being able to do that. But she said, "It's very, very lonely. We don't have the usual kinds of contacts." She didn't realize that going to the grocery store had been a way for her to connect with people. Before, it was just a chore and now suddenly, she recognized that it had been a routine that had provided connection for her. That she didn't recognize that. So two things there, having money definitely made things a lot easier for people, but it didn't automatically give them a sense of community. Lucy : And it did not give them people that they felt that they had a sense of belonging with. And then also, being partly because of the pandemic, people were starting to recognize that these activities around food that we think of as just chores, that they were actually opportunities for very meaningful connections with other people. And suddenly we were missing those. Jolie: What about you, Jerry? Any observations either through the research or your own experience, in these last seven, eight months around community that have caused you to think a little differently? Jerry: Especially in thinking about the interviews, it's surprising how much, when you would start to ask somebody what their comfort food is, how little they would talk about the food. And what the conversation would turn to is about the meals that they would share with people, or the origin of the recipe that they got the recipe for their comfort food from. And then they would bring off into a different story about that, about their grandmother, so on, so forth. And so, I think it goes to show so much of comfort food is tied up in identity and community. Who we decide our tribe is. And so it's really fascinating to hear somebody start to talk about how much they really, really have been going to carbs during this time, and then all of a sudden they're talking about how much they miss their grandchildren or friends, so it really is a lot of focus on the comfort that we get from community. Rather than the comfort that we get from food. Jolie: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas podcast. Musical Interlude: Question. Answer. Discussion. Announcer: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie: Hello and welcome to the Big Ideas podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Lucy Long and Jerry Reed, about their research on comfort food ways and how the network and practices around food provide opportunities for connection. One of the things that also strikes me in the discussion about comfort foods and how they come from traditions, from rituals, whether those are religious or cultural, familial, regional, things like that. I'm wondering, are you seeing in your research, new traditions being formed out of these pandemic times? Or revisions of traditions due to these particular circumstances? And if so, can you give us some of those stories? Lucy : I think new traditions are definitely being created, being rediscovered. One of the definitions of comfort food, Julie Loker was a medical sociologist who first started studying comfort food, and she published an article in 2002 and then in 2004 that established comfort food as a scholarly topic. And she identified four different needs that were being fulfilled through comfort food, that then helped people relieve their stress. And one of those was nostalgia, one of them was convenience, and we don't always think of convenience and fast food can be comfort food, because it's very convenient. Foods that offer physical comfort, the hot chocolate on a cold day, and then indulgence, which is what we usually think of. And then about 10 years later, another researcher identified belonging as a need that was being fulfilled. Lucy : So people wanted to eat the foods that other people were eating, because it gave them a sense of belonging to that community. So that gave us a baseline for studying comfort food. And part of what we started finding, the definition of comfort food is foods that help relieve stress. That's the accepted, American definition. What we started finding is that the kinds of stresses that people were dealing with during the pandemic, I think are more of an existential nature. We don't have control over our lives anymore. All of a sudden you have to recognize that nature really is more powerful than humans. So all these myths that, Americans in particular have grown up with, were suddenly being challenged. Lucy : And so, what I started noticing was that comfort food was fulfilling some of these more excess existential needs. Baking bread, I find it amazing that that so many Americans had gluten sensitivities, that bread purchasing was what was dropping. And then all of a sudden, they're all trying to make bread during the pandemic. And I felt like a lot of what that was showing was, people had a sense of control by cooking in general. And they could control the whole process and they could control the outcome. And having that sense of control is very important during the pandemic, when we can't control anything else. Lucy : It also gives people a sense of agency or efficacy. We can actually do something, it's not just control, but we can actually do something to change the outcome of things later. So we can organize our freezer so that we know that we can now make dinners for at least another 30 days. And that makes the individual feel like, oh, okay, I can do something to change the outcome of my future. And then also, one of the things that was fascinating, that the researchers who are doing most of the interviews pointed out to me, a lot of people were finding comfort by giving comfort to other people. Working with food banks, making food for their neighbors, doing things like ... something as simple as going shopping and checking with all their elderly neighbors and friends to see if anyone needed things picked up. Lucy : And that was being nice, but it also fulfilled this existential need to feel like, as an individual, we have significance in life. We can matter. And we can matter to these other people. So we started seeing these other needs, rather than belonging, I like to think about connectedness. Because part of what we were seeing with food was people were connecting, not just to a community. They were connecting to nature, to the seasons. So many people started gardening. I know for the first time I was able to do a CSA because usually I'm not in Bowling Green during the summer. Lucy : So suddenly I was, and I discovered that, oh, okay, now I'm eating zucchini and tomatoes and nothing else for the next three weeks. So now I'm eating butternut squash and potatoes and that connects me to the seasons. It connects me to nature. It connects me to these larger things that help to give a sense of continuity of life. So that kind of connectedness is on an existential level. And it's a much deeper kind of stress than simply, I had a bad day. So some of that was very exciting to me, the idea that people were finding comfort by giving comfort. I find that very optimistic and it gives me a lot of hope. Jolie: Yeah, and I think that's one of the ongoing questions, of what of these changes will stick around after there is a vaccine, after the immediate pandemic crisis has passed. Jerry, are there any other new traditions or observations that you were struck by in some of the interviews you've done that you want to share? Jerry: I guess I can categorize them in three different ways. There's the new traditions, one of the examples I can think of is somebody who has specifically taken time out of their day to have their tea time, specific time, and they specifically have their tea with condensed milk. Which is very popular in Newfoundland. Then there's also traditions that have changed. So one interview we talked about how do you have a Seder dinner online and the guides that have been sent out by the community and recipes that have been sent out. Sadly, people can only have a Seder dinner, but have a Seder dinner for a smaller group, rather than the large portions that are usually served because you have so many people. Jerry: And then there's also this, it's a slight abandonment of tradition, and one of the best examples that I have for this from an interview, would be a couple that ... Their new date night routine was to go to this very fancy Italian restaurant. Well, you can't eat in, so they would get the takeout and eat this very nice, expensive Italian food, in their car out of styrofoam boxes. So it's this, going away from being around all these people ,and it speaks the same idea of it, but it's not really the same thing anymore. And it's also an excuse to get out of the house. It has a new meaning just beyond that. And so that's three different ways that I think about it. Jolie: What possibilities do you see in bringing food into classrooms more often and more directly, whether at the K-12 level or in college. Could you talk a little bit about that? The role of education around food? Jerry: Well, I steal this concept from a botanist I met in Costa Rica. He became a botanist, and then later a tour guide, and said that he studied botany because there's plants everywhere, so you always have something to talk about. And the same is true with food as a human need, you just need food, so there's always something there to talk about. And food is so intrinsically tied into identity, and often in ways that we don't realize, which circles through back to the appropriation piece. When we talk about Southern food, for instance, and even Appalachian food, these two very different categories that both get a lot of their food histories from historically Black cooking and slave cooking. Jerry: And so when we talk about food, at any level within education, all of a sudden we're able to talk about individual identities without even having to bring up ethnicity, race, gender. One of the easiest questions to ask, to start talking about what your identity is without really even talking about identity, but talking about food, is to ask how your family prepares rice. Because most families eat rice, and if you don't eat rice, that says something when it comes to identity. And rice is this really recognizable and very versatile food. And so what you do with it says a lot. And then you can start talking about, when it comes to cultural differences, this aesthetic piece, that your enjoyment of this specific rice dish comes from your history and your family and how grandma makes it. Cultural history. Jerry: So food is this vital piece of connection. And my previous research for my thesis focused on how children use food as a means of creating connection and community amongst themselves. And they're very active in doing this, and examining food, and trading food, and trying to engage each other with food. It's a human need. And so to be able to bring this human need to the forefront of education, to use it as a background for conversations in the humanities, conversations in the sciences, is easy and beneficial because it's very easy to understand. Jolie: I'd like us to conclude by asking you each to reflect on our current moment and what you think might be the broader implications on how we regard food ways. And in particular, what lessons do you hope we learn from this moment about food and connection that we can take forward with us in the after times, whenever they do eventually arrive. Jerry, would you go first? Jerry: So much of how we decide who we are as individuals comes back to food. Not necessarily the individual dishes, but the people we eat with, the people we choose not to eat with, and how we share those meals. And what this time has done has changed that in very significant ways. But I think people are also finding ways to overcome that and rebuild their community, and rebuild the communication that they once had through food, through a variety of other means. And so I think one of these overarching pieces that you should begin to look at next is, we compare the inequalities between these two new systems, because it's easy to see one problem in just one system. But once that changes, it reveals new problems that may even say, the problem that we thought we had? It doesn't exist. That's not even the thing because it's actually this thing. So now is the time to really solidify all of these major problems that then can be focused on. Jolie: What about for you, Lucy? What would you hope we take away from this period in history in thinking differently about food and culture? Lucy : First, I should mention, that listeners can go to the website and actually see ... We have an online exhibit from text and photographs from the interviews. So people can go to www.foodandculture.org, and that website takes them to the exhibit and to the whole project. And they can read the questionnaire and actually respond. And they can also see on that website, the curriculum project, doing it. But I think the thing that I take away from this is the significance of food. That we tend to overlook the power that it has to create connections for us. And those connections both take us inwards and outwards, so that we can connect with our own histories, our own past. It can be something that's very personal, but it also connects us outwardly with larger society, with our larger culture, and internationally. So I think what the pandemic is doing is making us recognize the significance of small things, of everyday things that we normally take for granted. Jolie: Thank you both so much for joining me. I really loved this conversation. Listeners can keep up with ICS by following us on social media at @icsbgsu. You can listen to BiG Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound editing by Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by Kari Hanlin. Musical Outro: Discussion.

D.B. Dowd—Professor of Art and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and faculty director of the D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library—talks to Giuseppe Castellano about the definition of illustration; whether illustration is or is not art; what advice he has for any illustrator looking to find their “style”; and so much more.

Jolie speaks with Dani Haynes, coordinator of student case management at BGSU, and Dr. Sandra Earle, an associate professor of pharmaceutical science at the University of Findlay and a university advocate at BGSU. They discuss how COVID-19 has exacerbated food insecurity for many students and share advocacy strategies to mitigate the stigma, shame, and misinformation around basic needs insecurity on college campuses.   Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie : Welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Jolie : Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we're not recording in the studio, but from home via phone and computer. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect those of BGSU or its employees. Bowling Green State University is located in the Great Black Swamp, long a meeting place of the Wyandotte, Shawnee, Lenape, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Fox, Pottawatomie, Erie, Miami, Peoria, Chippewa, and Seneca Indian Tribes. We honor the rich history of this land and its indigenous inhabitants past and present. Jolie : Today, I'm joined by Dani Haynes and Dr. Sandra Earle. Dani works in the BGSU Dean of Students office as the Coordinator for Student Case Management. She also founded the Falcon Care Grab and Go initiative to address student hunger and food insecurity. And Dr. Sandy Earle is an associate professor of pharmaceutical science and Associate Dean for Assessment for the College of Pharmacy at the University of Findlay. Sandy also serves as a university advocate at BGSU with a special interest in providing assistance to those in crisis and ensuring food security for all students. Jolie : I'm very happy to have this conversation. To start, I'd like each of you to share how you got interested in student crisis intervention and advocacy work, particularly around the issue of hunger and food insecurity. Dani, do you want to start us? Dani: Well, I got started in student issues, student crises about six years ago. I used to work for a nonprofit and originally I was working in survivor services for survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence. And I was an advocate at the University of Toledo for their Title IX process. And so throughout that time, I began to notice some of the issues that students were having that didn't necessarily coincide with Title IX incidents, but was still very traumatizing to the individual. Dani: So, when I started here at BG, I still had some of those same notes in my mind, but I wasn't sure if it translated to the student population. Within maybe my first six months, I began to see some students who were housing insecure and food insecure. And I know that BG already had the Falcon Care program, which you can donate some swipes to students in need. Then,throughout the summer, I realized the dining halls weren't necessarily open, and so those students didn't have the same opportunity to receive resources. Dani: And originally I began to provide them food from Kingsbury, which is where I lived. I would take food into the office and then Chris was like, "Are you feeding students?" And so I said, "Hypothetically. Will I get in trouble?" Because we need this job." And so I explained, "Well, students are hungry. And I, as a mom, cannot see students hungry. I just can't do it." And I explained what some of the issues were. Dani: And so he said, "Okay. You can start this program. We'll give you some money. Let's see how successful it would be." Dani: And so originally, there was a bet on if I can provide close to 50 bags for the first year and we served 47 bags within the first year, which highlighted that there was a need. Since then we have provided 159 grab-and-go food bags since our initiation. So, that's just to say the need is growing, not just because of the pandemic, which has exacerbated the need and provided greater awareness for those who didn't necessarily see that it existed. So that's just a little bit about how I got into crisis. Jolie : What about you, Sandy? How did you come to be interested in food security issues? Sandra: Well, I have been a professor for a long time and I absolutely love being around college students and obviously as a teacher and as a professor, my focus has, for a long time, been on student success and how do I help them? And I teach something that's kind of challenging usually, so I'm always trying to think of how to help them. Sandra: And as my husband Rodney moved into the presidency, people told me, "Hey, Sandy, you have some power. You could use your power for good." And I'm like, "Really?" Because of course, what do I know about this? This is not my gig. This is his. But if I can use my power for good, I better darn well do it. Right? It's my responsibility. And of course I love it. I love being able to help students and everybody obviously, but students are probably in the position that need the most support from somebody like me. Sandra: And honestly, I was fairly unaware of this problem of food insecurity on campuses. It's much more serious than maybe my being very poor as a student, but this is real food insecurity that people even bring from their home. So, I came from a home where I never was wanting for food, but once I was on my own college, things got a little tight. Sandra: So, if you think you don't even have that safety net from home, so you're coming from that. And how do we expect these students to be successful in school if they have to worry about what they're going to eat next time, or where they're going to sleep, or if they're safe walking across campus, or if they're dealing with some mental health issues or crises? How do we expect them to sit and study and take a test? Of course, we can't. Sandra: My goal is to make sure that the only thing students are worrying about is their exam. That's my goal. Of course, that's a pretty lofty one and it's certainly beyond my power, but whatever I can do to help with that is my goal. Jolie : Sandy, we know that stress in childhood, including around poverty and food insecurity, has dramatic consequences on children's brain development. Can you tell us a little bit about the biochemical and psychological effects of resource insecurity? Sandra: Well, I could tell you what I know, which isn't a lot, other than the research that I've done as an person of interest, not from a scientist standpoint. But it's very clear that if students, especially young children, don't get the nutrition that they need, this is a critical time for brain development and their ability. And not only that, but for them to feel safe in this world, that they don't have to be worrying about things that they should not be worrying about, and dealing with actually being able to fuel that brain chemistry that we need to learn and to be happy. Sandra: And we can't minimize the happiness part. I think that people that are in constant distress, it's physically very bad for your body and obviously emotionally and mentally break down because we've got to deal with our most basic needs first. There's plenty of research on that. But kids that are without food or stable environments, homes, et cetera, their chances for success in this world are so diminished. It's a crisis. Sandra: And I'm especially worried during this time of COVID. There's so many kids, especially kids that have single working moms. I think of this every day. Because I feel like some days I'm struggling and I have every luxury. And I think these moms and dads that are single parents that have to go to work probably, because we know that those that are making the least in our society, as far as their income, it's something like 85 or 90% of them, and Dani, you can correct me if the percentages are wrong, but they cannot do their job virtually. Sandra: And the people that are at the very top income brackets, those folks, 95% of them can do their job virtually. So, while it isn't going to be easy to do your job virtually and teach your kid, at least you're physically there. So, I don't know. I don't know how to help this, and this is not necessarily food insecurity specifically, but just the COVID situation and you have to work to get food on the table. That's not an option. Jolie : I'm going to ask Dani a question, which is what does food insecurity actually look like on a college campus? Because we were talking before about the salad days of ramen or mac and cheese. But that's not really what we're talking about primarily. So, what does it look like on college campuses and how is it perhaps different than what we hear or think about with K-12 students, where they can get breakfast and lunch? But how does it show up at BGSU? Dani: Okay. So for K-12, let's talk about in elementary, in BG. At least 90 to 95% of their students are free lunch or reduced lunch. So, let's think: If that full population came to BG later on, they've been food insecure their entire lives. And they bring it to BG, what does that look like? It is the ramen noodles. It is the Kraft mac and cheese, but it's more than that. Dani: It's making a conscious decision to go without something, usually food, so that you can pay something else. Between 6% of university students in a four year institution go at least one day without eating. 10% at a community college. Roughly 44% of collegiates on university campuses struggle with food insecurity. So, it's surviving off of granola bars. It's saying, "Oh, I'm hungry, but let me drink some water." It's trying to get a free meal from a friend because you don't have another way to get it. Dani: Or it's coming from a food insecure background and then you get to college and you have all these meal swipes, and so you hoard food because you've been without food for so long and then you become panicked when your meal swipes are getting lower, your Falcon dollars are getting low. It looks different for each and every student because it's always a case by case basis. But some of the signs to look for in food insecure students would be those students you always see asking for food. And we've had some of those students, especially in the Nest, always standing around. You have those students who you invite out to lunch, dinner, or breakfast and they can never go. You have those students, you go to their house and their refrigerator is pretty bare. And so it's really about teaching them what food insecurity is. Dani: I know I went to Ohio State. I come from a single parent household and I'm first-generation, so nobody explained food insecurity to me. What I expected from college is, you will struggle. That is college. So, when I was food insecure in college, I didn't know that it was a problem. I walked into it like, "Oh, this is to be expected. This is normal." Dani: Students today are still thinking, "Oh, it's okay for me to struggle and survive off noodles." That's still food insecurity because it is expected. I was told this is what I can expect from college, right? So, when you are living the life that you've been told is the typical college experience, you don't identify it as a problem because it's never been taught to you to be a problem. And so that's the other piece of food insecurity that we need to start talking about. That being a struggling college student does not mean going hungry. It doesn't mean going to class starving and thinking, "Oh, I need to focus and I may just eat some noodles when I get home and that will hold me over for the next couple of days." That's not a struggling college student. Struggling college student could be classes, it may be finances, it can be a whole host of things, but it should never be food insecurity. Jolie : What are some of the initiatives that you two are working on to address these needs on campus? Sandra: So, one of the little things that I help do is starting the community garden. So, the community garden is just outside the art building. Anybody can walk by and get whatever they need if there's something there that they need or want. It's not something you have to sign up for. You don't have to tell anybody your name. You just get what you need and if I were queen of the world, I would replace all the shrubs with food. Sandra: Unfortunately, we live in a climate where there's not too much we can plant that will be there all year. But we live in a farmland. This is, as you mentioned, we live in the black swamp where the soil is quite amazing. If you look around at the farms, we have very high producing farms around here. Let's plant some food and just be able to walk by and pick what you want. I know that sounds probably idealistic, but why not have that for a goal? Dani: I actually love the community garden. So, I always promote the community garden. One, because fresh produce is really hard to come by for food insecure students, because that's not what it's given at entries. So, that community garden is amazing. Don't knock it or sell it short. It's pretty amazing. And it's cute. All the students like, "Oh, is that what those boxes are?" I'm like, "Yeah, go get some food." And I am a tomato and cucumber girl, I'm a vegetarian. I can survive off tomato and cucumbers like nobody's business, which that garden produces a lot of. Dani: Some of our other resources is the Falcon Care Program, which students can donate one swipe a week. You can do that virtually if you go to the Office of the Dean of students webpage or our present website, which a lot of our student orgs use, you can click on resources and there should be a link to take you to donate a swipe. Dani: Those swipes come to me on a meal card and it's really discreet. So, if a student is food insecure and they come and get a meal card, it has five swipes on it. No one else is going to be able to identify, "Oh, they went to Dani and got a free food card." It's not like that. We have that program, which has been here for years and it's really great that Chartwells have partnered with us to support students facing food insecurity. Dani: We also have the grab-and-go food bag program that you mentioned. That bag of food, each bag is about $20.08 because I priced it out. In that bag, you'll get almost a week worth of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A little bit more if you stretch it. So in order to inform students about that, I don't know if you all have seen some of the digital marketing on the screens that says, "Don't go hungry" and then it has, "Go to the Dean of Students office." That is to promote our food assistance programs. Dani: So, we have our Hunger/Homelessness awareness week. It's a week worth of programming. We started the event last year. This is our second one. It is November 16th through the 20th. We have a number of events. We plan on using Greek councils to do a food drive for that week to support our food bank program. We also plan on collecting swipes virtually. We plan on partnering with some student organizations and some residence life students to promote that program. And then we have some cooking demonstration videos that will be released that week to show students how to prepare food within our grab and go food bag. Sometimes it looks just like a lot of random, quick things that you can take on the go, which it is meant for that. Dani: And also a lot of students don't have cooking utensils, which is strange. Can openers. You will not believe how many students can't eat the canned food because they don't have a can opener. So, it is meant to be accessible and easy and quick on the go. But there are ways you can make meals like mac and cheese. You can put the tuna in there and have tuna mac, right? But showing them that they can do that. So those are some of our resources. Jolie : Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, BGSU, like universities across the country, moved with very little notice to remote and online instruction. We are now back open, but with a dramatically reduced footprint on campus. How has the pandemic affected students in terms of their access to things like food, housing, and other necessities? How has the pandemic changed some of the student needs and how have the initiatives you're offering adjusted to meet those changing needs? Sandra: I'm just going to comment on one thing on this, Dani, because you're really the one that knows the facts on this. I know from talking to Rodney and others in the leadership of the university, there's a huge concern, and this is probably happening nationally, I just have not seen it, he is very concerned because the group of students that did not come back this fall are the lowest income students as far as family income. Sandra: He said, "We had a big jump in family income if we look at our average family income of our students." And that's because we've lost the lower income students. And this is extremely alarming to me as an educator and as a member of our society that wants people to have access to education. One of the things when it comes to food insecurity is that if you have a college degree, less than 5% of people with college degrees have food insecurity. But if you don't have a high school diploma, about 27% of those folks have food insecurity. Sandra: So, education is a social mobility thing that we have to work diligently through to make sure that it's available to those that want to better their life's lot. I really worry that families that were hit hard by the COVID pandemic, no longer is college an option for them. And this is a huge problem. Sandra: Dani, maybe you have more statistics on this. But I know that Rodney is super concerned about this and he worries that it's not just that they're taking a break. The window of going to college is fairly short. So if they're not coming now, they're probably not coming. So, it's a worry. And it's not about keeping numbers up for college. It's about providing social mobility for these students that really, I'm sure, were excited and counting on it and now it's just not a possibility. Dani: That is a really great point that I think a lot of people have not really given a lot of thought to, is the students who are not coming to college. The lower income student, the first-generation student. And because it's a family dynamic. So, if your entire family is struggling, if you were the one to assist with your siblings or other parental adults or guardians, and then they are getting sick or they can't work as much, you make a sacrifice because it takes a village. And so that is one way that we should be concerned about our students and that COVID has brought more light to. Dani: In addition to that is the amount of students who live check to check. I think a lot of times people really think collegiates are far more wealthy or have far more parental support than they do. And so one thing we've noticed immediately is when the university closed in the spring semester, the amount of student emergency fund requests, it tripled. Actually, it's just off the charts. Dani: Normally we would donate a dozen, maybe two dozen awards to students. At this point, we're close to 1400 students applying for our student emergency fund. And it's not because they feel entitled. It's literally because they don't have the familial support. They were living check to check. When you think of international students, they can't work anywhere but on campus and we're not hiring them. So, where do they go? They don't qualify for the community resources. They don't qualify for loans. And so that's an entire demographic of students that is really hard to serve. And you want them here, because again, this is a great opportunity for them, but how do we meet their needs? So, you can think of how COVID has highlighted some of that. Dani: And then the final piece, again, is food insecurity. So, I think the student emergency fund really highlights some of the housing insecurity because it is living month to month. It is worrying if you're going to be evicted. But food insecurity, since COVID, I think in the spring semester, we provided two dozen food bags to students. We partner with our BGSU Police Departments because they're 24 hours. And students were able to go there and collect the bags so that they could still have access to the resources. We were still able to use some of our Chartwells Falcon Care Cards, the students will be able to go and grab a meal from dining hall and take it to go. So, that was still an access for them. We really was able to transition very well to continue to support the students and we're very thankful for all of our partners who helped us with that. As of right now, our office is still open 8:00 to 5:00. So, if students need food, they can always come and grab a bag. Dani: We're always thinking of new ways to support our students in food insecurity. I know Chartwells just provided 10 HelloFresh type of boxes that they had left over. And so I emailed a lot of our food insecure students, "We have these free boxes of food. Come." And they came immediately. Like, "Oh, absolutely." And so that's just to show, although I had just helped them within the last couple of weeks, they're still food insecure. They're still seeking resources. Dani: And then the last one is the mobile food pantry. They've been able to go off campus and use the drive in. Their numbers are still large because, although we closed campus, the students were still here. They have a lease. They may not be able to go home. So, I think COVID has really shown how much the community needs one another and how there are so many ways we can support one another that we probably would not have thought of pre-COVID. Jolie : We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas Podcast. Musical Interlude: Question. Answer. Discussion. Announcer: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie : Hello and welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast. Today, I'm talking to Dani Haynes and Dr. Sandy Earle about student food insecurity and other challenges made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jolie : Sandy, in addition to your advocacy work, you are a researcher studying how different drugs affect the body and in turn how the body can change a drug, as well as you're interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning. How do you understand the relationship between these different roles? How does your research inform your teaching and your advocacy and vice versa? Sandra: Well, that's a great question. I probably don't reflect on that as much as I should on a day-to-day basis. I don't know. I've been very blessed in life. I love my job. I love my students. I really like learning new things. I like to continue to learn. I think most people in academic environments do. Sandra: I am very interested and have done some work and trying to figure out how to help each student learn in the way that they do. I don't have a degree in this area. My area of expertise is pharmacokinetics, which is modeling drugs to figure out how much drug needs to be where in the body at a certain time to be efficacious but not toxic. So my actual training, as far as my academic training and what I teach, doesn't really help that much. Other than my interest in math and modeling things, and really knowing that everybody's unique, and that's what pharmacokinetics teaches you too. You're tailoring it to that unique situation and everyone's unique. Sandra: I love what I teach. I think it's very interesting and I think it helps patients have the best experience that they can have. And so it's important for me to help pharmacists know how to do this, but I have really become more engaged and that's through my work in assessment and helping students be successful in the classroom. And this, I guess, again, leads back to the food insecurity and not having to worry about ... Yes, you should be worried about your test. Yes, you should be worried about your project and your paper. You need to be worried about all that. But please don't worry so much that you can't be successful. But I don't want you worrying about food and shelter. And so I guess circling back to that, I explained my path, I guess, how I've evolved as an academic. But ... Jolie : One of the things that you're really talking about is this tension between addressing the individual needs of a given student, but also recognizing that we live in a society that the systems themselves are unequal, right? And so we also see patterns of inequality around access, around some of the resources. So, a 2019 study by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that LGBTQ +, Black, and Native American students were significantly more likely to be food insecure, housing insecure, or a combination of the two. Can you explain for listeners, why is it that some members of these groups are at an increased risk? And what are some of the things that universities can do to help meet those students' needs? Sandra: Well, I think, and Dani, you can jump in here too, but from my understanding and my reading, it's because they're in a situation where often they live, they've been brought up in food deserts, which are more and more common and problematic in our society. And if you don't know what a food desert is, it's an area that you cannot get affordable, appropriate food within your local area. Because a lot of folks don't have transportation either. And especially during COVID when the bus systems shuts down, how are you going to get food when there is no food for you to get? Especially healthy, affordable food. Sandra: And as Dani mentioned before, produce is especially difficult to get. And as a healthcare practitioner, we know that diets that are just made of processed food or fast food is not what we want people to be eating. But to be able to get the fresh produce and to get affordable, fresh produce, in a lot of places you have to have a car. And this is often where people that are disadvantaged because of their race or their sexual identity are put at great disadvantage. Sandra: So, I don't know if that answers your question. But we also know that COVID, for these groups that are in such distress anyway, COVID has affected them as the disease itself and access to all the support systems that they need, it's hit them in two to three, probably more than that, fold when compared to others that are not in these groups of, as you've mentioned, gender identity minorities, as well as Native Americans and People of Color in general. Dani, you may have more light to shed on that. Dani: So, you said a lot of great points. The only thing that I would add is those demographics, or that population of students that you mentioned, you can also think they are probably more times than not an independent student when you think of student financial aid. So with that, that means there's not very much familial with support or monetary support. They're probably working a little bit more than 10 to 20 hours a week to come to college, to survive in college. Dani: So, there's so many other factors. Really, when you think about student financial aid, it is way more than Pell Grants and things like that. You should always think of those independent students as those students who constantly need high touch points. For the last three to four years, I did reach out to student financial aid last summer and on average BGSU receives about 1,400 independent students that self identify as independent students through student financial aid. Dani: Those 1,400 students should be students that we are always checking in on because we know, based on that status alone, they don't have the support. So, just things like that. Again, I mentioned earlier on I love trends and things like that. So, it's always about knowing, yes there's marginalized identities, they will struggle at a greater rate for a number of reasons. And a lot of it could be systemic. Also learning, what are some of the other groups of students or why those particular groups still align within other challenges, really? So, I think that would be the other piece I would add. Jolie : What are some of your practical recommendations for what institutions can do to support students facing basic needs insecurities? Dani: I think the first one would be making it available. So for example, Wood County, BG in particular, there's no homeless shelter for just the average person we have Cocoon. So, maybe we could have Residence Life provide immediate shelter for students in need and not just those in a Title IX situation, which is always great and we are very appreciative. Could it be possibly creating family housing? Because we know that our student demographic will change. We will probably get more parents. Where are they going to stay? What are the support services that we have? Dani: Student organizations. Is it just directed towards average college age students or all collegiates? So, if the meetings and things like that are in the evening, then I'm probably not going to go, but those same meetings have free food that I would probably benefit from. So, it's just really looking at all of those little pieces and how, if we shifted them or added additional resources like having afternoon meetings or having a grocery store, not just the pantry, but an actual grocery store where you could just shop and have all types of items. Dani: I know that we partner with the French thrift shop in Woodland Mall. And so we give students clothing vouchers that they need. That has been a really great resource for student parents, because everything in there is 50 cent or $1 and you don't have to pay for it because we already have the clothing vouchers. We partner with LMARIES Laundromat. That's been super awesome because yes, the residential students have free laundry through residence life, but off campus it's really expensive to wash clothes. Dani: I know when I was a grad student, I went to school overseas and it was super expensive. I never dried my clothing for a whole year. All of my clothes were crunchy. I remember when I came back home, that was something I was really excited about because I couldn't afford both. Clean clothes I can do, but you just going to have to air-dry and they're crunchy. They are not the same. It's a privileged opportunity that I realized is a real thing. But laundry was really expensive. So having that as a resource to students. Dani: Having toilet paper and regular household items. A student just asked me, "Can I buy light bulbs with the Walmart food card?" And I was like, "Dani, why did you not think that students need light bulbs?" They need to see. And they just bring so many things to my attention, for resources that they need. It's so incredible because we're humans, we have our own apartment and yet we take a lot of things for granted. And so I think the other thing is within higher education, we can look at some of those things that we take for granted as something that everyone has and makes sure that our students will have them. Sandra: And frankly, I don't have much to add to that other than I think the biggest thing I would say is don't assume you know. Don't assume anything. I have learned a lot about this just from hanging around people like Dani and doing some reading on my own. And don't assume you know. I have learned that there's students on our campus that not only did their parents not support them, but they're upset that they're here. Sandra: So, there's so much. And I think as somebody that has never had to worry about this, to put yourself in the shoes of someone that does, and really look at it with love and compassion and sometimes I get upset cause I see people's comments about food insecurity and dismissing it. And I think that's the biggest thing I would say, is people need to be open to the possibility of what this is and thinking about what it would be like to be in this situation. And then trying to do something about it. Whether that's with actually giving gifts of money to the different food pantries and of course to the BGSU Student Emergency Fund to support students. Sandra: And it's not only students, it's also staff and faculty that are in this situation. And we want to make sure our whole community is taken care of. So, to give monetary gifts, or to Dani's point, maybe take someone that you know out to eat or offer them even something subtle like a bag of cucumbers from your garden. Just put yourself in their shoes and do what you can. If you're in the position where you can help, I would encourage you to do that. Because our society, we're really dependent upon each other. During this time especially. Jolie : So, that really leads to my last question. So, for folks who want to support these initiatives, what are some things they can do? So Sandy, you mentioned donating to the student emergency fund. Are there other places or ways that people can give if they are able to do so? Sandra: I'm going to let Dani answer that. I know you can do that through the Student Emergency Fund. I'm sure that you can support the different food pantries in the area, but I'm going to turn that one over to Dani because this is her thing. Dani: So, there's always opportunities to help students. Is it connecting through student organizations that also serve student populations? Is it the Center for Public Impact? They do a lot of assisting with students. Is it donating swipes so that we can have swipes for our Falcon Care program or donating food to the grab and go food bag program? Is it winter apparel? Last year during Hunger/Homelessness Awareness week, I had some coats and gloves and other winter apparel. Our off-campus commuter service program actually knitted a lot of the scarves and hats. Dani: You'd be surprised how many people come to BG, not fully understanding that, one, BG is a windy tunnel. As soon as I step foot on the campus, it is so windy. I don't understand where the wind comes from. So, it's always really cold. Students are not always prepared for that. Dani: So, it's having maybe a clothing closet or creating that or saying, "Hey, I have all of these coats or winter apparel. Is there anyone in need?" Is it hygiene products? Do you have those? Is it supporting students during move in? Like sponsoring a student's bedding or ensuring that students have maybe a refrigerator or microwave? It's so many little pieces that we can do to help. I think as long as we begin to focus on serving the students in most need, we will always be able to serve all of our students because it only goes up from there. Jolie : And Dani, for students who may be in need of some of these resources, what's their next step to access them? Dani: They can go to the Office of the Dean of Students webpage and all of our resources are there. If you click on support and guidance, it will take you to the case management services page and you'll be able to access this. If you can't remember that, if you type in free food in the BGSU main page, it takes you to a landing page that has resources for free food, as well as application for our food assistance programs. Dani: The applications is not meant to decline, it's meant to gain some information. Because if a student is facing food insecurity, they're facing financial insecurity, they're facing other things that I can assist with as a case manager that you may not always have the opportunity to do if I don't know who you are. So, that's another resource. Dani: And then always, if you can't remember that, think of Office of the Dean of Students. We have drop-in hours Monday through Friday, 8:00 to 5:00. You can always call 211, that's a community resource. So, no matter where you are as a BG student, especially when we have a lot of virtual students, 211 and they will be able to direct you to any community resource that is available so that you're not just reliant on our campus resources, because it's not going to sustain you if it's an ongoing issue. Jolie : Great, thank you both so much for joining me today. Jolie : Listeners can keep up with ICS happenings by following us on Twitter and Instagram @ICSBGSU and on our Facebook page. You can find the Big Ideas podcast wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza with sound editing by Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by ICS intern Morgan Taylor, with editing by Kari Hanlin. Musical Outro: Discussion.

Jolie is joined by Dr. Mary-Jon Ludy, chair of the department of public and allied health and an associate professor of food and nutrition at BGSU, and Dr. Jyothi Thrivikraman, an assistant professor of Global Public Health at Leiden University College in the Netherlands. They discuss their interdisciplinary, international research study of how COVID-19 has impacted the sleep and mental health of college students and offer advice on resiliency in the midst of stress.   Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie : Welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture & Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, Associate -Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we're not recording in the studio, but from home via phone and computer, as always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Bowling Green State University is located in the Great Black Swamp, long a meeting place for the Wyandot, Huron, Kickapoo, Erie, Miami, and Peoria tribes. We honor the rich history of this land and its indigenous inhabitants, past and present. Jolie: Today, I'm very pleased to be joined by two guests, Dr. Mary-Jon Ludy and Jyothi Thrivikraman. Mary-Jon is department chair of public and allied health and an associate professor of food and nutrition at BGSU. Her research interests include energy balance, body composition, and innovative teaching. Jyothi is an assistant professor of global public health at Leiden University College in the Netherlands. Her research interests include food insecurity, food waste, and healthcare financing. She has worked and taught in countries around the world, including in Asia and Africa. MJ and Jyothi were part of an interdisciplinary, international research team studying how COVID-19 impacted the sleep and mental health of 2000 college students spanning seven countries and three continents. The study's findings and recommendations were first published in an August 2020 special issue of Clocks & Sleep. Thank you both for being with me today. I'm really happy to get to talk to you about your research. To start, could you explain the questions motivating this research and what you learned from your surveys? Mary-Jon: We are looking at the intersections between lifestyle, behaviors, resilience to stress and rumination in college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. So to unpackage that a bit by lifestyle behaviors, we're talking about food intake, alcohol consumption, sleep, physical activity. When we speak about resilience to stress, we're thinking about bounce back or recovery from a stressful situation. And when we think of rumination, we're considering excessive negative thoughts. So with that context, there's been a great deal of research to show that positive lifestyle behaviors, help to bolster mental health and likewise with resilience to stress, if an individual has more resilience to stress that helps to support their mental health. So more resilience, less anxiety, more resilience, more positive mood. The flip is true for rumination. If an individual has more excessive negative thinking, they're likely to have more markers of depression or more perceived stress. There have not been many studies that have looked at that intersection. Mary-Jon: So between lifestyle behaviors, resilience, and rumination, and certainly not in college students during a global pandemic. So that is the focus of our study. And it's a survey, and we have been working, as you said, in the introduction with researchers and a variety of disciplines and a variety of places across the globe. Something that you didn't mention in the introduction. We did our initial research in April and May, but we have done a follow up in October and November. And one of the exciting things I think that we added, we have a new partnership. So we have some partners who are in Ghana. So we have a fourth continent and an eighth country that we're excited to be collaborating with. And I think initially what we have found is that college students are struggling during this pandemic and it doesn't matter where those college students are. Mary-Jon: So the mental health struggles are very real. We're seeing in terms of those lifestyle behaviors that students' dietary quality has decreased, their physical activity has decreased. Their sleep quality has decreased. They're experiencing more stress, less resilience. We have seen perhaps what you would characterize as positive changes in alcohol consumption. So students are drinking less and they're actually spending more time in bed, so more sleep hours, but that hasn't led to better sleep quality. So even though you're staying in bed longer, not sleeping as well, and if we're thinking about the alcohol consumption, a lot of times alcohol consumption comes with group gatherings and folks are doing less of that right now. Jolie: Jyothi, mental health has been on the minds of lots of American parents, faculty members, staff for a long time. How does that compare to where you are at Leiden? Are these patterns similar where the pandemic is exacerbating existing problems, or is the context there a little bit different for sort of what the base point comparison was?  Jyothi: So my college, Leiden University College, is part of Leiden University and we're in the international honors' college of Leiden University. And we draw our population 50% from the Netherlands, but the remaining population comes from countries around the globe. And so for many of our students in the initial lockdown, it was this uncertainty about if their country's locked down. Will they be able to get home? And so there was a fear about, will they be able to go home? And if they go home, will they be able to come back and return to study? But the situation now is slightly different. Most of the students have come back to study, and we are doing a mixture of online and face-to-face classes. And the Netherlands as a whole, for most schooling has opted for face-to-face. So primary and high school students are all face-to-face and college students, we have the option of meeting face-to-face if we want to with reduced numbers, smaller classes, ventilation, and mask wearing, which has just been legalized in the Netherlands.  Jyothi: So our situation is slightly different in terms of that face-to-face interaction, which I do think has helped a lot with the students. In the initial stages, when we had that very, very strict lockdown in March, April and May, it was a challenge. We're not as an institution used to having online education. So we went from a very small, interactive dynamic program to being on Teams and Zoom, which none of us had ever done before. So there was a great deal of transition, uncertainty, uncertain Wi-Fi connection for many families, right? And many students. And I think some of those issues have resolved as time has progressed.  Jyothi: That being said, the students, what they're struggling with now, I would argue is the social aspects. So they're getting the education that they need, but there's the social component of learning that is being missed out on. So we do have a residence building and we do have students living in their dorms, but surprisingly, I was really apprehensive about 400 students moving in from many different countries. I was absolutely confident that we would be ground zero for a COVID outbreak and we've had five or six cases since they've come back. And so that's been amazing, but that has meant that they've been following really strict social distancing guidelines, isolation. So they haven't had the social interaction. And I think now, as the weather gets colder and darker, you can see some of those challenges appearing. We've had beautiful unseasonably warm weather, and now it's cold and dark and it gets dark around four here. So people are fraying at the ends. Jolie: You talked about the way your teaching had to adjust in very short order to online, but I'd like you to talk a little bit about how your research and your data collection methods changed in this time period. And for this project in particular, did you have to do the project differently than you normally would have, or was this kind of similar to the kinds of research each of you had done previously? Mary-Jon: It's really interesting that you ask this. And for a number of years, I've been working with research that involves health patterns in first-year college students. And one of my collaborators, Robin Tucker, is at Michigan State University. And another collaborator, Laura Keaver, is at Institute of Technology Sligo in Ireland. Laura had obtained some grant funding that would have enabled her in April to travel to Michigan State and to BGSU, to help build on our research collaboration. Obviously that didn't happen because of COVID, but one of Robin's graduate students,Chen Du, had recently had a study approved for face-to-face data collection that looked at the intersections of lifestyle, behaviors, resilience, and rumination and college students. So we needed to regroup. Mary-Jon: And Robin and Chen worked together really quickly to reformat this investigation into an online survey. Robin reached out to Laura from Ireland and me at BGSU and said, "Would you like to collaborate on this?" So Laura and I said, "Sure." And we worked quickly to gain approval from our institutional review boards. I posted about the survey to our faculty listserv to get help in recruiting students. And when I did that, almost immediately, I had responses from some colleagues who were interested in getting involved. So Wan Shen is a Chinese faculty member, she is in nutrition. She said, "Could I help you to recruit a Chinese sample of students?" And I said, "Oh, that would be fabulous." Mary-Jon: And HeeSoon Lee, who is a South Korean faculty member in social work, said, "I would love to help you recruit a South Korean population." So both of them jumped on board and then another colleague. His name is Brent Archer, he's a South African colleague, he's in communication sciences and disorders. And he said, "Oh, maybe I can help you recruit a South African population." Well, that didn't work out. However, Brent connected us with Jyothi and her team in the Netherlands, and this just kept growing and growing. And we formed this international team of health focused investigators, but health in a broad sense, multidisciplinary health. And it's been just super exciting to work with and learn from this whole team. Jolie: And Jyothi, what about for you? Was this process in doing sort of everything online and surveys and the sort of international approach, was that in line with previous research you had done, or was this a sort of new mode of work for you as well?  Jyothi: It's a very new mode of data collection for me and tend to be very much more of a participatory action research type of researcher. So I've done a photo voice project where participants in the Hague had to take photos of their food waste. So I do believe in local engagement, right? So this was very new for me in survey data. My strong suit is not quantitative data, so this was a leap for me as well too. But you know, what was nice was to join a project with researchers from different countries and to learn from each other, to understand people's different viewpoints on these topics, to even get feedback on the paper. So we've had one paper submitted and accepted. And so it was nice just to see how other people thought about the different issues and the suggestions they gave. So I think it's an opportunity to learn and MJ, Robin and myself, we've applied for another grant. We weren't successful, but this possibility has opened up other possibilities, which has been lovely. So I welcome future collaborations with this team. Jolie: I'm curious, another question I have is sort of how do you when you're working internationally across multiple disciplines, right? So a general common language of health, but thinking about those questions with different methodologies, different theoretical orientations, all of that, how did you create a common research language for talking across those disciplinary, theoretical, geographical and cultural differences?  Jyothi: Sure. I can actually give an example. We had multiple email exchanges about this. So in the first round of a survey. We didn't collect any race and ethnicity data. And we were talking about that, during the second round, there is race and ethnic data collected, but solely in the U.S. and we were trying to think about how would we collect that here in the Netherlands? And we don't collect data like that. And so we emailed back and forth with Laura at Sligo. And she said that they just dropped that question. The same with the Malaysian partners and Taiwan and we don't categorize individuals according to Black, white, Hispanic, African-American, those categories don't exist. It's whether you're Dutch or not. And whether you come from a migrant background or not. And so the categories that are used in the U.S. even though they make sense to me, because I'm American, they're not practical here.  Jyothi: And for our students, if they had to fill that out, they would know what to make sense of that. We do have students that are Black, but they're African black. We have Zimbabweans; we have Ethiopians; we have a different category. So their experience about being Black is very different. And so I think we spent a few emails, so we actually don't have those questions. So it was also looking at the survey to contextualize it for the various regions, what made sense. And that was fascinating for us to think about as a team. How do we think about this, and what are the assumptions that we're making when we include these questions? Jolie: So, MJ, you were the founding director of the Health, Wellness, & You academic learning community at BGSU where first-year students guided by upperclassmen, grad students and faculty mentors became researchers about their own health patterns. Can you talk a little bit about why you think it's important for first-year students in particular, just to really think reflectively about their patterns and to find opportunities for improving their own self-care practices? Mary-Jon: Jyothi and I actually talked about this yesterday. And one of the concepts that she talked to me about was critical junctures in life. And Jyothi was talking about that in the context of the COVID pandemic being one of these time points, where it can cause you to take either path A or path B, and it's a life course shift. And I think that parallels the work that we do with first-year college students. So it's one of these critical junctures in life where students are adopting patterns that may follow them throughout life. So it's a time where if you're able to establish healthy lifestyle behaviors. So if you're able to learn techniques that will help you to improve your resilience or be more physically active, or eat a high-quality diet or sleep better, that those are patterns that you can use to support you throughout life. Jolie: Given your experience at both the U.S. systems, and now in the Netherlands, I wonder what changes you'd like to see implemented. And you can answer this at whatever scale you want, whether it's sort of on the small scale, like a college campus, right? Are there recommendations you think that could improve health care access and the issues of resilience and things like that for students, or they're kind of bigger scale changes? Clearly, you're mentioning sort of the different kind of economic and social support models that's a much larger scale, but what are some of the smaller scale changes that you think could help improve student outcomes in times of real challenge?  Jyothi: So, one of the things that my institution did, because we were shifting online, we decided that the student's well being was central to that. And we weren't going to operate as a business as usual standard. So our Dean actually said, "it's okay if you want to cut back on content a little bit to ensure that whatever you teach you meet the learning outcomes, but you kind of focus on a few things and ensure that they learn those well." So that relieves a little pressure from us, but it also helps the students that they're not just moving from one task to another, to another, one topic to another. So I think it's recognizing at the moment what you need and for the students, it wasn't drilling content and more content into them. And so I think it was even in the initial stages of the pandemic we had from the institution and understanding that 80% is good enough. That we need to transition ourselves. Many of us have families, kids that were home, and it wasn't this expectation of you must work a hundred percent.  Jyothi: You need to be on calls. 80% is okay. 70% is okay. And part of that is, it's a different sort of job guarantee. In the U.S. you have tenure in institutions, but many of us here have permanent contracts. So after two years, you're generally up for a permanent contract, which means that it's really hard to fire you. But most people work really hard, so there's a level of trust. So with my husband's company, for example, he was locked down and worked from home, but it was also, they told him universally for the first two weeks, just make that transition to being at home, ensure that your kids are okay. And I think it's not just us as a university or college, it has to be multiple pieces of the puzzle to recognize that we're all in this together and working together. And it made a huge difference that my husband could take two weeks and we could kind of focus on the kids and we didn't have to worry about this and that, that we could kind of transition as a family into this new reality. Jolie: You've both studied, taught and worked at universities and cities around the world. I'm curious as to some observations you might make about similarities or differences with how different regions or nations provide mental health resources and support to students in particular. Mary-Jon: Something that we have both talked about is the stigma that is associated with mental health care and concerns. At BGSU, right before the pandemic, we participated in something that was called, The Healthy Minds survey to look at mental health factors on our campus. And some really interesting findings came out of that. So most of our students were experiencing mental health challenges. So about 60% of them were experiencing mental health challenges, but only about half over the time course of a year actually got treatment for their mental health challenges. So that's half of students going untreated, and the students by and large are reporting that those mental health challenges affect their academic performance. So about four and five of them are saying "these mental health challenges have affected my academics." Mary-Jon: And I think maybe the most interesting thing that came out of that survey for me was that almost no students said that they would judge another person for receiving mental health services. It was very small. It was about 4% of them, but 47% of people thought that other students, other people in their lives, would judge them for receiving mental health services. And when I'm thinking about that, that is the single biggest challenge is to mitigate that stigma so that we're getting students and we're getting members of the population at large connected with the services that they need. Jolie: How does that compare to your experiences, Jyothi?  Jyothi: So while we do have good overall medical care, I think mental health is one area that we don't do so well here. So there are waiting times, and it is a challenge to go and seek mental health care. And at my college, we do have student life counselors, but there's a limited number of sessions that you can have and schedule with the student life counselor. So once those are done, you do need to seek care outside of the college and getting and accessing that care, while it might be free, is a challenge. And even that, there are limits to how much the insurance will cover.  Jyothi: So in the Netherlands, they ask you to define whether you have a low problem, a medium problem, or a high problem. And then they decide how many sessions they think that you might need. So someone who has a low mental health issue, they might decide to give you 10 sessions, and then it just scales up from there. So while we do have a system that there are not barriers financially, there are other barriers. And so it has been a challenge this semester for some students accessing those services and part because in the country where we struggle with that in general. Jolie: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas podcast. Announcer: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie: Welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast. Today, I'm talking to Dr. Mary-Jon Ludy and Dr.Jyothi Thrivikraman about sleep, mental health, and resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health said that COVID is pulling a thread that is showing the very different conditions in which we live because of social structures that are inequitable both within the United States and between countries. By pulling the thread, it's revealing patterns that have long been known in public health. I think this really speaks to what we've been talking about. As we've seen, the pandemic has exposed and deepened racial, socioeconomic, and health inequalities. In the U.S. this is definitely true in the case of Black Indigenous, Latinx, and other communities of color, having higher rates of infection, serious illness and death. And we're certainly seeing that here with the disparate economic impacts of the virus. Do you also see differences in access to and the efficacy of self-care, sleep and resilience among members of at-risk groups? Mary-Jon: I would see some specific challenges to these BIPOC communities and challenges that I have experienced when working with my students are that oftentimes these communities are essential workers. So they haven't been given the same breaks or the same flexibility that lots of us have had for working from home and social distancing. So these communities are put at greater risk. And some of the students that I've worked with, they have had to continue working at their jobs because they are the only family member who's currently working right now. So even though they're trying to navigate the higher education system, they're also responsible for supporting their families. And I think that there's a good body of research to say that the BIPOC communities are also living with higher levels of day-to-day stress. And those experiences with chronic stress can have an effect both on mental health and on physical health. So it's a more vulnerable population. Jolie: Anything you want to add to that, Jyothi?  Jyothi: Yes. So we don't have the same categories. So for us, it's migrant, non migrant. And within the migrant category, we do distinguish between Western and non-Western migrants. So for non-Western migrants, so in the Netherlands, that would be Moroccans, Turkish. We do have a large Indonesia Surinamese population from the former Dutch colonies in Indonesia and Suriname. And in the first wave, they were not disproportionately impacted, but in the second wave they have been disproportionately impacted. In terms of whether they're essential workers or not, we don't necessarily have that. So it is much more of a mix between Dutch and non-Dutch doing some of those grocery store clerks, the other essential roles.  Jyothi: So it is a different mix here, but I would argue, yes, these communities have been impacted in other ways. So whether it's primarily suffering illness and death from that, but they might have impacts around food. They might be under employed, so the other secondary impacts. A lot of them may not speak Dutch. So accessing medical care, the shift to online education, if your kids go to a local school, everything was in Dutch. And so some of the parents have challenges understanding what is going on if you don't speak Dutch. And then there aren't very many support mechanisms to help non-Western migrants who don't speak Dutch right now. Jolie: We are recording this conversation in December 2020. So we're now a year out from the first confirmed cases of COVID-19. I want to ask a last question. What do you think are the most important lessons that you hope we are learning? What do you see as the best-case scenario for how this current crisis might transform our conversations around mental health and wellbeing? Mary-Jon, you want to go first? Mary-Jon: Sure. For me in the pandemic, I have seen the value of educational institutions. Bowling Green State University, often calls itself a public university for the public good. And I believe that the pandemic has made that mission even more clear. So I'm reflective. And I think about the pandemic as an opportunity to be part of the solution. Something that I think about with higher education is that it has a reputation for being a bit of a dinosaur. So we don't adapt very rapidly to change. And the pandemic was something that forced us to rapidly adapt to change. So we were able to transform our courses quickly online. We have been able to learn that we can work in hybrid course environments in hybrid work environments. And if we have students or we have faculty, or have staff who are experiencing challenges, that it gives us an opportunity to work with them in a flexible sense. Jolie: And for you, Jyothi, what do you hope we take away from this time?  Jyothi: I think to follow up on what MJ just said; I do think that it has opened up new possibilities from an educational standpoint, new ways of collaborating across institutions, amongst faculty. We've had guest speakers from around the world that we didn't even think were possible. And so, for exposure to students, that's been brilliant. We've also gotten much more creative about trying to design assignments, where students go outside of the building. So we don't just give them essays anymore. We say go safely or in groups of two with masks and go take photos and develop an essay. So we've started to think creatively about how education works and what's the best way for students to interact with the material. But because I like larger pictures, I do wonder because there is this talk about getting back to normal and some of the conversations we've had about structural inequalities, both in the U.S. and here in the Netherlands.  Jyothi: I do hope that we don't go back. I hope that one of the lessons that we learn is how to creatively engage with solutions and problems. To realize what we've been talking about, which is that we're people and that we need each other much more than we've realized. I think both the U.S. and the Netherlands tend to be very individualistic on some level. And one of the lessons that I hope and that public health is formed from is how important we are and how connected we are. And we sometimes forget that. And I hope the pandemic has made us realize our connections. Jolie: Yeah, I think that's so true. I think this time, and the challenge is so many of us have with social distancing, that feeling of isolation really does reveal that when we talk about public health, we're not just talking about viruses or bacterial infections or things like that. We're also talking about collective mental health, and the social fabric of communities and the need to really prioritize that. If we can get a man to the moon, if we can do this moonshot warp speed for a vaccine, why can't we have those same kinds of ambitions and success at really rethinking the social fabric of our communities to be more equitable? So thank you both so much. You wanted to add something? Mary-Jon: So can I add something? And I don't know where to throw this in later, I think many of the pieces of education and pieces of programming already exist, it's just getting people connected with those and something that's been really neat on our campus is we've had these dining robots. So these little robots that you can order and they deliver your meals to you. So that's something that happened on our campus right before the pandemic began and something I serve on this mental health awareness and education committee, and something that we were able to do was to get messages to students about support services, like the counseling center to be included in the dining robot. So when you get your meal, you also get a message reminding you of support services. Mary-Jon: I don't know that will work and actually help to connect people to the services. But I think we need to look at those unique communication methods. And another thing that campus is doing is Designing Your Life. So that's a book that came out of Stanford, but it's an approach. And it's been mostly used with mid-career professionals who might be unhappy in their lives. So to think about how to design more successful and more meaningful lives, but it's an approach that's really being considered for college students to think about designing their lives in a manner that will promote better balance and better self-care. Mary-Jon: So I'm thinking about some of these things that we discussed, and I'm thinking that if we have this designing your life approach, that part of that is thinking about how to bolster your resilience and thinking about how to set up healthy lifestyle behaviors. So I think about these pieces just being infused in all of the courses, and as faculty members, we're always putting together a syllabus design for course. So what can you put in there that can help to connect students with services and let them know that it's actually okay to access the services? Jolie: Listeners can keep up with ICS by following us on social media, whether that's Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook @icsbgsu. You could also listen to Big Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza with sound editing by Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by ICS intern, Morgan Taylor, with editing by Kari Hanlin. Musical Outro: Discussion.  

Jolie is joined by Dr. Monica Longmore and Dr. Wendy Manning, professors of sociology at BGSU, to discuss their National Science Foundation-funded grant to study social distancing compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also discuss how family bonds are being challenged and redefined in this challenging time.   Announcer : From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie: Welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we are not recording in the studio but remotely via phone and computer. As always, the opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Bowling Green State University is located in The Great Black Swamp, long a meeting place of the Wyandotte, Shawnee, Lenape, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Fox, Pottawatomie, Erie, Miami, Peoria, Chippewa and Seneca Indian tribes. We honor the rich history of this land and its indigenous inhabitants, past and present. Jolie: Today I have the pleasure of being joined by two guests, Dr. Wendy Manning and Dr. Monica Longmore. Wendy is a distinguished research professor of sociology who studies the increasing diversity and complexity of contemporary family relationships. She currently serves as Director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research and co-director for the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Monica is also a professor of sociology, she studies how individuals defined themselves along with self-evaluations of various personality components. Thank you for joining me today. Both of you in April, as well as Dr. Peggy Giordano, were awarded a National Science Foundation grant on the subject of the coronavirus pandemic predictors and consequences of compliance with social distancing recommendations. So, we've all been living with social distancing but you're, sort of, really thinking about the impacts of that. So, thank you for joining me today to talk more about this research. Jolie: Can you describe the research project and how it's evolved as this pandemic has continued? And generally speaking, how is social distancing connected to your own individual research interests relating to marriage and family relationships and adolescent development? Wendy, will you start us off? Wendy: Sure. It's a great pleasure to be here today, so thank you. What we're doing today is really based on a long-term, 20 year project and so, that really has positioned us to best understand what's happening with COVID. And we started this project back in 2001, we did our first year of data collection of teenagers who were living in Lucas County, Ohio and they were all going to public schools and so, it was a population-based sample. And we had about 1,300 adolescents participate in the survey and we have been following them all through their adolescence, all through their 20s and now they're in their early 30s. And so, we had just finished our sixth wave of data collection when the pandemic hit and so, we have these valuable participants who we really know a lot about their lives and we had just finished a data collection, focusing a lot on child well-being and because a lot of our respondents are now parents and we thought, how are our respondents doing in the pandemic? Wendy: So, we were considering about how we're doing during the pandemic but we were like, how are our people doing? And so, we decided that it would be really a unique opportunity to ask them, when we just finished interviewing them about child wellbeing and parenting, how are you doing now? And so, that's really how the project stemmed was. We thought we have all of this information for so many years about these respondents and there's a lot of polls and surveys that are going out right now but they're all cross-sectional. And they're just asking you, kind of, one point in time, how are you doing? But we really wanted to know, we knew how they're doing over their whole life course and what they were like prior to the pandemic and how that's influencing what they're doing now. So, that's, sort of, in a nutshell where we got the idea. Maybe Monica, you want to tell us about the actual, how it's going. Monica: I think Wendy's correct. I distinctly remember a conference call with Peggy and Wendy and we had just completed our data collection and the first polls were coming out and these posters were saying, "oh, everyone's depressed and there's problem drinking and there's child maltreatment" and Peggy, Wendy and I were saying, "relative to what? What's our baseline?" And we knew that we had those measures, not only did we have them but we had those measures going back many, many years. This is, in a sense, a natural experiment. We've been collecting these data and then this pandemic hits, so that becomes our stimulus, so to speak. What do people look like now? Did their problem drinking really increase? Did child wellbeing decline? Did depressive symptoms go up? Did anxiety go up? And how much so? Or is it the case that individuals who are already experienced in these problems, perhaps the pandemic amplified it? Wendy: And also the question of, who does better and who fares better during the pandemic? So, trying also to learn something about maybe targeting programs or targeting efforts to try to help folks out. So, the National Science Foundation had an opportunity, what they call the rapid grants, where they would review them very quickly and that's exactly what we needed was, we needed to get in the field soon, we could not sit around and think about this for a year. Usually we would pre-test, we would have a lot of ideas, we would write a long grant application but we really had to pull something together quickly but we were in a good position because we had just finished asking them a whole compliment of questions. And so, a big feature and something that our colleague, Peggy Giordano, has really been taking the lead on are, we do a fair number of qualitative interviews. Wendy: So, we interview people with an online survey but we also target different groups of folks and talk to them. And in their own words, find out what's going on and we've had different themes over time and so, we decided we really wanted to ask some questions about social distancing, about COVID. And so, you were asking about how this project changed. We normally would do those interviews face-to-face, we have a wonderful interviewer in Toledo, Claudia Vercellotti, and she, instead of talking to folks in person, talked to them on the phone, we couldn't be face-to-face. And so, the pandemic did change how we did our interviews and it gave us an opportunity, though, to talk to a wide variety of people. Not everybody was living in the area, we had over 50 of those interviews completed on top of our efforts to do an online survey with close to 1,000 respondents. Wendy: So, the online survey continues during the pandemic, so that is something that our respondents are used to. We initially interviewed them in person, the first few waves and then we slowly have been moving to an online format. They know us, they know what the survey is about and it allows them to do the survey in the comfort of their own home, when it's good for them. We're almost out of the field collecting data on them, so we started in June and we'll be hopefully completing at the end of October and about 80% of the respondents have agreed to participate. Jolie: That's really impressive. It really speaks to this long-standing relationship that you have. Monica, your research examines how people define themselves in multiple factors, including their identities, beliefs and experiences. How do you see the pandemic and social distancing protocols having complicated or changed or amplified how individuals, particularly adolescents and young adults, craft these self-definitions? Monica: Right. So, one of the areas I'm interested in is, what are the psychological resources that people have for coping with problems? Particularly what I'm calling stress-related COVID problems. And so, what I'm suggesting is that, individuals who started out with a higher sense of efficaciousness or sense of control over their lives, would better be able to manage COVID related stresses, things like having to homeschool, having to telecommute, financial problems and that those are the individuals that perhaps would be less likely to experience depressive symptoms, high anxiety and problem drinking because I was trying to think of something that's behavioral and that's of a concern to individuals. So, that's, kind of, the approach that I'm taking up and I'm just recently looking at that, the idea of what I'm calling positive parenting. What are the ways that parents can continue to provide emotional support in a sense of caring to their children? And then, obviously, what's the gendered component of that? Because one of the things many people know is that, when kids are stressed, they call for mom. Kids are angry, they call for mom. Monica: And so, it does seem like there's going to be a disproportionate workload for women, particularly in that emotional range, what they have to give and obviously then, something has to give. What is going to give? Perhaps work hours have to give, maybe standards for homemaking have to give, something has to give. And so, as we've said before, we need a base, we have to know what it was prior, we can't just go in now and say, oh, look, women are not working as much as they used to. Well, compared to what? That's the approach that we're always taking. In prior work, Peggy, Wendy and I, have also looked at this notion of uncertainty, whether it's relationship uncertainty. As you probably know, there's high rates of cohabitation. And so, we're interested in whether or not COVID, the pandemic, is making individuals less certain about their relationships. Or perhaps you realize life is short, this is not so bad and then obviously, financial uncertainty, what is the effect of financial uncertainty on psychological wellbeing? Jolie: Wendy, much of your research is about cohabitation and its relationship to wellbeing. And we know that due to social distancing, many of them are living in closer quarters that they have ever lived before. Do you have any early implications for short or long-term impacts for couples and families? Wendy: I think that's a great question and there's been a lot of speculation about that and we can all draw on our own experiences and thinking about how relationships can be strained during these times but also you might learn that this is really a great relationship for you. Wendy: And so, I think, initially a lot of people were thinking, we're going to see high divorce rates because couples aren't going to have any outlets. We don't know the answer to that yet, we don't know if more couples are moving in together. There was a thought that maybe in our effort to create a COVID bubble, you would have COVID cohabitation. And whether those relationships are going to be as stable as other relationships that weren't formed during COVID and so, that all remains to be seen. And so, that's what's going to be really exciting because we'll actually have some evidence about that and we really want to know the answers about that. We've done a lot of research on intimate partner violence and relationship quality and we'll actually be able to understand if there's a change in intimate partner violence or verbal conflict or relationship satisfaction. So, all of these elements of relationships we'll be able to see what was happening before COVID and what was happening after. So, we're interested in that. Wendy: Peggy is analyzing, right now, a lot of the qualitative interviews that we've done and she's finding, also that there's couples where there's not agreement about social distancing or about how to manage it and so that can be an extra source of stress. So, it's not just being in the same house together, maybe having financial pressures but also just the pandemic itself and how to manage it, can differ. And she's seeing a decision and I consider there might be more increases in that with the holidays emerging. So, how are couples going to deal with social distancing? And it's one thing if you're social distancing during months where there's not major holidays but eventually, I think, there's going to be additional pressure and strain on couples. So, we're using the surveys, we'll be using the in-depth interviews, so we're really looking forward to moving forward on that. Jolie: This team on this grant includes Peggy, who has a background in criminology, Wendy, you as a demographer and Monica with social psychology. Why was it so important for this project and this project in particular, as well as your research, generally, to bring together these different disciplinary perspectives? Monica: For all of our projects but this one in particular, I think that we all brought something unique to it. Wendy, of course, understands demographic patterns and I think that I brought to it, sort of, the theory of behavioral motivation and then Peg always has been able to really articulate problem behaviors. And what is life like for individuals who have more disadvantaged backgrounds? Whether it's economic marginality or perhaps a history of substance abuse or a history of intimate partner violence or a history of parental incarceration. And to contextualize it, her point is always, you can't just study family life without looking at how it might differ by these sociological variables. So, I think we've all brought something different into the project. Jolie: Monica, your research is so much about child adolescent development. Since most adolescents can't currently have the typical social experiences that define their stage of life, what are some of the questions you're interested in finding answers to about the repercussions or changes to adolescent self-definition? Monica: I think this is a tough time to be an adolescent. Part of it is developmental, that the process of individuation, where you're supposed to be separating from your parents and really looking more to your peer group for guidance, at least, in terms of popular culture kinds of things. And that has been completely turned on its head. Now, on the other hand, what young people have now that they haven't had in the past is the social network and Snapchat and FaceTiming and all of these different kinds of ways of connecting. And so, I suspect what we're going to see is that, kids are finding ways to separate from parents in ways that we don't even know because we're just not in the groove, so we have no idea how they are staying connected. But one of the other things I was going to mention but normally when we're thinking about health and wellbeing, usually the larger your social network, the better you are, right? Monica: Particularly because the larger the social network, the more likely you'll get the emotional support you need. And you can also give social support because of that norm of reciprocity. But what happens then when you have this large social network and you can't do it anymore. And so, one of the hypothesis that Peggy, Wendy and I have is, this may be one of those instances where individuals with the smallest social networks may actually fare better than an individual with a larger social network. Now, again, this is something, it's a preliminary hypothesis, so we have to still study that. Jolie: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas podcast. Announcer: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie: Hello and welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Wendy Manning and Dr. Monica Longmore about their NSF funded project on compliance amid social distancing protocols. Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified many, many of the aspects of systemic, racial and economic inequalities in the United States and around the world. We are seeing that racial and ethnic minority groups are at increased risk of getting sick and of dying from COVID-19. In regard to your study, how diverse is the sample in terms of ethnicity and the variables of disproportionality related to social distances capability? Wendy: So, that's a big question that we're interested in, is the idea that the pandemic is not experienced evenly across all groups. And so, there's people who are marginalized in terms of economics, in terms of race and ethnicity, we have folks who are marginalized, all kinds of domains. And so, we'll be able to consider that in our analysis because our sample reflects the population of Toledo. And so, we have a sample and we over-sampled on racial and ethnic minorities in our project. We have...Our sample also includes a fair number of folks of different economic standings and economic wellbeing, so that will be important. We have included questions about who's an essential worker or not, so we'll have some understanding of what their occupation is and whether they've suffered economically due to COVID. We asked very direct questions about that. So, I think we'll be able to answer questions and find out ways that maybe some folks are better able to cope than others. Wendy: And so, that's what we're hoping to learn is that, while the pandemic is going to hit some people harder, people might have different kinds of resilience. Maybe if they have different kinds of social networks or different kinds of engagements in their relationships. So, we don't know the answer but it's a good one. Monica: I would add to that, that we also know a little bit about their social experiences, in particular. One of the questions we asked is, do you know someone who came down with COVID? And then a second follow-up question is, do you know anyone who passed away from COVID? And so, I think that those are questions that really get at the lived experiences. Jolie: What are you hoping your research might reveal about community and cultural factors for compliance with social distancing protocols? How are you hoping that your findings might help public health officials and others to better communicate around particular pandemic protocols but maybe also about qualities for resilience, more generally? Wendy: I think that's what makes our project really exciting because we feel like we've done a lot of research over the years but we've never researched something that's so time-sensitive and such a crisis, that's experienced by everybody. So, we're hoping that we will learn, who is resilient, who is able to maybe cope. We assume everybody is stressed, how that differentially impacts some folks versus others. And so, we're trying to reach out to broad audiences. One of the missions of NSF is that you have a public engagement component of your project and so, we are very invested in that. And so, we look forward to speaking to people in our community about what we find but until we know our findings, we don't know what the solutions will be. And so, right now, some of the solutions are, sort of, generic, it's, sort of, a one-size-fits-all and the messaging has changed a lot over time. Wendy: I know already that from the qualitative data, that it's complicated, that people have complex rationales for their behavior and they're appropriate for them in their life. But we're really excited about making a difference. We're just not sure exactly how that's going to happen. Jolie: I'm wondering if, because of this time, you are also thinking differently about getting some of your findings in the hands of your subjects. Has that been a subject of conversation amongst the three of you co-PIs on this project? Wendy: We don't have a specific plan, at this moment, to share the findings with the subjects but we definitely are thinking about new ways of sharing the findings through social media and we have hopes that then, we'll be able to reach out to our respondents. We typically do not correspond directly with our respondents, unless it's about interviewing and about the project but as many of them have participated over the years, I'm sure they've Googled us and they understand what our project is. Sometimes we talk about what some of the findings are, we really want the respondents to know that they are valuable to us because only they can represent their lived experience, nobody else can, we can't replace them with somebody else just like them. So, if I was just doing a big survey, I could just say, oh, here's a 20 year old person who's in college, I can just find another person like that. So, they're very unique and special but we're hoping, not only our respondents but the broader community, as they represent the community, we'll be able to speak out to them. Monica: One of the other strategies we've done on this project, more so than any of our other projects, is the involvement of undergraduates in the research process. Through the CFDR, I was able to receive a small grant to hire, I think it was about, five undergraduates, to work on our project, to help with the transcription. We met with them weekly and they were just fabulous. And, in fact, was so successful we're doing it again. We also have several students, undergraduates, who are doing research projects that will be present in their research projects, on campus, at one of our undergraduate conferences. And we're just given thought to, how do we take it to the next step? Is it possible that not only are the students transcribing and critiquing the data and writing about it, is there a role to actually train some of them to be part of the interview process? Is that something we can do as a next step? Monica: And so, that's as a research team, that we're trying to do is, bring research to the level of the undergraduate so that they are active participants in it. And with this particular project and because they were all home, it was not hard getting really bright, enthusiastic, students to work with us. Jolie: A group of researchers from the University of Maryland, coined the term quarantine fatigue, to talk about the decline of people observing social distancing protocols, as the pandemic has grinded on. Through their research, they estimated around April 15th was when some of that fatigue started to set in. Do you have any advice that you would give to those who are experiencing quarantine fatigue but are trying their very best to comply with social distancing guidelines? Monica: Quarantine fatigue is nothing new, I'm thinking back to research that Peggy, Wendy and I did during the HIV epidemic. And it was very similar, kind of, thing, in fact, they sometimes call it zigzag compliance, where you comply with safe sex practices and then it goes down and then you comply and then it goes down and it does get exhausting. And I think the message just has to be the same. You have to wash your hands, you have to social distance, you have to wear a mask. And I think that the constant reminder is the only thing, I don't know what else can work. Jolie: How are you two, personally, holding up in this challenging time? What are some of the strategies that each of you has taken to, sort of, deal with the additional stressors of social distancing of, sort of, higher alert around health and wellbeing, things like that? For you Monica, what are some of the strategies you've maybe ramped up or shifted compared to before? Monica: No matter what we're doing in terms of our research, I'm always the one who says, let's just remember, everything will take more time, nothing takes the time we think it takes. What used to be 15 minutes is now an hour and a half and we have to give ourselves that break. And I think Peggy, Wendy and I have been fortunate with this long friendship that we connect a lot, we talk a lot. In terms of my own personal life, I live out in the country, I have, maybe, three friends. Once in a while I'll go into Bowling Green but I'm pretty much at home. Jolie: What about for you, Wendy? What is this time look like for you and how are you coping, maybe, differently than before? Wendy: Well, I think we're working at home, so as faculty, that's different. We are engaging with students in different ways. And, maybe, we're having more intense and even sometimes more emotional conversations with students as they are trying to cope and deal with COVID. So, I think, you feel like you might be making more of a difference for some people who are having a hard time and I think we all, as faculty, feel a responsibility for that but at the same time, we all face our own struggles. And so, trying to think of activities that you can do, to get outside, I went camping, so some things like that. I thought I was past the years of camping but I actually slept on an air mattress on the ground and it was not bad. Wendy: So, I think, we're all doing a lot of Zoom calling with family and friends. So, I had a Zoom call on Sunday, with people from all over the world I had went to a international high school, so people were in Japan and Israel and Houston and London. And so, I think sometimes we're reaching out to people in new ways and connecting more, so I think that's helpful. I play online Euchre with my in-laws, once a week, so that I have a card game. It's almost the same as being there, it really feels almost the same. We never did this before the pandemic. So, Monica and I both have dogs, so we spend a lot of time with our dogs. Monica: And I also had a huge vegetable garden this year, it's just so classic, just like you see on television. I had a huge garden and every weekend I'm canning something. And when I do go to-- Wendy: --About bringing me a can. She dropped off at the shops, she goes, I was in town and I left you some salsa, I'm like, great. So, I benefited. Monica: Yeah. Yeah. Jolie: Thank you so much for joining me today, Wendy and Monica. Listeners, you can keep up with other ICS happenings by following us on Twitter and Instagram at @icsbgsu or on our Facebook page. You can listen to Big Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound editing by Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by Kari Hanlin. Thank you all so much. Musical Outro: Discussion.

Jolie speaks with Dr. Steven Cady, the Director of the Institute for Organizational Effectiveness at BGSU, and Professor Charles Kanwischer, Director of the School of Art. They discuss collaborative leadership during times of crisis and the lessons we’ve learned about adaptive teaching, effective communication, and more.   Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and The Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie: Welcome to the BiG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and Director of the ICS. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we're not in studio, but are recording remotely via phone and computer. As always, the opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Jolie: Bowling Green State University is located in the Great Black Swamp, long a meeting place of the Wyandotte, Shawnee, Lenape, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Fox, Pottawatomie, Erie, Miami, Peoria, Chippewa, and Seneca Indian tribes. We honor the rich history of this land and its indigenous inhabitants past and present. Jolie: Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by two guests, Dr. Steve Cady and Professor Charlie Kanwischer. Steve is the director of the Institute for Organizational Effectiveness at BGSU. He's world-renowned for his expertise in organizational behavior and development, specifically with the focus on whole system change. His current work involves collaborating with others to develop the best of both online and in-person learning environments. Jolie: Charlie is the director of the School of Art and a professor of drawing at BGSU. He's a six time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. In his administrative role, Charlie studies data to determine what students need to succeed in online learning environments. Steve and Charlie, thank you for joining me today to talk about leadership. Well, the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly exemplified the need for the kind of work you do to model collaborative leadership and meet the needs of students, faculty, and staff to deal with this swiftly changing academic landscape. Steve, could you start us off by talking about how your work was immediately impacted in March when the university moved to distance learning and what changes you made? Steve: So my work is on two levels, one is in the classroom with my students and then on the second level is my work with my colleagues, you two, and others at BGSU and beyond. On the first level, I immediately talked with my students and when I saw what was coming on the horizon, that we'd likely close down and we'd likely shut classes or go into a online setting, I talked with my students and I talked to them about various scenarios. I talked with him about scenarios in the class, "If we go online, this is what's going to happen. This is what we're going to meet online. This is how we're going to make it work. And this is how I'm going to handle the class, how we're going to handle your learning as well as your grading." And those kinds of things, and really made sure they had their questions answered. I also encouraged them to think about how they were going to handle it, what their scenarios were and what they were going to do. Steve: And I gave that advice to some other faculty that I was talking to, and they did that. And they said that it was pretty amazing that all of the sudden, when it happened, their students knew what to do, where to go. It's kind of like that emergency, like in a fire or whatever, where do we meet? Where do we regroup? That kind of thing. So that was number one, that was really important. Steve: And the second thing is I sent a note out to my friends and my colleagues and people and said, "Let's get together and support each other. What can we do to help each other? What can we learn from each other? How can we help each other and get better ideas on what to do in this moment?" What emerged from that was 170 people instantly showing up, signing up. We met on a Wednesday, over a hundred people showed up, I said, "You want to meet on Friday?" Another a hundred people showed up. "You want to meet on Saturday?" Another a hundred and something showed up. "Want to meet on Sunday?" Another a hundred and something showed up, and we were meeting almost every day, and then we started meeting weekly. And what came out of that is the importance of community and the importance of supporting each other. And the use of Zoom and the use of video conferencing to be able to see each other, while not ideal, it does work. Jolie: How about you, Charlie? How did that transition play out both in your role as a professor and as Director of the School of Art? Charlie: Well, it was on us so suddenly, that's what I remember. We were face to face one week... I guess we were reading news reports, we were sort of seeing, sensing this freight train coming at us, but then it was us in a rush. And I can specifically remember a faculty meeting, we called an emergency faculty meeting, when we understood that we would be closing down for what I remember was presented to us as two weeks. We were going to take a two week pause, we were going to suspend face to face classes for two weeks. And I remember really the sense of disbelief and the sense of trepidation that the faculty expressed in this meeting that we conducted to sort of figure out where we were going with the reaction to the initial shutdown. Charlie: And then it was an issue of, well, two weeks became a month, right? A month became the rest of the semester, the rest of the semester shaded into getting ready for the fall and knowing that we would have to prepare over the course of the summer. So a big part, I think, of my relationship with the faculty that I'm directing, the faculty that I'm working with, it was kind of leading them through the gradual amplification of the situation, sort of approaching it in stages. And I can remember faculty talking about, "What, if this happens, what if that happens? Have you read this article? It's telling us we can't engage in this set of behaviors anymore, we can't engage in these kinds of teaching practices anymore." And I remember going back again and again to the ideas, here's what we know now, here's what we can put in the firm column. This is something that we have a little bit of certainty about, it's not a whole lot, but we have to use that to begin to project into the future. Charlie: So what I found, I guess, was that leading the school at that moment was not just about the moment, it wasn't just about the situation we were in, in that particular moment. It was trying to create, I guess, the right kind of mental attitude, the right kind of response toward an inevitably shifting unfolding future, if that makes sense? Jolie: When you are dealing with a moment of such profound uncertainty and constant change, right? That the information, the decisions were not being made once and then decided for a semester, but that week by week, day by day, there might be changes needing to be made, that a big piece of what was effective was actually being really transparent with students and with colleagues about what is known, what isn't, and the fact that there are going to be lots of things the answer is, "I don't know, great question. Let's figure it out. Let's talk about it." Jolie: I think it's interesting that that's so important because the tendency, I think a lot of folks have during a time of crisis is to feel like what is demanded of them when in leadership positions is to be decisive and create structure and to be sort of rigid, and that, that is going to be more comforting to people. Could you talk, Steve, maybe a bit about what your own research interests in change management reveals about how people actually best respond to stress and change? Steve: Yeah, people support and defend that which they helped to create. And what's interesting is when we're in a learning environment, learning by its nature is about failure. It's about trying, taking risks in a safe space and learning at a deep level. And so when you look at collaboration and you look at leadership, we have spent how many centuries in rows and aisles in classrooms, where you sit and you're talked at, you raise your hand when you're talked to and you rewire the neural pathways in the brain to learn to be very much a linear, responsive thinker in which you don't think for yourself. Yet, the core value of education is we want to empower and inspire students to be leaders, to go out in the world and to be thinkers and to solve problems. Steve: So tell me one organization that you go in and sit in rows and aisles, when you go out and work? Show me one place where you're going to sit and be talked at and only speak and answer questions and regurgitate or repeat what you've been taught, so prove that you know what I'm talking about by repeating it back. Give me one example where that's life, it's not. Steve: And yet we spend from early childhood, all the way through college, and what's changing now, active learning, engaged learning is really... the flipped classroom, it's all coming back. But for years, and we're just now starting to get to it, for years that's all we've done. So now we create conditions where people go into the work, they sit and they say, "Tell me what to think. Tell me what to do. Where do I go? And what can I do?" And it's like automate. It's appalling to be honest with you. Steve: So change, if you want to teach people and you want to lead truly innovative, exciting places where people are joyful, wrestling with ideas, bringing their whole self into a situation. Bringing their mind, their body, their spirit and emotion, they don't just check their brain at the door and be told what to do, and don't share their emotions because it's not an appropriate and they can't be themselves, and they're taught that at school. And before you know what they go home and they have relationship problems because there's emotionally detachment from their kids, from their wives, from their husbands or partners, whatever it might be. And we have created an instructional education system that I think teaches us to be half-brained and half-human. And I think that we are now on the cusp, on the edge of a renaissance in terms of unleashing the whole human being into what is possible. And that is being advocated by all the learning and so forth. Steve: So collaborative leadership or leaders who are in environments and changing environments, they've been taught they have to have the answer because everybody keeps telling them to have the answer. It's not their fault and it's not.... And people might say, "Well, you should be transparent. You should be..." Well when they're transparent then the people that are followers take it out on them, passive aggressively, use the information against them, say that they're weak. It's just feeding into the same formula. Steve: Then there's a few brave, wise leaders, and it's beginning to emerge and it's coming out in the science and the research that the whole brain is necessary for great leadership. And you get leaders that then step out and step into that space. And they lead and they engage people and they let them fail and learn, they call it fail forward now, they call it the training, letting people fail forward into new learning and innovation. Bringing diverse groups together, it's easy to collaborate when you're with the homogeneous group, but you take a diverse group, it takes a lot longer to get to a place of functioning. Who wants to take the time to get there when you're in a hurry to show results. So leaders have got to be willing to step out and allow followers to push on them, to test them, to see if they really believe in this new kind of leadership that they're bringing forward. Charlie: Yeah, I think that's a really good answer, identifying creativity as an integral element in leadership. But from our point of view in the school of art, it kind of goes without saying, our issues are a little bit different. We are a collection of makers, studio practitioners, and our practices are based on trial and error and adaptivity and iterative, and we're used to work arounds and coming up with alternative solutions when one solution isn't working. We have that culture, we're in possession of a culture, in lots of ways has stood as well in this crisis, going back to the pasta makers and the glass pipes and all the at-home kits that faculty were putting together for students so they could work away from our studios. That creativity was in abundance. Charlie: Where maybe we face a little bit of a different problem than what Steve might be referring to or what might be going on in the more traditional academic areas on campus is our need is to harness that creativity in some way, to take all those people flying in different directions and help them establish a sense of collectivity, of collective purpose, of collective response to the situation that we were facing in the spring and that's ongoing. Charlie: Not that we want everyone to be on the same page, we embraced that variety is a strength, that diversity as a strength. That diversity not just of media and all the different things that we teach in the school, but diversity of intellectual approach, conceptual approach. It stood us very well but the difficulty as a leader, the challenge as a leader has been to arrive at consensus in the midst of all that diversity. Consensus on certain policies about how we're going to conduct our classes, consensus about the most effective modality for teaching a given discipline. It's been interesting. I've never believed more strongly that the culture that you move into the crisis with is the culture that sort of determines the response to the crisis. If we have a strong sense of community, if we have good communication, if we have a sense of transparency and fairness in the school moving into the difficult situation, then it seems like we're much better prepared for the unforeseen, the sorts of things that a crisis like this is going to throw at you. Jolie: I think one of the things you're both talking about is in some ways, and this has come up in other conversations this season in talking about the pandemic, is that it has created certain opportunities by throwing us off our well entrenched habits, right? And it's forced those in positions of authority, teachers in classrooms, directors of departments or schools to acknowledge and to have to model adaptability, creativity, a willingness to say, "Yep, I got that wrong. Okay, let's regroup." And then that becomes empowering for those, whether your students or it's the members of that department, school community to say, "Oh, I see my leader modeling this thing, okay, I can try and fail too." Because I think a lot of times what happens is we say we want our students to be creative, to take risks, but then we, in the position of authority, actually don't really demonstrate our own flexibility and willingness to take risks. It's like, "Well, I've had this assignment, I know how it works, I'm going to keep doing it this way." And this moment has made that really impossible in ways that are kind of freeing at times. Steve: I'll just say what's empowering in that is when a faculty member partners with the students and intentionally invites the students to partner with them in finding a new solution and saying, "Let's figure this out together." Students have been super helpful. Jolie: Yeah, they know things that we don't, right? And they often really do have an understanding of how to make better use of digital environments, of other ways of communicating and connecting. That can be really transformative. Steve: You start a class, you open a Zoom and you say, "Who can help me monitor the chat room?" And so if someone says, "Oh, I'll do that." And so they help you monitor the chat room and then I'll say, "Can you all summarize what's going on in the chat?" And then I say, "Can someone else do this here, and kind of help us pull up a screen and we'll create a collective document that we're going to work in." And someone will say, "I'll do that." And then so while they're doing that I'm focusing on this and we together are doing the class. Charlie: It's almost a cliche by now that we're not going back to the way things were before the pandemic, but we're also recognizing a lot of opportunity in that. The adaptations we've made, the flexibility we've demonstrated, the fact that we can offer content now in multiple modalities with different kinds of tools that faculty don't necessarily have to be present on campus, that they can be at home in a more flexible environment. Some of our faculty are actually in other countries, we have one faculty member teaching full-time from Canada right now, and another faculty member teaching full-time from Italy. They're both engaged in research projects at the same time that they're teaching and doing service. The kinds of technological bridges that we've been able to make, the kinds of technological structures we've been able to make are allowing a kind of flexibility and fluidity on the part of faculty that is unprecedented, we've never been in this kind of situation before. Charlie: We've also found that students who maybe are shy when they're in face-to-face critiques, unwilling to talk because one or two people are taking over conversations, we're finding it's much more democratic when they're online, that some of those shy students are speaking up. And actually some of the conversations that we're having around the work are more engaged, more robust than what we experienced in the face-to-face classrooms. Jolie: Yeah, there really is. In some ways there's a kind of leveling of some of those power dynamics in that move to the two dimensional screen where everyone could be a stakeholder and they can choose what kind of role that is, whether it's through the chat or speaking. I have a question for you, Charlie, about kind of your own work as an artist. How have you been impacted by this move and what is your working life like? Charlie: Like every artist I know, I've had shows canceled, opportunities that would have happened are not going to happen. In some cases canceled, in some cases postponed. So on a professional level, the pandemic's had a big impact just on the art world and the number of shows that are taking place, and the attendance at exhibitions, and galleries have had to close, museums have had to close. This sort of circulation that we take for granted in the art world has really been impaired, really been reduced. But when it comes to sort of daily working practice, and I try to work in my studio just about every day, when it comes to that, that has really been a source of strength through all of this. The idea that I'm going and doing this thing, making my work, even making progress in my work, feeling like the work has a different kind of meaning, a different kind of importance even due to the pandemic, due to the situation that's created by it, that's been really important. That's been really important. Charlie: That's been a source of, I don't know if it sounds like the right word, but solace or comfort, or maybe a better way to say it is centering. It's giving me a kind of a kind of groundedness that allows me to deal with the hyper fluidity of the situation. And I've talked to other studio artists, studio based artists who have said the same thing, that they've never felt more connected to their practice. I'm talking about the actual going to the studio, make the work, the actual execution of the work. They've never felt more connected to that than they have during this situation. Steve: And I would that for me, it's kind of interesting, I've yearned for that more because in my position and some of the things I've chosen to do, I have spent more time really busily holding the huddles and the other types of things. And I've noticed some of my friends have had that ability like you're talking about, and I've kind of yearned for that. I almost want to take some time to not be doing all these collaborative things. Charlie: That is your craft though, right Steve? You're a facilitator. You're a conversation sponsor. You're an expert at it, that's what you do. So in a way, you're exercising your craft, you're practicing your craft in a similar sort of way. Jolie: Well, and I think what that also points out too, is this moment makes in some ways more visible, all of the different human needs we have. This gets back to your point earlier, Steve, about kind of the whole student, right? We have to understand their material needs. We have to understand their spiritual needs. We have to understand all of that before we could really get to the intellectual. But it also, I think, for us as professionals, this has sort of made us realize, "Oh, I need more alone time." Or, "I desperately need more connection, that I'm feeling very alone and I need my colleagues. I need my relationships." And sort of forcing all of us to kind of identify, what are our individual needs for success? And if we recognize that, then we're in a better position to actually help our students and those we work with to similarly say, "Okay, what do you need to really feel successful, centered, balanced, able to do your best work?" Charlie: I guess what I would try to connect what we've just talked about to is the notion that, I see as one of my responsibilities is leader of the School of Art is to remind people, to urge people, to do everything I can to assist people in finding a sense of, I don't know if this is a word, but purposefulness, purpose in what they're doing. Because the pandemic has shifted, in all kinds of ways, not least of which is traditional outcomes for our work. For my studio practice, the places that I would normally be showing it. It's availability to people, and true for all the faculty. A lot of that has been taken away, and we don't know when it's going to come back and it's certainly not going to come back in the manner that it existed before. Charlie: But if you think about how that impacts students, we have students who are aspiring to be artists, students who are learning to be creators who want to succeed on a professional level. They're looking at the radical restructuring of the world that they thought they were entering, right? And it may even mean that some professional opportunities are closed off temporarily or shifted in different directions. So in the face of that sort of chaotic situation right now, the face of that unsettledness, it's more important than ever for students and faculty to remind themselves, what is this really about? What is this about at a deeper level? Why are you making work? Why are you putting so much effort into something that doesn't have the obvious outcomes anymore, and may not have the professional visibility that it had before? It really becomes about the work, I guess is what I'm saying. Jolie: About process, right? But it's about the process, right? Rather than the outcome. Jolie: What were you going to say, Steve? Steve: It's both in the sense that, there's a great book you may be aware of it's, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Charlie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), of course. Steve: And in that he describes people in Nazi war camps, completely healthy people died. Yet there were these other folks in the camps that weren't healthy, that were injured, and they survived. And he was trying to figure out as a medical doctor, how to help more people survive. And he said, one of the telltale signs that people were about to die was that they gave away their cigarettes, which was their currency in the camp. And what he found was that the people that survived regardless of their physical condition were the ones that had purpose, they had some work to continue. In the arts, they had an artistic project or book to write or something to complete, or they had something that they were living for, that they still had... They were yearning for, something that they yearned to complete and finish. Steve: And it was people who had that. So switch it to this. So I, with my students always ask them, "What difference do you yearn to make in the world? What is your profession, your career, your job that you're going to go after that matters to you, where you're going to feel a sense of purpose? How is this class and how is what we're doing going to serve you in going for that?" And I find that in this situation, if I can keep my students focused on the prize on the thing that they yearn for, in the midst of this it helps them to deal with the pressures. And if they're in community sharing that, that's the other piece, it's this community of support is critical. If anything I learned in this is that we have got to create small communities of learning, communities of support, build them, create them, start them amongst the faculty, amongst the students, amongst students and faculty, administrators, but we need to be in communities supporting each other. Jolie: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the BiG Ideas podcast. Musical Interlude: Question, answer, discussion. Announcer: If you are passionate about BiG Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie: Hello, welcome back to the BiG Ideas podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Steve Cady and Professor Charlie Kanwischer about leadership during crisis, and what we've learned about online instruction and communication. We've been talking about the importance of communication and collaboration, what are some of the factors you see that impede true collaborative leadership at the university level or in large organizations and institutions? Charlie: Well, the first words that popped into my mind were bureaucracy and budget. I don't know, the interrelatedness of those two things. Sponsoring interdisciplinary work, sponsoring collaborative work, it can be expensive. Asking the university to allow two faculty members to teach a single class and not simply double up the class, there's a cost to that. And you have all these sort of administrative structures and disciplinary structures that they just function better when everybody stays between the lines. When you're trying to cross over, when you're trying to work in between, lots of times the bureaucracy doesn't know how to categorize it, it doesn't know how to evaluate it, it doesn't know how to measure the outcomes that emerged from it. Most of the structures we have at the university are set up for measuring discrete things, categorizable things, and anything that seems to want to resist that or move outside of that. It can be difficult to do that if not even opposed. Steve: Yeah, and I would offer... My favorite African proverb is, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others." And there's a really good book out that's called Going Fast and Slow, and it talks about the brain and the brain science of decision-making and how people think. And you got your executive function, and then you got your instinctive portion of your brain, instinctive function, and the fight and flight, and those kinds of things. They call it system one and system two in this particular book. Actually it's interesting, you got the left and the right and the front and the back of the brain. And if you think about it, the back is about instinct, the front is about thinking and reflection and so forth, and slowing down. The left side of the brain is about order, logic, and the right side is about creativity. Steve: And so now you've got all these different parts of the brain that are engaged, and the biggest impediment is that people sometimes don't want to engage the whole brain. So they don't want to take the time, they want to go fast and therefore people want to go alone. Yet in order to go fast and to go with others, but to go alone, the only way you can go alone with others fast is through dictation, to dictate, to direct, to force, to coerce, to make the decision and put in place the mechanisms to force people to do it. That's the only way you can do that. And then you can maybe get people to move fast because we're in that school system structure that we've trained people for many, many years to sit in rows and aisles, listen when talked to, and move quickly based on the edict that has been given out. There's a lot of other impediments, but I would describe that as a core impediment that gets in the way of true collaboration. Jolie: Well, and that's the thing, that there are certain things that are happening fast, right? That we may have to react quickly, but what you're suggesting is if we really want to make these changes transformative and meaningful, then you're going to have to be willing to slow down, to listen to other people, to take time, to try and adjust. And it's going to be less linear, and that may be in the short-term frustrating, but in the long-term, you'll get further with it. Steve: What does slowing down mean? I'm slowing down right now. I'm only taking five seconds. I take a breath, I've slowed down. I can slow down in a half hour. It doesn't mean slowing down for months. It's painful to slow down. So if I move and act quickly, it's like, "Let's get this over with, let's get this over with..." And you watch a brilliant athlete who can just move and you think, "How do they do that so elegantly?" So I think there's a notion that fast means everything's right now and slow means everything's way out there. But actually you can move too fast in one day or too fast in five seconds. It's about how we slow down our thinking, slow down our presence, presencing and noticing, and slowing ourselves down for that situation as appropriate and moving at a pace that still keeps us moving forward. Jolie: One of the things we've seen with the pandemic is that existing socioeconomic and racial disparities have gotten much worse, right? And this is on the economic front, on the health front and the infection rates, death rates and the economic impact. So it can be hard to sort of talk about those intersectional dimensions in the work that we do, but how do you address the ways in which not only are some communities more impacted, but also some have greater voice? How do you ensure everyone gets a say and is heard, and that decisions are made with them in mind and with their shaping that, again, getting back to the fast and slow, when not everyone even has equal access to the conversation? Charlie: Well, that's been a hard problem because you're caught in this bind. You don't want to overburden people with communication. You have to know when to communicate and when not to communicate, and you have to have some discernment about what's important enough to communicate and what might not be so important that you might just be bothering people with too much communication. So I view it as one of the most important characteristics you can have as a leader is that sense of proportionality, what I called discernment a moment ago. When is it necessary, and in the interest of the people you're communicating with, to communicate with them? And what can I take on? What can I relieve them of? What sort of burden can I take off of them? Charlie: I think it goes back to the notion too, that inside of a entity, an organization like a school of art, you have to have pretty good governance structures and that means we have an advisory council of the leadership in the school that meets with me every week. And then we have regular faculty meetings and the separate divisions in the side of the school are required to meet regularly. So that throughout these governance structures, people feel free to share and to speak up and not only do ideas flow up to me, but they also flow down from me to everybody in the school. Charlie: I feel pretty good about the way that we've communicated with faculty. Of course, it's students, I think, that are more difficult to communicate with in this situation. We don't have good communication channels in the school right now for getting information out to students collectively. At the height of the pandemic back in spring, I was making fairly regular, consistent messages to the students through email, and even through video, trying to let them know what was going on. That's tapered off though through the summer and into the fall, I was getting feedback from students that email isn't really an effective way to communicate. Some of those emails had to be long, almost by necessity. And that certainly tuned students out pretty quickly when they see a long email, they're already ready to delete it. I had some experiments with putting together a sort of student council, a representative group from across the school that I would meet with regularly, but that was kind of sidetracked by the pandemic and the inability to get together. Charlie: So that remains a challenge, how we communicate with students, how we let them know what's going on inside the school. And then more to the point that you we're making, how we recognize who in our communities, of both students, faculty, and staff too, who's vulnerable, who needs that extra communication, who needs that reach out, that extra level of connection? Maybe it's not going to everybody, it doesn't have to be a blanket email, but I'm finding ways to have regular meetings with people who I know are at some sort of risk. And I am, by the way... See, I am seeing that, I am seeing the stress take different kinds of forms for faculty and staff that are really having an impact on their health. Jolie: Yeah, and I think, by the same token, figuring out how to build processes, not only to communicate to those communities, but also for them to learn from them, right? So my final question for each of you is, what bit of advice, or what would you like to see around thinking differently about practices and principles of leadership learning from this moment? Charlie, what do you want to take away? What have you learned or what do you want others in leadership positions to learn from this moment about how to better lead? Charlie: It's a great question and a very hard question to answer. I guess I would begin with... What you want to recognize, I think in any communication that comes from leadership is a kind of empathy, a kind of acknowledgement of the difficulty of the situation that you're in. But it has to be empathy that's based on particularity, if it's so generalized and if it's repetitive, if it's always the same phrasing, if it's always the same points being made, if you're always using the same vocabulary, what that's signaling to me is that you're not thinking about the particular qualities of your audience, the particular lived experience of your audience. That might require extra communication or more customized communication, sort of what we were just talking about with Steve, but I think it actually goes in the opposite direction if you don't engage in that sort of thing. It becomes a kind of perception that the leadership that's communicating with you is, it was kind of communicating through a template. Charlie: We talked about industrial scaled education, industrial scaled content delivery, there's industrial scale communication as well. And I think when you're communicating to a diverse community, a very heterogeneous community, everybody doing something different, having different sorts of experiences, that kind of more homogenous communication is off-putting, it can actually do more damage, I think, than benefit. Jolie: What about for you, Steve? What would you like listeners to take away when they think about leadership roles and how to be more effective? Steve: I think believe in the power and the wisdom of the group, individually and collectively to trust and believe that people will make better decisions together than you can. If you think you can make a better decision than the group you've lost your group. Charlie: I think that's a nice, succinct way of really describing what I was trying to get at in my statement, Steve. I think out of empathy is an acknowledgement of solidarity and an acknowledgement that you're all in it together and that others may have ideas that benefit the collective. And if you imagine that you've got all the answers or that this is all on you to solve, you lose the group right away. Jolie: I think that's a great place to end. So thank you both so much for this conversation. Listeners can keep up with ICS by following us on Twitter and Instagram @icsbgsu and on our Facebook page. You can listen to BiG Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts, please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound editing by Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by Kari Hanlin. Musical Outro: Discussion.

This episode is the final chapter of a mini-series focusing on the NEH-funded project "Toward a Pedagogy from Crisis.” Stevie Scheurich guest hosts and shares the personal stories of precarity and uncertainty for non-tenure track and contingent faculty members in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. These participants discuss how the pandemic brought to light pre-existing crises and economic insecurity within academia and share how they are navigating these challenges as instructors.    Announcer: From Bowling Green State University, and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Stevie: Hello, and welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast, brought to you by the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. Stevie: I'm Stevie Scheurich, a PhD student in BGSU's American Culture Studies program, and a graduate teaching associate in BGSU's Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies program. I'll be guest hosting this episode, which is part of a mini-series focusing on the National Endowment for the Humanities' sponsored project, "Toward a Pedagogy from Crisis: Adaptive Teaching and Learning at Bowling Green State University during COVID-19." Stevie: Due to the ongoing pandemic, we are not recording in the studio, but from home via phone and computer. As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved, and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Stevie: Bowling Green State University is located in the Great Black Swamp, long a meeting place of the Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Fox, Pottawatomie, Erie, Miami, Peoria, Chippewa, and Seneca Indian tribes. We honor the rich history of this land and its indigenous inhabitants, past and present. Stevie: For today's episode, we will be doing things a little bit differently. Building on our previous episode, featuring members of the grant team working on Toward a Pedagogy from Crisis, today, I will be talking to the non-tenure track faculty members who participated in the summer camp devoted to reflexive teaching and learning. Campers were comprised of graduate teaching associates and contingent faculty who experienced differing levels of precarity due to their positioning within academia. Stevie: Since we here at Big Ideas are big believers in the transformative power of storytelling, this episode will feature members of the Summer Institute sharing their personal experiences of precarity and uncertainty caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Stevie: I began by asking everyone about how the pandemic has brought to light preexisting crises and precarity within academia. These crises are disproportionately experienced by people who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, queer, and working class folks at all levels of academia. Stevie: I asked everyone how they saw these inequalities affecting their students and themselves as non-tenure track faculty. Everyone immediately began by reflecting on how their students were being affected. Megan Rancier, an Associate Teaching Professor of Ethnomusicology was concerned by major gaps in access to internet and technology. Megan: I think I've definitely noticed those inequalities kind of more outside the university than within it. But I think you're absolutely right that once we kind of all went into crisis mode, all of these obstacles, all of these inequalities, suddenly became much more obvious to people who previously probably were oblivious to them, like me. Megan: For example, I'll talk about one thing with faculty and one thing with students, and I'll start with the students because obviously when we shifted everything online, there was this massive assumption that the internet would just solve everything. It won't be any problem. Students are using internet all the time. They're good at it. They know how to use all of these different things. And of course they'll have access, because why wouldn't they? Megan: Then, come to find out, everybody was using the university wireless. Well, not everybody, but a lot of people were using university devices, people living in urban spaces, rural spaces, it didn't matter where they were, if they were not on campus, there was no guarantee that they were going to have access to a device or access to a reliable internet, and, in some cases, internet at all. Megan: In retrospect, it seems completely bizarre that we would have just made that assumption that everybody would be fine. Within a few days. It became obvious that everything was not fine and students started to fall through the cracks. So that was a huge challenge for everybody. And then you start looking around and realizing how many other challenges students are dealing with. Of you're in an apartment with eight other family members and they're all sharing the same device, or maybe you live in a situation that is not healthy or safe, you have that added challenge. Megan: All of a sudden the focus totally shifts from, "we need to make sure the students are doing what they're supposed to be doing, completing their assignments, doing what we ask them to do in our course syllabus, et cetera, et cetera," and all of a sudden we, faculty, are more placed in a situation where we're like, "Hey, are you okay? What do you need? Talk to me. Are you there? I'm worried about you." Megan: Suddenly it became a lot more human than I think a lot of faculty are used to being with their students. And that is very challenging, I think, for a lot of faculty, because I think sometimes we go into this sort of default mode of almost a little bit of a oppositional relationship with students, as if they're always trying to outsmart us and we're always trying to anticipate what they're going to try to do to get out of what we're assigning them, blah, blah, blah. And so there's this kind of Tom and Jerry dynamic a little bit. Megan: But when we get into that mindset, we forget about each other's mutual humanity, and I think that the COVID crisis and shifting everything to online and realizing the real problems that our students were dealing with outside of coursework, was a real wake-up call for faculty, that I think we needed. Stevie: Christopher Witulski is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Musical Arts who teaches ethnomusicology and world music. He's noticed that both the pandemic and the summer's protest for racial justice have prompted a broader discussion about how curriculum design can be used to either promote or push back against colonial and white supremacist structures. Christopher : Maybe that's telling that it's not very often that I sit back and think, what would the dream structure be for a system that is more equitable for everybody involved. The fact that that's not a conversation that we have is telling in its own right, and perhaps that's part of the conversation itself. Christopher : But no, in my department, we're actually trying to make some changes. I think there are a lot of things that we've noticed related to the COVID crisis in the spring, the shifty online learning too, and then also the issues, the obvious foregrounding of racial disparities and inequities that happened over the summer, obviously that extended far past that, but that became really clear and really focused in the national consciousness over the summer. Christopher : That's turned into, I don't know about other fields, but across music studies that's been something that every part of musical studies has been grappling with, this history of white supremacy, why we value what we value, what we teach, why we teach what we teach, how we do it. Because at the end of the day, it's all choices that we're making. We're valuing certain ideas and valuing certain content. Christopher : I personally don't care if you know Mozart's birthday, but this is a conversation I've been having with my students for a different class, how can you take these ideas about history and thread them into something that's relevant and compelling and helps us to understand the experiences that we are having here and now? How do we understand? When I teach world music, how do we look to other people around the world and see how they're interacting with music and each other, and use that to understand ourselves? Christopher : Maybe that's a little selfish, but how can we look at something that feels different, because that's what a lot of teaching is, you're introducing new ideas, and then using that to better reimagine ourselves? Stevie: Some of the people I talked to focused on how the pandemic's highlighting of existing inequalities has given us an unprecedented opportunity for improvement. Tiffany Scarola, an Assistant Teaching Professor in the English Department sees the pandemic and the major shifts in educational approaches that it requires as an opportunity for expanding and accelerating the work that has already been done to build just and equitable classrooms. Tiffany: I feel like for both me and my students it's been equally set, but I mean, there's always going to be issues in any form of education, whether it be higher education or K-12 learning, because people are becoming more comfortable with embracing their identities, which they should. We have accessibility now as opposed to it being disability previously, and we have the LGBTQI community. Especially BG, it being a safe zone, safe campus, things like that. Tiffany: It's just the fact that people are becoming more comfortable, but it's still this slow moving arch, because we just don't know what people are going to become comfortable with once they kind of define their identity. But before I definitely feel like a lot of those particular issues that students struggled with, especially with regards to identity, not just so much as in gender or binary identity, but in terms of having disability requirements and stuff like that, students with dyslexia, or I have a student who requires to be able to actually see my mouth physically to be able to listen to lecture, because I forget what it is that causes that, but that kind of need is something that I never would have thought of, especially now with having to wear my face partially covered when I do a physical lecture. Tiffany: But I definitely think some good has actually come out of the pandemic because now we're kind of, and I don't want to use the word forced, but it seems like the only term I can kind of use. We have to confront it and we have to realize it in a real way and in an immediate way. And some of the stuff that we've had to do to accommodate just kind of the general student population has very much had a positive effect. Stevie: While everyone was mostly focused on how the crisis was affecting their students, with a little encouragement I was able to get them to share how the crisis was affecting them as non-tenure track faculty members. Megan: Of course faculty were going through their own challenges. So shifting from the students to the faculty themselves, I think most of us are in the privileged position of not having to worry about equipment and reliable internet as much, although that is still a challenge for a number of faculty, especially part-time faculty who don't enjoy a full-time salary, let's face it. And they also have job precarity, as you mentioned, to worry about. Megan: I saw numerous examples of people trying to teach from home, but they had their kids there. Their kids were home from school and they're trying to juggle 50 different things. I mean, I realized how incredibly lucky I am to have what I have, just a quiet space. I don't have children so I didn't have to worry about that. And I completely sympathize with people who do because that just seems like such an impossible task. But yeah, a lot of pressure placed on faculty to suddenly come up with this completely new way of teaching that a lot of faculty just really were not prepared for. Megan: It makes sense. I mean, so many things you take for granted, just sitting in a room and talking to another person, you don't realize how easy it is until you're trying to replicate that experience through a screen with buttons and apps, and all of a sudden you realize, oh my gosh, I took this simple thing so much for granted, where I could say something and look at the other person to see if they understand, and now I can't even do that. That's such a simple thing, such a human thing, that technology really cannot fully replicate. Megan: The pedagogical experience, like pedagogy itself, is so dependent on that basic human interaction that I think a lot of us are still kind of struggling to figure out how to replicate that. Stevie: All of the campers I spoke with noted that the COVID crisis and the summer camp have encouraged them to bring a vulnerability and approachability that has helped them build stronger community in both their virtual and face-to-face classes. Here's Elena Aponte, Adjunct Instructor of Women's Studies and Academic Writing. Elena:: I think struggling with community was kind of an issue beforehand. It still is now, but I think post pandemic, we're a little more in this together. And I think difficult in terms of personal issues, my teaching persona and being a teacher has incredibly changed since the pandemic. And that's one of the things that the summer camp really helped with too, is just allowing us to be more vulnerable and allowing us to really engage more as a community with students, whether that's making sure to let them know that this is a safe classroom or just simply reaching them on a more personal level with the different things you can do as a teacher. Stevie: And here's Chris Witulski. Christopher : I think I have, but I'm not sure if it's a change from the student side or if it's a change that results out of my own thinking as I shifted during the camp. There were a couple of elements of the camp that I really appreciated, especially starting... The idea of creating a space for learning is not a super novel idea for online teaching. But for instance, I remember there was a moment in the camp where some of the assigned listening was about vulnerability and humanization and sort of humanizing yourself and trying to allow the students to be human as well. And that goes beyond the basic, here are a handful of strategies for icebreakers and building communities. It gets beyond that in a way. Christopher : For many students, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't matter. But I feel like I hope it does. Sort of being more human, being a real person, being vulnerable, being comfortable with that, sort of sitting within that and existing there. So yeah, in that sense, I do feel like there has been a change. I hope it's something that's reflected in the way the students are perceiving things. Stevie: Some campers have also noted that as much as technology can be a barrier, it can also help build a relaxed and supportive learning environment. Here's Elena Aponte again. Elena:: I think allowing them talking via chat is often really fun too. Because if you spend a lot of time online or interacting with each other like that, it is really fun. So it's been fun to teach that way too. And they are kind of way more supportive. I know in my office we have the motion sensor lights and sometimes if I'm lecturing my lights will just turn off. So they're used to me waving my hands at some point during the lecture to turn the lights back on, and they're really supportive about that. Stevie: Speaking of technology making and breaking barriers, Tiffany Scarola shared with me how she used Snapchat to help reach students who only have access to classes through their phones. Tiffany: In the spring, when we were first to go all remote, I had one of those students who was using his phone a lot for schoolwork, and I decided to use Snapchat as a mode of communication with my students. And I kind of sent it as a joke, "You guys can hit me up on Snapchat." And a bunch of them were like, "No, I really need it, because I have terrible internet, or I have unreliable internet, but my phone data works so much better." Tiffany: At the end of the semester, several of them remarked to me, "If you hadn't used Snapchat to send out messages about class, I never would have known when some stuff was due or I never would have known class announcements or never would have known these updates." Stevie: I concluded all of my interviews by asking the campers to share with me their wildest dreams about how this crisis could serve to restructure academia into a more just and equitable environment for both instructors and students. Answers ranged from changes in individual teaching practices to broad changes at every level of education in the United States. Tiffany Scarola emphasized the radical importance of bringing transparency to academia. Tiffany: This is something that I truly do value, pandemic or no, but definitely the pandemic I think would provide us the opportunity to embrace this, is transparency for real and not the manifestation, the falsity of it. I mean, because transparency is a real thing and people say the word, but they don't live the word sometimes with certain things. And I just feel like, if not now, when are you going to do it? Tiffany: Because that's how we break the barriers and realize that all of those members of those underrepresented groups can participate. If we are truly embracing transparency, then those groups will feel included. Of course, people identifying by their proper pronoun, all those things are so acceptable and great and I love that and let's keep doing that, but that's not all we need to do to create a completely equitable society, either in academia or outside of academia. Tiffany: I just hear the word transparency used in meetings and it's just like, but you guys don't fully embrace it, and that's part of why there's still a disconnect and why your students aren't getting the material, is because you aren't fully being transparent. Tiffany: I, for as long as I've been teaching, I think I've been teaching now at this level since, I want to say, like 2013 was my first year teaching academically at college level, and I have always tried to embrace the idea of transparency before it was a thing. Letting my students know about the things that I struggled with in school and the things that I struggle with as an instructor, letting them know, "Guys, I really messed up this one lecture thing from the other day, so forgive me. Let me backtrack on this," and stuff like that. Tiffany: Just being actually open with them, even down to how I design my Canvas shelves. When I do it, I put everything out there for them all at once, and I tell them, yeah, it's going to be scary and intimidating, but at least you know everything that you're getting into. And I try to make it so everything is just in the modules and they can just go on down the line and there's no, here's your to-do list for the week, here's this separate window where you can get all these readings from. It's like, here's all the readings and they're listed in the schedule in this order, so literally all you have to do is go down the line. Here's the assignment for this week and just go on down the line. As opposed to making them dig for the content. Tiffany: There's a time and a place where they should be doing that for source acquisition and stuff like that, but a truly transparent classroom means that we recognize all of those things and we allow our students to see that we are not infallible, because that's a big part of the problem with not just the underrepresented groups, but with the groups that are widely represented. They still feel that there's this really big distinction between the fact that we're in front of the room and they're on that side of the room. Tiffany: At one point, we were all on that side of the room and we need to recognize the real struggles of what happens on that side of the room, regardless of race, gender identity, any of those things. And it starts with us acknowledging the things that we have struggled with ourselves. Tiffany: Right now, people are more willing than ever to talk about things that they're struggling with, but we still could do more. In an ideal utopian society, yeah, it would be to not just say that I believe in transparency and to say that I create a safe space, to actually live up to saying the words. Because there's a big difference between saying that you embrace it and actually demonstrating it to your students. That's how you get through to them, and that's how you overcome crisis, whether it be in your education or in the real world. It's all the same. Stevie: Chris Witulski focused on the need for universities to build flexibility into their structures to encourage experimentation and to make systemic change easier. Christopher : This is something that I wish we were better at, but there are a lot of structural, really firm, multi-level structural boundaries to being able to make the kinds of changes that I think would be really helpful, whether it's in the area, in the department, in the field of study, in the classroom, at the university. Christopher : I think the hardest part... See, I don't even have an answer to what I would imagine a dream situation to be, because I'm having a hard time imagining beyond the boundaries that exist, you know? But I feel like oftentimes there are solutions that seem really clear and really straightforward, but then there are boundaries to implementing those that are frustrating and I think the sheer degree of frustration that exists keeps those boundaries in place. Those things prevent people from being able to carry out the kinds of changes that would make a difference. Christopher : In terms of a structure, I would love to see a more flexible university. I would love to see a more flexible system. We're trying to do that a little bit in our area. I would love to see stronger online systems. I would love it whenever I take an online class, I learned a lot because there were good things that I wanted to use instead of, I took this online class and I learned a lot because being a student in it was really awful for some reason. The camp was actually was an excellent example of something that gave a lot of models of how you can do this better. But a lot of times when I've taken online classes, they've been really painful. Christopher : I would love to see more flexibility for instructors, for the university, for structures, for students, more options, more ways to engage things, more ways to understand the ideas that we're trying to get across, more opportunity for choosing your own adventure, but not in a way that just sort of fits you within a different administrative structure instead, which is what it often turns into. You know what I mean? So a way to do that in a real powerful way at the core of imagining what the school is. Christopher : What that looks like, I don't know. I'd have to sit down for a little while and jot some notes down. Stevie: Elena Aponte emphasized how hiring more Black, Indigenous, and POC instructors will positively impact Black, Indigenous, and POC students. Elena:: I think the sense of humanity is really important, and if I was going to look to the future, I would definitely hope that that sense of humanity is put to the forefront too. And again, going back to my personal things in terms of justice and equity, making sure not to teach students a history of anything that's whitewashed. Elena:: Because in the Pathways Program, I do have quite a bit of students who are students of color, are first-time, first-generation students, and they may not be expecting their professors to even acknowledge that or understand that, and so I want to be able that I can. Elena:: It does frustrate me that I am, even though I'm half Puerto Rican, I'm still white, I'm also half white, so it's frustrating that I do have to teach students of color their history in some way. That is frustrating. So my hope for the future would be that there's more opportunities for professors of color to teach everything they want to teach, but also to teach students a history from their own perspective too. Elena:: I know we're seeing stuff with like the University of Chicago is offering, it's been a while since I've read the article, but they're offering this program specifically for Black scholars and they're getting a lot of pushback for it because they're saying, well, you're shutting out a huge demographic of students, et cetera, et cetera. But if we're looking at the world around us, it makes sense for them to want more Black scholarship, especially if we need to understand these issues for those of us who can't, or didn't before. So that's also something I'd like to see moving forward in terms of justice and equity, recognizing the Black, Indigenous, people of color, and that community and making more opportunities for them without making them feel guilty either. Stevie: Elena also pointed out the importance of equitable pay for non-tenure track faculty. Elena:: From a completely personal standpoint, more opportunities for adjunct professors as well. Better pay. Access to healthcare. I think adjunct professors do a lot of the majority of teaching core classes for universities. Same thing with graduate students. Graduate students teach a lot of core classes as well. They just need to be more publicly recognized for the work that they do. Elena:: We're well-educated individuals. A lot of us have masters degrees as well. And we're doing this because we love to teach, or we love the discipline that we've learned in, so it's only fair that we should get a little more recognition over what we do at the university, which I think will happen in time, for sure. Stevie: Finally, Megan Rancier pointed out the importance of equitably funding education at all levels. Megan: Now, if we're talking about my wildest dream, I would want to make university education free. I would want it to be accessible to everybody. And that would also require all the K-12 schools to be adequately resourced and equitably resourced, so that students come in with the same levels of preparation. Which, if you teach in any university, you realize that they are not. So that would be my wildest dream. Equal resource allocation to all K-12 schools, free college for everybody, adequate funding. Megan: My God, if you look at the decline in the state share of instruction to public universities, the institutions that the state is supposed to be supporting so that it has an educated workforce that can then go into good jobs so that they can then pay their taxes and fund everything that we need in the state, it's shocking how that funding has declined over the past few decades. Megan: I would love for this crisis to be a wake up call to state legislators, and even federal legislators, to reinvest in public education, because we need it. And we've seen how the pandemic has highlighted all of these inequities. Megan: But what my fear is, is that it might do completely the opposite, because we've had this economic downturn as a result of the pandemic and the knee jerk reaction seems to be, well, we've got to cut this, we've got to cut that. All of a sudden we're in austerity mode, when that is very short-term thinking. If we're thinking in the long-term, we need to be investing in education even more. Megan: Not to get on a soapbox or anything, but because of what I saw with inequal access to technology and resources during the shift in spring 2020, I would just like for that not to be an issue, those just simple barriers to an education. And again, it's true at the K-12 level as well. Megan: Every child, every student should have equal access and equal opportunity to the tools and resources that they need in order to have a shot at being successful. Because otherwise the inequalities will simply compound on each other and the gaps will become wider. We need to change the direction of the funding situation in education. So I don't know if that was a dream or a dystopia that I just painted for you. Stevie: With that, I'll leave you all to mull over your own dreams and ideas about what can be done to build a more just and equitable academia and educational environment for all. Stevie: I want to thank everyone who spoke with me for this episode. Listeners can keep up with the Tour to Pedagogy from Crisis Project and other ICS happenings by following us on Twitter and Instagram @icsbgsu and on our Facebook page. Stevie: You can listen to Big Ideas wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred platform. Stevie: Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza, with sound editing by Marco Mendoza. Support for this episode was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded the grant project, Toward a Pedagogy from Crisis: Adaptive Teaching and Learning at Bowling Green State University during COVID-19.

Dr. Powers teaches mass communication research, media literacy, media and politics, news editing, sports writing, and the multimedia reporting capstone course at Towson. As a journalist for more than 15 years, he has covered higher education, health, business, sports, media, and the arts for publications such as The Los Angeles Times, Inside Higher Ed, and MediaShift. His research interests are audience engagement and the impact of journalism; youth civic engagement and news/media literacy; and media and disability. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and the Journal of Media Business Studies. He graduated with a Ph.D. in journalism studies in May 2014 from the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where he was named the top graduate student in 2013-2014. He earned a master's degree in American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. Dr. Elia Powers Recommendation: https://kit.co/BecomingDisciplined/dr-elia-powers-recommendation Becoming Disciplined Information: Website: http://becomingdisciplined.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/becomingdisciplined Twitter: https://twitter.com/@path2discipline YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTWHSvpla2FwobDKDCYg3Uw Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/becomingdisciplinedonthegram Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Becoming-Disciplined-446211239265714

This episode, we talked with Professor Abram Van Engen, Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, about his research on religion and literature. His research focuses especially on seventeenth-century Puritans and the way they have been remembered and remade in American culture. Van Engen began his career with a study of sympathy in seventeenth-century Puritanism, drawing together abiding interests in the history of emotions, theology, imagined communities, and literary form. Those interests led to his first book, Sympathetic Puritans, and numerous related articles on early American religion and literature. Beginning with these concerns, Van Engen has moved from a study of the Puritans in their own place and context to an interest in the way Puritans have been recollected and re-used by later generations. Studying the life of texts and the effects of collective memory, Van Engen has produced a second book, The Meaning of America, along with several other publications that together study the creation and curation of American exceptionalism. Work on his second project was furthered by participation in the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis, where Van Engen has been leading a team to study the concept and creation of American exceptionalism through a history of the phrase “city on a hill.” That work has led to multiple related digital projects, all in teams with undergraduate and graduate researchers. Collaboration remains essential to his work, with co-edited journal issues, co-written articles, co-taught courses and working groups that bring together literature, history, religion, politics, and psychology. Van Engen’s undergraduate courses have included Literature, Spirituality, and Religion (a freshman seminar); Early Texts and Contexts; American Literature to 1865; Natives and Newcomers in Early America; City on a Hill (for American Culture Studies); and Morality and Markets (co-taught with the Business School). Graduate seminars have included Puritanism, Literature and Religion, Intro to Graduate Studies, and Marilynne Robinson. Van Engen is also the Director of English Graduate Studies as well as an Associate Professor of Religion and Politics (by courtesy). He received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2010. -- The Carver Cast engages with Christian faculty in higher education and highlights the work of those faculty to bridge connections between university, church, and society. In doing so, it seeks to disrupt the perceptions that Christians are “anti-intellectual” and that higher education is “anti-Christian.” Tune in for a wide-ranging discussion with faculty around the country, with mediocre production quality but excellent content! Penina Laker and John Inazu are Carver Project faculty fellows and members of the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, where Laker is assistant professor of communication design and Inazu is a professor of law and religion.

Fear often inhabits both wealth and poverty. How does viewing money and self-sacrifice through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus bring freedom and joy? Writer and speaker Marlena Graves, author of The Way Up Is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself, talks with Amy Julia about wealth, poverty, faith, and the freedom that comes from being filled up with God’s love.SHOW NOTESMarlena Graves received her M.Div. from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York and is pursuing her Ph.D. in American Culture Studies as she researches the influence American culture has on Evangelicals’ view of immigration, race, and poverty. Connect with Marlena: marlenagraves.com; @marlena.graves on Instagram, @marlena.propergraves on Facebook, and @MarlenaGraves on Twitter.“Money can’t buy happiness or joy or peace. We can use money that God has given us for God’s ways, but to think that [money by itself] is going to satisfy—it really doesn’t.”“The way of Jesus is to use whatever God has given us and whatever station of life we are in for God’s Kingdom.”“The only way I can love people, love my neighbor, is if I am in tune and paying attention to God.”“Prayer is putting your gaze upon God.”On the Podcast:Scripture: Amos 5:24; James 5:1-6; Matthew 13; Matthew 19:24; Luke 5:27–32; Luke 19:1-10; Luke 9:51-56; Mark 9:35; Matthew 25Rich MullinsPope FrancisPenny’s diagnosis of Down syndromeThank you to Breaking Ground, the co-host for this podcast.White Picket Fences, Season 3 of Love is Stronger Than Fear, is based on my book White Picket Fences, and today we are talking about chapters 6 and 7. Check out free RESOURCES—action guide, discussion guides—that are designed to help you respond. Learn more about my writing and speaking at amyjuliabecker.com.

Jen is joined by Marlena Graves and Tim Soerens for a great conversation about counter-cultural reading practices and listening to voices on the margins. Plus, we are excited to offer a book giveaway sponsored by InterVarsity Press! Check out the episode for details.Marlena Graves is a writer, deep thinker, and speaker passionate about the eternal implications of our life with God. She received her M.Div. from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York, and is pursuing her PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In 2014, she released her first book, A Beautiful Disaster: Finding Hope in the Midst of Brokenness. Her newest book, The Way Up is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself released last month with InterVarsity Press. She lives in Ohio with her husband and three daughters.Tim Soerens is a pastor, social entrepreneur, and co-founding director of the Parish Collective, a global movement which reimagines what it means to be the church in, with, and for the neighborhood. Tim has also launched sold-out conferences including the  Inhabit Conference. In 2014, he co-authored The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Transform Mission, Discipleship, and Community. His new book, Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are recently released with InterVarsity Press. Tim lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.Books mentioned in this episode:Beautiful Disaster: Finding Hope in the Midst of Darkness by Marlena GravesThe Way Up is Down: Becoming Yourself by Forgetting Yourself by Marlena GravesThe New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches are Transforming Mission, Discipleship & Community by Tim SoerensEverywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are by Tim SoerensThe Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways that Jesus is the Way by Eugene PetersonIn the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership by Henri NouwenThe Life of St. Francis of Assisi b St. BonaventureThe Complete Works of John ChrysostomStart With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon SinekAdvent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ by Fleming RutledgeFoolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture by Lesslie NewbiginSabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now by Walter BrueggemanActs: A Theological Commentary on the Bible by Willie James JenningsYou Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. SmithTattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory BoyleBallpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul GoldbergerBraiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall KimmererThe Harry Potter Series by J.K. RowlingWings of Fire Series by Tui T. SutherlandA Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill BrysonDignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris ArnadeThe Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel WilkersonCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel WilkersonBlue Highways: A Journey Into America by William Least Heat-Moon

In today's episode of the Zeitcast Jonathan is joined by Producer Joel Everson as they sit down with Marlena Graves to discuss her new book, The Way Up Is Down. In this conversation we hear Marlena's story from her childhood love for silence and creation to her adulthood appreciation of a more ecumenical faith, this episode is full of beauty and truth. We know you will enjoy it!Marlena received her M.Div. from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, New York and his pursuing her PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH where she is researching the influence American culture has on Evangelicals' view of immigration, race, and poverty. Since 2015, she has been an adjunct professor at Winebrenner Seminary in the areas of discipleship and spiritual formation. She has written for a wide variety of venues like Christianity Today's Her.meneutics Blog (now CT Women),Womenleaders.com, and Our Daily Bread. Marlena is a former member and board member of the Redbud Writers Guild. Currently she is a board member of Evangelicals 4 Justice, works in partnership with Freedom Road, and also belongs to INK: A Creative Collective. As a Puerto-Rican influenced by many streams of the faith, she feels as if she dwells on the borderlands of Evangelicalism.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sonofapreacherman/Visit Jonathan's Website: http://www.jonathanmartinwords.com/Watch The Zeitcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdHzTuNKhTK-AZjfmkxQiwwPlease rate, review, share, and subscribe!Edited and produced by Joel Everson

Racism in America doesn't only affect Black people. The centering of the white experience means that it has also affected Indigenous, Latinx, and Hispanic populations among others. In this episode, I talk with Marlena Graves as she walks us through some of America's history of racism and the easiest step locally to begin fighting against white supremacy and supporting people of color.Marlena Graves (M.Div), Marlena is a bi-racial Puerto-Rican. She is the author of The Way Up Is Down: Finding Yourself by Forgetting Yourself (IVP, July 2020), Enneagram 9 Daily Readings (IVP, Winter 2021), A Beautiful Disaster: Finding Hope in the Midst of Brokenness (Brazos Press, 2014), Who's My Neighbor: Loving Our Neighbors as God Loves Us (Discovery House Publishers), and over 200 articles in a variety of venues. She is pursuing her PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University with a focus on Evangelicals and race, immigration, poverty and possibly gender. She lives in the Toledo, OH area with her husband and three daughters.Website and Social Media LinksWebsite: marlenagraves.comTwitter: twitter.com/marlenagraves Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marlena.graves/

BiG Ideas, a podcast from the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University, is excited to announce The Enlightenment, a bite-sized podcast, written and hosted by ICS intern Taylar Stagner. In this episode, Stagner speaks with graduate students, and professors who share how the Covid-19 pandemic, and the campus shut down it has caused, have affected their lives as researchers and working parents. Jolie: Hello, you're listening to the BiG Ideas podcast. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green State University. This is not a typical episode. The conversation you are about to hear was recorded during the COVID-19 crisis, so you may very well notice a difference in our sound quality. You'll also notice that we've got a different format. We wanted to capture some of the incredible challenges facing BGSU students, faculty, and staff during this world historical event, as well as document some of the incredible creativity, resiliency, and generosity we've seen. Now more than ever, we believe it's important to hear thought provoking and inspiring stories about BiG ideas featuring members of our community. The following episode is one of several short form stories being produced and reported by Taylar Stagner, a master's student in the American Culture Studies Program and an ICS intern. We're calling this series, The Enlightenminute. We hope you enjoy it. Stay safe out there. Taylar: Research, draft, edit, submit, edit again. Resubmit, publish, research. Research, draft, edit, submit, edit, resubmit, publish research. Research, draft, edit, resubmit, edit, publish research. This is how you stay relevant in academia. It's a cycle of drafting and submitting to journals for publication. Constant research is how professors argue for tenure, master's students finish theses, and graduate students finally get the letters PhD next to their name. But what if a worldwide pandemic shuts down how people actually do research? With K through 12 schools shut down, kids are at home. Many research projects require in-person observation. And how do you stay calm and go with the flow when the whole world is turned upside down? Here at ICS, our director, Dr. Jolie Sheffer, is usually very busy with her own research and service projects, sometimes up to 15 projects at a time. But now, her energy focuses more towards her students' wellbeing. Jolie: Now, there was no guarantee that our students even have housing, that they have food, that they have enough money, those bare necessities, and even internet access to be able to participate in the classes. That priority list looks really different. So in some ways, I have fewer things on my plate now, but the stakes of those things feel much higher. Taylar: With a young child and a partner who also works from home, finding time to write is a challenge. But when Sheffer finds time to write, it becomes a necessary reprieve from the current circumstances. Jolie: I am trying to still write most days between 15 minutes to 30. There are a few days I've been able to get in an hour if my husband's able to watch my son. And that's actually been really helpful for my mental health. I mean, I really like losing myself in the research and getting back into those kinds of thorny problems that help me forget about COVID-19 and all of that uncertainty. Taylar: There exists so much uncertainty, especially with kids at home. Adam Cohen is a doctoral student here at BGSU. And the last couple months have been especially challenging because he and his wife recently had twins. Adam: Which they came three months premature. They were supposed to be born at the beginning of April. And due to some complications, they were actually delivered on New Year's Eve, 2019. So we've been in Cincinnati since then, because there's a really good children's hospital out here in Cincinnati. And they've been in the NICU, which stands for neonatal intensive care unit. Taylar: So obviously, taking care of his family is the priority. But with everything up in the air, Cohen still has to think about his dissertation and how COVID-19 might disrupt his original plans. Adam: Generally speaking, my research is in media studies, particularly audience studies. And for my dissertation, I've been researching what I call electoral spectatorship. So I'm looking at debate watch parties at bars during the 2020 presidential election in the US. Taylar: And there might not be another public debate to get together for the rest of the 2020 presidential election. Cohen might be able to switch his research to online watch parties, but that pivots away from what he was really prepared to study. Adam: But it's a completely different conversation than the one that I was previously in. And it kind of unfortunately cuts out some of the stuff that I was most interested in, like the intertwining with consumerism. I'd have to say, I really don't know. So I'm still kind of hoping that it doesn't fully come to that, but it might. Taylar: Stevie Scheurich is also working on their doctorate. They study gender and feminisms, and Scheurich is in their second year. Stevie: My focus is just kind of shot because everything is so up in the air. There's just so many variables that I can't really do anything about. And I'm coping. I feel pretty calm most of the times, but sometimes just trying to get my brain to think in a straight line or to sit down and do my task for more than 10 minutes at a time, it's just not cooperating. Yeah. There's time, but I feel like I'm moving slower. Taylar: I asked Stevie about how some academics are excited to get more work done with all this newfound time at home, but Stevie doesn't see it that way. Between their responsibilities as a student and a graduate assistant for ICS, this time just feels like a practice run for more unstructured time to work on a dissertation. Stevie: I feel like it's an illusion of more time. I still have the same amount of tasks to do in a day. I just have more agency when I get to choose to do it. And for me, I feel like this is kind of a nice dry run for thinking up dissertation time, because that is unstructured time as you find. Hopefully, there's not a global crisis happening during dissertation as well. But if I can do this, then I can sort of manage that as well. Taylar: In order to cope with all the uncertainty, Stevie has taken on the mentality of a familiar aquatic creature to help remind them it's okay to go with the flow. Stevie: One time, I went to the Shedd Aquarium and they had a jellyfish exhibit, and there's just this circular tank. And I guess they don't really move on their own. So they were just circulating the water in a circle. They're just at the whim, floating in a circle. And that's sort of how I feel, if that makes any sense. I'm sort of afloat in the ocean. Don't have a lot of power myself. So I'm just letting the wave carry me where ever. As long as I'm staying afloat, I guess, that's important. Taylar: During such daunting times, we can all take notes from jellyfish. The whims of a global pandemic have shaken all of us, but now there isn't so much to do other than ride the waves with fellow jellies to more certain times. During our next episode of Enlightened Minute, we speak to administrators at BGSU who are wrestling with how next year will unfold. I'm Taylar Dawn Stagner, and I hope you've enjoyed reaching Enlightened Minute. Jolie: You can find the BiG Ideas podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. This episode was written, researched and produced by Taylar Stagner with editing by Stevie Scheurich. Special thanks go out to Marco Mendoza for his extraordinary sound editing in challenging conditions.  

In this special COVID-19 episode of the BG Ideas podcast, we talk with Dr. Lori Liggett, who researches popular images from the women's suffrage movement. Liggett is a Teaching Professor in the School of Media and Communication and a Spring 2020 Faculty Fellow.   Announcer : From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG ideas. Musical Intro: I'm going to show him this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie: Welcome to the Big Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies, and the Director of ICS. This is a special episode of the podcast, which we are recording during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means we're not in the studio, but are talking via phone and computer. Our sound quality will be different as a result. Jolie: But now more than ever, I thought it was important to share with you some of the amazing work being done by members of the BGSU community. Even, or especially when conditions are challenging, we need to recognize and celebrate great ideas. As always the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved, and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Lori Ligate, a Senior Lecturer at BGSU in the School of Media and Communication who's teaching and research focus on gender and visual culture. She's a spring of 2020 ICS faculty fellow who is doing public scholarship focused on images of womanhood in popular media during the era of women's suffrage. I'm really pleased to get to talk with you today, Lori. Thank you for being flexible and joining me, virtually. Lori: Thank you. I appreciate it. Jolie: To start off, could you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in studying the era of women's suffrage? And what have been some of the more interesting and surprising directions that this research has led you? Lori: Right. Well, basically I got involved in studying the suffrage movement about 25 years ago, and it wasn't my original intent. I was studying women's service magazines of the late 19th century. Women's service magazines are things like Godey's Ladies Book, which was one of the first one. Then you segue into things like Good Housekeeping. Lori: I was interested in motherhood, domesticity from a sociopolitical point of view. As I was doing decades of looking at literally every issue of Good Housekeeping, I started seeing this pivot from talking about new household technologies, and cooking procedures and new techniques for mothers, and into more political stuff. And immediately I was hooked. And of course, I knew a little bit about the suffrage movement, but I hadn't seen it within that context. And it shocked me, because there were actual literary essays that would appear in the service magazines. Lori: I also started seeing it in advertising, just references were popping up everywhere. And when I really got into it was probably around the, I would say, 1908, 1910 issues. When you started seeing, and remember this as Good Housekeeping, references to militarism, to women becoming militant, to radicalism. Now, this is Good Housekeeping. I guarantee you, if you were to go to the newsstand today and pick up a Good Housekeeping, you would not see anything on radicalism and militancy. I was shocked. Lori: This was largely due to what was going on in Great Britain at the time. And a leader in Great Britain, one of the leaders, is the famous or infamous Emmeline Pankhurst. And the British movement had become militant at that point. We started to see the beginnings of that in the American suffragist movement. I just never imagined I would see it in Good Housekeeping. So that's the origins of it. Jolie: And what were some of the elements of your research that surprised you most? You said that the language of militancy, but what about some of the visual iconography? Lori: Well, I expanded from there over the last 25 years, I guess I would consider myself a media scholar, but I really focus on visual culture and visual communication. I've always been attracted to the images of things. When I study media, I'm interested in mediated images. And so I was already studying advertising. Lori: This was a long way to get to the bicycling stuff that I'm doing now, but I am a fanatic about the art nouveau movement, which was late 1880s, at full steam in the 1890s, less popular, but still very prevalent up until the start of World War I. I started seeing images of women in advertising that was very much art nouveau style, but would have a political element. In a lot of those images, I noticed that they were using the bicycle. And so you would see women on bicycles, advertising everything from soap to cigars, to carpeting, to flour. Things that had nothing to do with bicycling, but you would see a woman and a bicycle. Lori: I was just fascinated by that. And I started collecting images of women on bikes. Basically, what I was doing, I was downloading JPEGs, and just keeping an archive, trying to figure out what to do with it. At some point, I would say probably in the 1970s, definitely by the eighties, and certainly the nineties and throughout, you started to see more scholarship on the suffrage movement that wasn't what we would call traditional history. Lori: I was a grad student in the nineties, and so looking at material culture and the sociopolitical angle of political culture, it sort of brought everything together for me. So we've got these visual images, we've got advertising, we've got women's politics, we've got for some reason the bicycle, which I didn't understand at that point. And really a couple of decades later, it leads me to the project that I'm working on now. Jolie: Tell us a little bit about some of that research, and what have you discovered was the role or the purpose of all of that focus on the bicycle? What is the connection to women's voting, and changing women's rights? Lori: I had to backtrack and learn a lot about bicycle history. I'm certainly not an expert, but I know a lot more about bicycle history than I did, let's say nine months ago, let's put it that way. And so the bicycle itself is just a fascinating global phenomenon. Today we would look at a bicycle and almost all of us, regardless of gender, of where you live in the world, the bicycle has been part of your life at some point. There's reason for that, which is that the bicycle represents the first device that permitted human beings to self mobilize. Lori: In the 1600's, there are images of people on these things that kind of look like a bike. People were imagining something along those lines. But it takes until about, I think the date is 1817, and you have a German guy, his name was Karl Von Drais, or Dryas probably. He developed this thing called a running machine. Now what was the running machine? They were also called hobby horses, or dandy horses. Another name based on his name was a Draisine. What it was is it was something that looked like a bicycle, two wheels. There was a plank that you would sit on. Lori: You would straddle it, sit on it. And then with your feet, almost like Fred Flinstone, you would move it along. It took decades of improvements until you get to the 1860s. And you have something that the French developed, which was called the boneshaker. The boneshaker was called that because it was incredibly hard on the cyclist's body. Lori: At the time these devices would have been made out of wood and steel. The tires, there was no tire the way we think of it. The wheels were made out of iron or steel. And so if you wrote it, it was just shaking every bone in your body, so it was called the boneshaker. And there was a woman's version, which was called the tricycle. They develop these three-wheel devices, extremely heavy, extremely expensive, not to be ridden in public. But only wealthy women who had private space, so garden space, would ride a tricycle. It said that Queen Victoria had a couple of them. And they were pretty popular amongst the wealthy. But you did not see women riding a tricycle out in public spaces. Jolie: Well, so fast forward a little bit to how does that get associated? How do these new technologies and improvements to this, get associated with ordinary middle-class and working-class women? Lori: It's interesting you say ordinary because the bicycle, the one we think of with the big wheel and the little back wheel, that was actually called the ordinary. And that was developed in the 1870s. It was called a high wheel or an ordinary, and it was considered an improvement on the boneshaker because it was light and it was fast. It was extremely difficult to maneuver. Riding schools were set up. Lori: But you actually had women, particularly in the beginning, French women who started almost performing on these high wheelers. They would come to the United States and perform as almost circus acts. And they were working women. They were women who were not from the upper classes. They tended to wear clothing that was considered back then a little scanty. And they were seen really as spectacle, as an oddity. Lori: In the late 1880s, you have something developed that's called the safety. The safety is really the progenitor of the bicycle today. And almost immediately due to a guy in American named Albert Pope, he imported the safety. He bought all the patents for it, and he started marketing like crazy. And Americans started buying the safety. Just a couple of years of the safety coming to the United States, bike manufacturers started doing something they called the drop frame so that women could get on to the bike. Lori: Women took to it like crazy. And in the 1890s, you have something that was called the bicycle craze. And it truly was this phenomenon. I don't want to bore you with details. But just to give you an example in 1885, you had six bicycle manufacturers in the United States, just six, and they were producing about 11,000 bikes a year. In 1895, there were 125 manufacturers. They were producing a half a million bikes a year. A year later, it was a million bikes. Lori: What happened is, oftentimes the bike is seen as this great democratic equalizer of the classes and gender. We had all these social reform movements. By the 1890s, the women's suffrage movement had been pretty much in full swing for almost 50 years, with peaks and valleys, of course. But things were different. Lori: There were new technologies. Technologies in communication, transportation, mass media. Newspapers were the most popular form of communication, and the price of a newspaper had dropped. The relationship there is that the ability to find out about these devices was available to almost everyone, whether you were in an urban area or a rural area. And bikes became prevalent in the streets. Lori: Now, not everyone liked them. A lot of cities imposed bans, and there were bands against women riding bikes. One of the things that ties to the suffrage movement is that during the 1890s, so you have the bicycle craze, but you also have probably the, I don't know if I'm would say the height, but the beginning of the strength of the suffrage press. Lori: And as there were mainstream and regional, national newspapers all across country, suffrage leaders started publishing their own works. And there were many. I think in the 1890s, there were something like 30 different suffrage publications. And these acted... Of course, they were political, but they were also quite social. And they serve the purpose of creating community amongst women who are geographically separated, and also maybe not have the same political mindset. Lori: A lot of women probably had not heard about the details of a lot of political organizing that was going on. Or perhaps it had always been treated as this anomaly, this strange thing on the side that was going on. But the way we do social media today, it's very difficult to think about, that someone would take the time to write a letter to the editor, then wait for a month, and get the response. But it was really the way that women communicated. Lori: They would write in a question to the editor and then people would respond with helpful tips in. It was really sort of an exchange of ideas. And you had things that within the suffrage press that certainly were talking about the issue of suffrage, and other social reform issues, but bicycling, or cycling in the 1890s became one of the major topics of conversation. Lori: That's what women wanted to know about. They wanted to know things like how do you ride a bike? How do I get a bike? How much do they cost? What do you do when people harass you, and jeer at you and throw things at you and call you names? Which were all things that happen with great frequency. And the suffrage press played this incredible role in bringing women together in a political way, in a community way. Lori: And also the specific thing, which was the bicycle. Jolie: 2020 marks, the hundredth anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote. What are some of the things we might take for granted now that back then really posed major obstacles to the women fighting for suffrage? Lori: If we look at... The marker for the women's suffrage movement is 1848, the Seneca Falls convention, out of which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and a hundred other people created something called the Declaration of Sentiments. The purpose of that conference, or convention, initially was not for women to gain the right to vote, or even to advocate for the right to vote. It ended up, they discussed that. But it was really the whole women's rights in general. Things we take for granted. Lori: Women during that time period could not serve on a jury. They had no legal rights. They could not own property. They did not have the right to their own children. They did not have the right to divorce. And all of that is based on the United States, adopting a legal system which was based on the English common law system, which is called coverture. And basically what that says is when a man and a woman marry, they become one person and that one person is the male. Lori: The woman's identity was figuratively, but legally and economically merged into with the male. She really was the property if she was single, of her father, if she was married, her husband. And it was really that, that the women's rights movement began to address. And out of that, then the very soon realization was if you don't have the right to vote and you don't have any means to influence lawmakers. You don't have access. Without access you have nothing. Lori: And I think today we are still fighting for so many rights to access, but we don't realize that the most fundamental rights were not ours, except for the people who are part of the suffrage movement for 72 years. And of course today, again, it's people all over the world and people who identify all different ways, who are still fighting for access. Access to self-governance to a voice in governance, to the financial systems, economic systems. So there are a lot of parallels to today. It just seems very diffused today. You know, it's much more diffused and, but yeah, we owe them a lot. Jolie: Many of us have learned some of those major figures from the suffrage movement, but there are many more that are less well known. Do you have any particular figures or key moments in history that you'd like to draw our attention to that maybe don't get covered in the one chapter or that one paragraph in a given textbook? Lori: Right. There is a lot of work going on today to look at individual stories that have not been told about the suffrage movement, and to look at particular demographics within the suffrage movement that before this have not been discussed. Of course, African American women, Native American women, and women of color in general, Asian Americans, immigrants, people who were not fully Americans were part of the movement from its very inception. Lori: We know some of those famous names. We know Harriet Tubman. In fact, there was a movie that was just out about Harriet Tubman. A lot of the black women who were involved in the movement in the early years, came out of the abolitionist movement, as did almost all of the early white women came out out of the abolitionist movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott who's my ancestor, by the way, Susan B, Anthony. Lori: Those are the names that we know. They all started as abolitionists. They were anti-slavery reformers. Sojourner Truth, who gave the famous speech, "ain't I a woman," in Akron, Ohio. And she was really talking about rights in general. And I don't want to pare down what she said too much, but I encourage anyone to watch some of the reenactments that have been done. I think Alfre Woodard does one. There are quite a few famous black female actors who have reenacted, not necessarily in dress, but the voice, the speech of Sojourner Truth, it is powerful. Lori: You also have so many women who are involved that are much lesser-known, but not during the time period. Ida B Wells, she was a famous person, anti-lynching activist, and journalist. Mary Church Terrell who I believe got her degree at Oberlin College, and was an educator and very well known in the movement. Lori: And then there are all the women that you would see them as the set actors in a movie, in a documentary where you don't know their names, you don't know who they are. But the movement took just thousands and thousands and thousands of people. I mean the movement was 72 years long. It was multigenerational. The two of us, we would have been in the middle of those generations. We would have had mothers and grandmothers, and daughters, and nieces. It was multigenerational. The earliest women in the movement never lived to see the 19th amendment. That always makes me very sad. Lori: But Lucretia Mott died, I think, in 1893, I think that's the date. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I want to say about 1904, something. Susan B. Anthony, a couple of years after that. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, all these people, they didn't actually... And this was their life work. This was their job. Lori: And so I think that we... I teach a narrative structure in scriptwriting for television and film. One of the principles that I always try to explain to my students is we never want to look at a movie and say, "Well, it's not as good as the book." The movie is a snapshot, and those snapshots are typically, they become engaging when we have what we call a representative character. And so what's happened is the most well known white women of the suffrage movement have become our representative characters that have taken us through the movement. And now in the last 20 years, it's been about expanding that snapshot. Let's go down all these different avenues. And I think when you study visual culture, you study material culture, you look at visual communication. You start to see that the snapshot is a very, very, very... It can be a very full portrait of all of the people who were involved, including men. of course. Jolie: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the big ideas podcast. Announcer : If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact ICS at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie: Hello and welcome back to the Big Ideas podcast today. I'm talking to Dr. Lori Ligate about the Centenary of women's suffrage. Lori, we've been talking a lot about the past and about rediscovering this history. What relevance do you think this story has for our own times? Are there particular points of struggle that today really signify the challenges to women's participation in US politics and governance? Lori: Well, I want to answer that probably two ways. And I'll start with something that is on everyone's mind today, which is that the women's suffrage movement at its endpoint in 1918 was the great flu influenza pandemic. I'm not an expert in that by any means, but of course I've been reading about it recently with regards to the women's suffrage movement. It was sort of a light bulb one day when I realized, I'm doing all this work and I've got all this timeline in my head. And someone mentioned the 1918 influenza pandemic, which I knew that was the year, I was aware of that. I'd never put the two together and thought, "Wow, what did this do to the suffrage movement?" I mean, we have to remember that was a catastrophic global event. In United States, alone, 675000 people died, worldwide 50 million. Lori: And so I look to see what other scholars and journalists have written about this, and actually, Google it, there's some really interesting information to be learned about the women's suffrage movement, and the 1918 flu pandemic. It almost derailed the movement. I don't think it's too far fetched to say that we here in 2020, a hundred years ago, we are very lucky that somehow these women and men were so organized, and had such a machine in place that somehow they were able to overcome this catastrophic world event. And just two years later, less than two years later, 18 months, really the 36th state, Tennessee ratified the 19th amendment. But it almost derailed it. Lori: I read something recently. What it said is that one of the things that happened, we know that during World War I, just like World War II, many women moved into the workforce because the men were away. What I didn't realize was that because the flu pandemic, that also contributed women going into the workforce. Now that need seems antithetical to what we think. But so many men were away during World War II, and then you've got this pandemic. Lori: Women were working as nurses, even if they weren't nurses, they were doing nursing type work, moving into the workforce in a way that had never happened before. Soldiers were coming back from the battlefield and bringing the influenza with them. The death amongst American soldiers was higher than any other population. And so there's all this interconnection between this political movement that had been going on for 70 years and this global pandemic. I think about today when everything has stopped, it seems like. In reality it hasn't. There is still activism that's happening. Right now we're talking probably more than decades about the Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment grew directly out of the women's suffrage movement. Lori: The sad thing about that now is that we have now surpassed the number of years that it took for women to gain the right to vote. We have not yet attained the Equal Rights Amendment. I think that's sort of a great parallel for today is that, we have so many more mechanisms in place. I mean, what we're doing today, looking at each other awkwardly, in real-time and using several devices to hopefully record this. Now we have devices, technology, means to communicate, and to have a voice that the women and the men back then did not. And the activism that's happening in terms of equal pay, equal access, and I guess just generally equal rights is continuing must continue. And however long this pandemic takes, we can't be derailed by it. Jolie: Talking about the current pandemic. You were on fellowship with ICS this semester, so you were already released from teaching and service, but how has your life changed? Granted, what was already supposed to be a restful, and research focused semester? What has happened to you? Lori: Anticipating that you might ask that question, I've run through many scenarios of how I would answer it in my head. Because the first thing I want to say from a very sincere and genuine place is how much I have appreciated being given this opportunity to do this fellowship. I started really last summer. I forget when it was announced that I got it. I think it was a semester before that. But really last summer I started putting the wheels in motion. I taught a class last semester on the women's suffrage movement. And I went at this full steam. Lori: This semester with not having to teach, and not doing service, the goal was to get out into some archives. I love doing archival research. I wanted to see the bicycle museum, which is located in New Bremen, Ohio. There are quite a few archives that are within driving distance. And so I think that was the first thing was the realization, and I'll be honest, it took me probably like a lot of this, quite a few weeks to realize that probably wasn't going to happen this semester. A lot of archival materials today, thank goodness, are digitized. When you really start looking at things specifically, you realize that a lot of things still are not digitized. So that's been difficult. Lori: As you know, the two primary requirements of the fellowship are the public community presentation, which for me was a scheduled for March 28th. And I would have been doing a very visual, public-friendly, community-friendly talk on the suffrage movement and the impact of the bicycle, and vice versa. Of course, that was canceled. Lori: And then the other thing that just breaks my heart is the Ohio Humanities for the last, I don't know how many years have sponsored a series of Chautauqua programs in Ohio. This was meant to be the last year of Ohio Chautauqua. And this year there were two planned, and one of them was in Rossford, Ohio, which of course is very close to us. And pure coincidence, the theme was Voting in America. I found out about this, I thought I was dreaming, I contacted them and basically forced myself upon them, and met with various people. So we started meeting, I was on the Chautauqua planning committee. I forget how many meetings we had. I think I had a preliminary meeting to meet the director. And then the committee met at least two times. Lori: And it was this great group of people. There were two of us educational types, or educator types on it. But we had the parks and rec guy, and we had the woman who is the local historian, and we had librarians, librarians are good for everything, librarians. Lori: And so this committee of about 10 people, and the Chautauqua was planned for, I think it was the second week, was a five-day event planned for the second week in June. We had five, I study documentaries, so we call them social actors. But I guess in the Chautauqua world, they are a re-enactors. They are the actors that play certain characters from history, coming from different parts of the country. I was working with the League of Women voters and they were going to... And I think I was going to do it too, I was sort of getting my nerve up to dress as suffragists, and to have a parade. And we were going to have voter education materials, and end of the story, it was canceled. Lori: So there is some hope that it could happen in the fall, but I don't know how much that's hope and how much that's reality. That's the way it is. And so I've had to pivot in the work that I'm doing, and go back to doing more secondary source staff, sort of get my wind back a little bit. And I'm going back and looking at some of the 1890s poster art that I love. I'm looking at that from perhaps a 19th-century taxonomy of women. There's still so much interesting work to be done, but it's been disappointing. But I've got a good compared to a lot of people. So I can't be overly disappointed. Jolie: We've talked about this a bit, but about how this movement overlapped with a world war, a different pandemic. As last thoughts for our conversation, is there any kind of lessons we can take, that you would want us to take away from the suffrage movement, managing to persevere in the face of long odds, and many internal and external challenges? Lori: I guess what I would say is that what history teaches us is that the reform movements, social and political, economic, whatever I'm using reform sort of broadly, they succeed if people don't give up. And we have to remember that there are always going to be ebbs and flows to everything. I try to tell myself this personally. There are ebbs and flows to everything, but if you keep going and your commitment is there, the success will eventually come. Lori: Now, whether or not the people who begin the movement live to see it, that's another thing that seems very sad. But what becomes most important is the work itself. And I have experience in labor organizing and that sort of thing, and what I will say is, and this is contrary to what we're taught from a self improvement, that every individual makes a difference. Lori: I think when we look at history, it is always the collective. It is always the collective. We see individuals who stand up, and they become our representative figures in that part of the history. But if you explore further, it's usually a collective that may come after that individual, who takes up the cause and keeps it going. And so power in numbers, I guess, is what I would say. And we will get through this pandemic. When you look at the numbers from 1918, you look at things going back to the black plague, bubonic plague, all those, they wiped out huge numbers in the population, and you wonder how the human race survived. We will get through this, hopefully with not the catastrophic events or the effects of 1918. And so the work has to continue. The activism has to continue, and we've got the tools and mechanisms to make that happen. Jolie: Thank you so much, Lori. It was really great to talk to you. Lori: It was nice to talk to too. Thanks. It was good to see you, too. Jolie: I know, lovely to see you. Yes, we can't be there in person, but this is as close as we can get. Lori: Yes, absolutely. Jolie: You can find the Big Ideas podcast on Apple podcasts, Google play Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. Our producers are Chris Cavera, and Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by Rex Light with editing by Stevie Scheurich. Special thanks go out to Marco for his extraordinary sound editing in challenging conditions.  

Dr. Peg Yacobucci, professor of Geology, and Blaze Campbell, PhD student in Bowling Green's higher education and Student Affairs, discuss their work on the nearly $1 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation's Advanced program, which is committed to increasing the participation of women in STEM fields.   Transcript: Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of culture and society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Music: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. Jolie Sheffer: I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American Culture Studies, and the Director of ICS. Today we're joined by Dr. Peg Yacobucci and Blaze Campbell. Peg is a professor of geology here at BGSU and the principal investigator and project director of a three year nearly $1 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation's Advanced program, which is committed to increasing the participation of women in STEM fields. Jolie Sheffer: Blaze is a PhD student in Bowling Green's higher education and Student Affairs program and the Graduate Assistant on the BG ALLIES team. Jolie Sheffer: The BG allies program aims to develop systemic approaches to increase gender equity for faculty and STEM disciplines. To accomplish this BGSU ALLIES is developing models and policies to train faculty allies to reduce biases that impede the career advancement of women and other minoritized faculty. Jolie Sheffer: Peg and Blaze, thanks for joining me today. Peg Yacobucci: Thank you so much. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Thank you for having us. Jolie Sheffer: Let's start out with just some basic explanation of the grant that you received from the National Science Foundation. What is its purpose and who is it targeted at? What existing problems is it trying to solve? Peg Yacobucci: So the BGSU ALLIES project is seeking to address some of the barriers that women and other minoritized faculty in STEM disciplines here at BGSU face in terms of their career advancement. Our preliminary research data collection efforts have shown that women and minority faculty are not represented in our applicant pools for faculty positions at the same rate they are earning PhDs. Peg Yacobucci: We also found that especially at the mid career level, associate professor level, women in minority faculty are stalling out. They're less likely to go up for full professor, they're less likely to move into leadership positions in particular. And all of these things seem to be tied to some systemic and interpersonal issues, reflecting biases that are serving as barriers to women and minority faculty here at BGSU. Jolie Sheffer: This initiative has a two pronged approach that is about both inclusive leadership and faculty allies. Can you talk about the goals of each aspect of the project? How do they relate to each other? Peg Yacobucci: So research has shown clearly that in order to really transform an institution of higher education, you need to work both bottom up and top down. So the faculty allies portion of our project is focusing on how we can work with faculty within STEM and social science departments here at BGSU to learn more about some of these barriers that women faculty face, and to learn specific strategies to address things like microaggressions and the everyday biases and barriers that faculty face within their own departments. Peg Yacobucci: The inclusive leadership piece is really focusing more top down, working with faculty administrators. Chairs, and directors in particular have a really strong influence on what happens and the work experiences of the faculty in those units. We are also working with Associate Dean Steen's and working with the Provost to look at institution wide policies and practices that may need to be changed in order to reduce those barriers to women. Jolie Sheffer: Blaze, what does it mean for you to participate in a project like this, especially as a graduate student in your PhD program, what drew you to this work and what are you getting out of it? Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: It means a lot. And so prior to entering my PhD program, I worked in student affairs within higher education and so a lot of my interest has always focused personally and professionally on issues of social justice within higher education. However, all of my research professional experiences, it was really centered on students and getting them to form their ally ship development and how staff can really be instrumental in that approach. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And so when the opportunity presented itself to be a part of this program, I was drawn to it, one, because it gave me an opportunity to learn more about the academic side of things, and issues facing faculty roll in. So I see myself going into that role, probably after this. And so learning how I can see some of the structural ways women in faculty roles, what they face in the barriers, that was something that I really wanted to learn more about. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And then secondly, as I spoke to... So, presenting, doing workshops, facilitating ways to engage people around these topics is something that I'm really passionate about. And so, getting to do that for faculty and learning how people are doing that in an effective way to really foster ally ship within the faculty and academic side of things, was something that I really wanted to be a part of. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And Peg is my direct supervisor. And so I primarily work on the faculty ally side of things. And it just so happens to be all women within that team that I'm working with. And so that wasn't something on purpose. And so I just benefit from having all of these role models to really learn from across disciplines within BGSU. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And so that means for me in my professional development, that I'm not only learning about these things, of how to be a better facilitator and be effective in really transforming culture within the higher education setting, but I'm also studying my supervisor and all of the rest of the women on the team on how I can really leverage myself and develop myself into a professional going into research and teaching and things like that. So it's been really awesome. Jolie Sheffer: That's great. Peg what does it mean for you personally, to be able to open the door to more women in STEM fields? How is your own experience shaped your commitment and thinking through of this project? Peg Yacobucci: I can actually take this back to kindergarten. I was in kindergarten, right as the missions to the moon were closing out in the early mid '70s. And first week of kindergarten the teacher asked whatever wants to be when they grow up. And of course, they said, astronaut, because oh my gosh, I want to be an astronaut between the moon missions and Star Trek. I mean, why wouldn't you? Peg Yacobucci: And my teacher said, "Well, I'm sorry honey, you can't be an astronaut because you're a girl and girls can't be astronauts." Which was true at the time because you had to be an Air Force pilot to be an astronaut. And only men were allowed into the pilot program and the Air Force at the time. Peg Yacobucci: And I just shrugged it off. I was like, "Oh, okay. Nevermind then." And then I read a book on dinosaurs about a week later and said, "Okay, I'm going to be a paleontologist." And here I am 51 years old and a paleontologist. Peg Yacobucci: So I encountered this barrier of women and girls in STEM very early on. And I'm pleased that my kindergarten teacher did not tell me that I couldn't be a paleontologist, which was helpful. And then I had a lot of support from teachers and from my parents working my way up through high school and into college to be a scientist. There was a lot of encouragement that this was something that I can do if I was passionate about it. Peg Yacobucci: When I got to college, I really confronted some of those barriers firsthand. Having faculty dismissed me, having faculty not answer my questions or acknowledged my raised hand. Having other students harass me, things like that. That was a very eye opening experience for me in college to see that there was a lot of institutional and interpersonal barriers that I hadn't really encountered as a high school student. Peg Yacobucci: And then moving on into grad school and thinking and reading about issues of women faculty, especially in academic settings, and what it's like for women in a very male dominated discipline like the geosciences, which has one of the lowest participation rates for women of all the sciences, and some of the unique challenges of that. Working in the field when you're the only woman in a group of folks out camping for three weeks in the middle of nowhere, and the person issues and safety issues that can come up. Peg Yacobucci: So there's a discussion that started in the 1990s when I was in grad school about how we can encourage more women to go into the geosciences, specifically, given these pretty significant barriers that are not just STEM related or science related, but related to the discipline itself. Peg Yacobucci: So when I came here to BGSU, I started in 1999. I was immediately interested in working on diversity and inclusion issues and got involved pre-tenure on a number of initiatives, and a number of university structures like the Equal Opportunity Compliance Commission, the university's Equity and Diversity Committee, things like that. Peg Yacobucci: So I've been working on issues of equity and diversity going way back to my very first days here at BGSU. So it's so exciting to get together with a group of people and work on these proposals for the National Science Foundation, and then successfully land almost a million dollars to work on this stuff. Jolie Sheffer: I want to talk a bit about the harmful yet sometimes invisible cultural norms that this project is seeking to address. Can you talk a little bit about disparities in faculty workload, and how that affects women's and minorities advancement. Peg Yacobucci: So we've done research on this area, including looking at survey data, climate survey data from a climate survey that we created, plus the coach survey, which is a national survey of faculty satisfaction. We also did an interview study led by our colleagues, Dr. Lisa Hanasono, from the School of Media and Communication, and Dr. Ellen Broido from the Department of Higher Education and Student Affairs, where we interviewed a number of tenured and tenure track faculty about workloads and in particular about service. Peg Yacobucci: All of those pieces of information are telling us that women have higher teaching workloads and definitely higher service workloads, especially in areas that are more invisible, not valued or rewarded in our institutional structures in particular types of service that are relationally based. So mentoring students, advising student . All of the informal work. Writing letters of recommendation that women and minority faculty have a significantly higher burden of those. And those are exactly the kinds of service activities that get left off of annual performance evaluations and tenure and promotion packets. Jolie Sheffer: Blaze on wondering if you're drawing on your experience in the classroom before and now as a graduate student, do you see some of those sorts of secret service creep happening? Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Most definitely. And so within the Student Affairs role, if you are one of few people of color, if you're one of few women, if you're one of few, whatever marginalized identity and that is the same for your students, there's not many of them and they're looking for mentorship, they're looking for someone that they really can connect to and feel like they can bond with, that's why I got into this work. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: It's hard for me to say that it's a burden, however, when it goes unrecognized, and when you have this extreme workload administratively, if it does become challenging, and so that's definitely something that I've experienced in my professional role within Student Affairs, but also in teaching. And so those letters of recommendations, those one on one encounters that I have with students. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And so I love that work. And I think a lot of people who are speaking out about this and doing research, they were not speaking out in terms of, we don't want to do it. But these are the things that really push the field forward, whatever field you're in. These are the things that go into why you would want a career in higher education. And so for them not to be valued and for them to get left off of things within academia and on evaluations and things like that, it's very hurtful, it's very hurtful. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And so figuring out ways for those types of services to be acknowledged, and for them to be counted and for you to know that they're really connected to retention on all levels, whether it's staff and faculty and students in their persistence and their sense of belonging on these campuses. Jolie Sheffer: Well, and that's a another question, which is, we know that student retention is really tied to them identifying faculty that they see as role models, that they see as invested in their future, right? So we know that we're supposed to really encourage those kinds of connections with students. Yet, there can be unexpected consequences on faculty, so burnout. Jolie Sheffer: So Peg, could you talk a bit about how faculty burnout plays into this ceiling with career advancement? Peg Yacobucci: As Blaze mentioned, a lot of the faculty when they were asked about this kind of service work, a lot of them said that it's not valued by their department. It's not being recognized and rewarded, but it's really important to them. On the flip side, a lot of faculty said this is becoming burdensome, and it especially was true of our own already faculty and our international faculty who are often approached by, for example, one of our interviewees talked about how students from her country seek her out to be the mom. To be the cool aunt who takes them shopping and helps them navigate life in the United States. Peg Yacobucci: But they would never consider her as their advisor, because she's not a man. And men in their culture, it's more important that a man be their advisor. And this particular person was expressing some frustration that there's a point where you have to say no to protect yourself. Peg Yacobucci: And so this idea of burnout that women faculty and minority faculty are spending so much time doing work that's important that they actually value, but it's really hurting them and it's hurting them both in terms of their career, it's also hurting them personally in terms of work life balance, and just having time to get everything else that needs to get done. Peg Yacobucci: So I think burnout is one of the really important negative consequences of not paying attention to having workloads be as equitable as possible, and communicating that both to faculty chairs, directors, but also to students and that students know that we love to be here for you. We love to be your role models, but pay a little attention to how much of a burden you're placing on some faculty over others. Jolie Sheffer: Can you talk a little bit about the three I's of the program inclusion, intersectionality and interconnections? What do each of these terms mean? And how are you tying those ideas to actual workshops, training modules and on the ground practices? Peg Yacobucci: Inclusion, everyone has their own definition of inclusion. For me thinking about inclusion, an inclusive workplace is one where everyone feels welcomed, or everyone feels valued for the unique experiences that they bring to the table. Everyone feels that they have what they need to succeed. So we're trying to build inclusive workplaces where everyone feels welcomed, valued and supported. Peg Yacobucci: Our middle one, intersectionality, it's really important to pay attention to the fact that we all have multiple identities. Our social identities, our myriad that they intersect in complex unpredictable ways sometimes and they change over time. So that we can't just do a program for women that's really primarily for straight white married women with small children and say that we're helping women. We need to pay attention to the way intersecting identities impact different women differently in the workplace, and in particular, how having multiple minoritised identities, being a woman but also a faculty of color. Peg Yacobucci: Being a woman and an international faculty member. Being a woman who's caring for elderly parents or has a disability. Those are all potentially going to look different in terms how we can intervene to help make them feel included, valued and supported in the workplace. Peg Yacobucci: And our third I, interconnections. One of the biggest complaints we have heard from faculty here and it aligns perfectly with research nationwide, is that women, especially women in STEM, feel extremely isolated. We're often working in a lab by ourself long hours, nights and weekends. And head , we got to get this work done. We're not even communicating with other people in our own unit. And we're certainly not talking to people outside our unit. Peg Yacobucci: So often if you're the only woman in your discipline or in your department, and we have departments right now that have one woman faculty member in STEM or two, or maybe even three, very exciting. But we have a lot of situations where you might be the only woman or if you're the only pre-tenure woman, or tenure track woman in your department, you're very isolated, and you have no one to talk to. Peg Yacobucci: We also found talking to chairs and directors, that they feel very isolated because they're no longer part of the faculty. So they can't bounce ideas off the faculty because now they're supervising the faculty. But they've not had opportunities to build those relationships across departments. Peg Yacobucci: So a big part of what we're doing, both with our faculty allies program and with our chairs, directors, is trying to build a sense of interconnection and community that we now have two cohorts of faculty allies who have been trained. It's over 80 faculty across some and social science departments here at BGSU who are now part of a community that we have the same vocabulary. We've talked about the same kinds of problems, issues and strategies to address them. Peg Yacobucci: So we're building these communities across campus to help provide a network of support, and also engage networks of power so that chairs, directors and faculty don't feel isolated. They know where they can go to get help, to get support and to get feedback. Jolie Sheffer: Let's pause for a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas Podcast. Announcer: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu . Jolie Sheffer: Welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast. So one of the things I hear you both talking about is not just thinking in the moment, right? But really trying to create opportunities for the next generation of leaders. So can you talk a bit about what Do you see as the difference between advocacy and ally ship? And how is it that you move from just calling out or calling in bad behavior to actually transforming institutions to be more inclusive? Peg Yacobucci: The faculty ally program, we're doing a half day workshop that's really focused on by student intervention, exactly what you said. What do you do in the moment in a situation? How can you step up and speak up so that your silence is not complicity and doesn't indicate consent to what's happening. And that's critical. It's critically important to shaping the day to day experiences of faculty in in our departments. Peg Yacobucci: But it's not the only thing you need to really transform the institution. And that's why in addition to working with chairs and directors and working with faculty, we're also looking at policy issues across the university data collection practices across the university. We need to better understand the experiences of our faculty, especially faculty with complex intersecting identities. Peg Yacobucci: So we need to be able to know who those people are. And right now, we don't have the best data systems to understand who our faculty even are. And we also really need to think about the top down message that policies and practices send. And so we're working on a number of policy revisions that will help reduce some of these structural barriers we have to the full participation of women in STEM careers in particular. Jolie Sheffer: I'm curious, there has been much in the news over the last several years, with periodically folks saying things like, "Well, the reason women are underrepresented in STEM fields is that they don't have the aptitude or the interest." So what do you say to those folks who think that we've already come far enough and that the issue is actually in women and underrepresented groups themselves? . Peg Yacobucci: I've certainly come across that idea for a long time going back to my grad school days when Larry [Sumner 00:20:00] said essentially the same thing. Maybe we should be investigating whether women don't have the aptitude for STEM that men do. Peg Yacobucci: So I would say those ideas are out there. Research does not back them up at all. I mean, this is not a matter of an opinion or thinking about it. We have concrete research that says that women and girls are interested in science, and I do a lot of outreach to second graders. They all love dinosaurs. I can confirm, in my personal experience that second graders love dinosaurs, third graders love dinosaurs. Peg Yacobucci: By the time you get to seventh or eighth grade girls are getting the message that if you want to be popular, you better not be good at math and science. And studies have shown that in some cases, by seventh grade girls have made a decision that science isn't for them. And minority students as well... A colleague of mine in Chicago looking at the Chicago Public Schools found that students of color who by seventh grade are making a decision about whether they're even going to finish high school or not, let alone go to college. Peg Yacobucci: So I think Research shows clearly that every little kid is a scientist, and every little kid loves science and that the middle grades are the pivotal point when girls are given a message that this isn't for them. And then that is reinforced through high school and college in their experiences, their experiences with their peers, their experiences with teachers, their experiences of the kinds of barriers that we still face. Peg Yacobucci: The lack of role models, you go to college thinking you're going to be a scientist, and then you struggle a little bit your first semester. And you're told, "Yeah, maybe this isn't for you." Instead of, "Let's find a way to solve this problem and keep you in." Jolie Sheffer: Blaze, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the interrelationship between having visible faculty from underrepresented groups and how that directly impacts students. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Yeah, that is exactly where my mind was going. How you hear this phrase over and over again, and sometimes it feels like it's overused but representation matters and every time I am in a talk or even at the movies, it recurs to me again, that representation matters. And it's a direct indicator in a lot of cases of how I feel about my capabilities. And sometimes you need that reminder by seeing someone, whether it is someone black, whether it's a woman of color, whether it is someone with a disability that, "Hey, they're doing it. I can show up and I can do it too. And I have what it takes." And so it's extremely important. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Going back to a few questions ago, when I talked about the fact that I am on this team with all women faculty, the part of it that I work with. So every Tuesday I'm in these meetings with women who are doing amazing research within the grant project as well as outside of it in their home disciplines. And doing the work that I have to do for the grant, but also studying them and how they have been able to be successful means a lot to me. And so figuring out that, "Hey, I have what it takes to do research. They're doing it and they're doing it amazingly. They're staying true to themselves." Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Their positionality is rooted in the things that they're studying. I don't have to put my blackness to the side. I don't have to put where I come from, from the side that can be related to the things that I like to do. As far as my profession, what I'm researching or what I want to present at a conference. Those role models are extremely important. The ones that I have that are directly in my life, as well as the ones that I get to meet at conferences, and hear speak just from the privilege of being a PhD student. It's extremely, extremely important. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Going back to your last question, I think that the easy answer is to put all the blame on the person in terms of why there aren't more women or why there are not more people of color going into STEM roles without acknowledging that we receive messages from early on about what we should be doing and what we're good at. And those things stick. It sticks for you as a person receiving them but the people who are giving them they've been told those messages . Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: So teachers and those that kids really see as role model figures. If you're telling me indirectly and directly that I'm not good at math and science at some point in time, I'm going to believe that and I'm not going to be interested in it anymore. And so we all need work on figuring out what our implicit biases are so that we can really disrupt them and not be so quick to blame the particular group on why there are not more compositional diversity within or whatever field. Jolie Sheffer: We talk a lot about interdisciplinarity at ICS. And I know that the grant team, as you've mentioned, includes members from multiple disciplines. Can you talk about the range of disciplines included, and some of the challenges and rewards of collaboration across and between disciplines? Peg Yacobucci: Our grant team includes natural scientists from the School of Earth Environment Society at [inaudible 00:24:49] and Dr. Sheila Roberts, who's Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and is also a geologist. Karen Root and biology. We also have Michael Gow, Vice President for Research and Economic Development who is a chemist. So we have natural sciences well represented. Peg Yacobucci: But we also have amazing social scientists from School of Meeting Communication. From higher education, Student Affairs. From the College of Business in the Department of Management. And it's been amazing for me personally, to be able to work with all of these extraordinary people who all have a real passion for improving gender equity and inclusion here at BGSU. Peg Yacobucci: And it's been just personally incredibly rewarding to work with this amazing group of people. Jolie Sheffer: What about for you Blaze, how has it made you think differently about the institution specifically at BGSU or about higher ed more generally? Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Well, it's definitely been dope. Considering the fact that a lot of times the social behavioral scientists, they get stereotyped as the people who care about diversity issues and STEM people are over here in their own world in their labs, and then business they're over somewhere else, right? Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: So there are all of these stereotypes and assumptions about what each camp is about and what they're doing. And so to see this wide range of individuals come together and care about equity and figure out how to advance it within their own disciplines has been extremely eye opening. And it's also taught me... I've always been a big believer in interdisciplinary projects and going about things. And this is evidence that something across different perspectives is always going to be stronger than me staying in my own silo, and trying to figure it out for myself and speaking to people who have the same language as me as far as jargon in the higher ed and Student Affairs side of things. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And learning how to collaborate and be able to have a healthy debate and still know that we are at the root of it, we all still care about the same thing. Jolie Sheffer: Speaking of thinking across disciplines, research has shown that when a field becomes dominated by women pay decreases. So fields that used to be predominantly male experience a pay drop when the field becomes more closely associated with women. This is true in education, right? In fields like mine in English. Jolie Sheffer: There was a concern that this could happen as more women enter STEM fields. And we also know that there is a deep funding disparity between humanities disciplines and some of the STEM fields. So how do you think institutions should address these kinds of gender gaps in disciplinary value and funding? Peg Yacobucci: Interesting, I think one of the most important things that comes out of the research in these areas about why this is happening is the challenge of addressing implicit biases, right? So an important way that the institution can address this is by making the evaluation of faculty work. The valuation the rewarding of faculty work as transparent as possible, right? Peg Yacobucci: So make the criteria by which you are judging faculty performance as visible as possible, as clear cut as possible. That will help address issues of differing valuation. We also need to acknowledge that this happens and that this exists. And we can't pretend, "Well, I know in other disciplines, this happens. But this would never happen here, this would never happen in my department. I judge everyone fairly." You need to acknowledge that nobody judges anybody fairly, that's not physically possible, there's always going to be implicit biases. Peg Yacobucci: What you can do is make the biases visible, make them something we're all aware of, and then make their criteria for valuing. Whether that's ranking people for a faculty job position, or considering pay or merit raises, things like that. Make the criteria as visible as possible. So that's a really concrete thing that institutions can do to address some of these issues. Jolie Sheffer: Anything you want to add Blaze? Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: Yeah, I think we ignore history so much. And so we know it happens. It's happened in these other fields. And so how can people in leadership roles, look to these past occurrences, to be proactive and to say , "Okay, the implicit bias was clearly there. The underlying message is a devaluing of women. And so how can we use these really terrible things that have happened to make sure that they don't happen again?" Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And I think that's powerful. And going back to what Peg said, let's not keep on sweeping things under the rug. Things happen and when you have a society that's built on discrimination, and seeing certain people as superior and others as barely human, we have a lot of work to do and using those things that have happened throughout history to not let them happen again. It's simple but not so simple, because things keep on happening again. . Jolie Sheffer: Promoting gender equity in academic STEM environments is the core of your project. How does this project fit into the focus on diversity and inclusion practices within BGSU and throughout academia? So how are you addressing some of these policy and training to ensure that as we hire in the future, we are in fact diversifying who we are bringing into campus? Peg Yacobucci: This is a three year project... And we have funding for three years. We're really hoping and working towards a lot of what we're doing to be institutionalized. So our ultimate goal is to make ally ship and inclusive leadership, the norm and expectation at BGSU. That means that going forward, all new faculty will engage in these issues and have some training on ally ship. What are the concrete issues? But moving beyond just awareness of the issues to actions. Peg Yacobucci: What are strategies and actions that are proven effective? How can we work with faculty, with chairs and directors to bring new faculty on board? We don't need to train everybody. Research has shown that you're not going to reach everybody with this message that this is important, that inclusion and diversity is important. Peg Yacobucci: But if we can train a critical mass somewhere in the vicinity of 40%, 50% of faculty and then new faculty. As they come in, new chairs and directors as they step into that role. We're hoping that we're going to be able to sustain this across the campus, not just in STEM departments, but university wide in all disciplines. Peg Yacobucci: So while the funding is coming from the National Science Foundation, which is tailoring our focus on STEM disciplines, our goal with the support of the provost, the President and the deans is to roll these things out and make them part of the fabric of the entire university. So we're piloting this stuff now hoping it will become just part of what BGSU does. And that ally ship and inclusive leadership, just becomes part of our identity. . Jolie Sheffer: I'm curious, all of this sounds so wonderful, right? How do you balance the carrot and the stick to getting folks to change their practices, to think about these things and to function as effective allies? Peg Yacobucci: Part of what we're doing is setting an expectation. And so we're working for instance with the college Dean's to add some inclusive leadership items to the annual evaluation of chairs and directors. That's going to set an expectation. This is going to be part of how you're evaluated. So you probably better do something about these particular inclusive leadership practices. That's sort of the stick. Peg Yacobucci: The carrot is how can the ALLIES project help support you in meeting those goals, meeting those objectives? So we're balancing setting an expectation and through institutional practices, making that part of how faculty and chairs and directors are potentially evaluated, and then providing the resources and the scaffolding to get faculty to that point. So it's a little bit of both for sure. Jolie Sheffer: Blaze as we wrap up, what advice would you have for people who want to be part of these solutions and for young people who are maybe leaving college now and thinking about their own futures as leaders, whether in higher ed or in other fields? Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: I would say, as important as it is to have content knowledge about different subject matter, know about what microaggressions are, know what implicit biases, know what oppression is, and all of those kinds of things. It's also really, really important to know how to engage in a dialogue and to know how to be critiqued and to be challenged, even when you're coming from a good place. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: And so you may have read all of the books and still get into a space where you're really called out and challenged for something that you thought you were doing with really great intention. And so, being able to grow and learn. And if you want to be an ally, you have to be in partnership with those that you are allying for. And so not seeing yourself as this savior and coming at it from a paternalistic standpoint. Blaze Campbell-Jacobs: But wanting to be in partnership and always listening first is going to be key and sometimes it's about standing up and saying and doing what's right and sometimes it's about stepping back and allowing for someone else's voice to be heard, because your privilege takes it for granted that people would listen to you. And so balancing those roles in your ally ship. Jolie Sheffer: Thank you so much Peg and Blaze. It was a pleasure talking with you. Peg Yacobucci: Had a great time. Thank you. Jolie Sheffer: You can find Big Ideas on Apple podcast, Google Play, Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza with sound engineering by AC level. Research assistants for this podcast was provided by ICS intern Nicole Zucco with editing by Stevie Scheurich. This conversation was recorded in the Stanton Audio Recording Studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Dr. Shannon Orr (Professor of Political Science whose research focuses on environmental policy, director of the Master of Public Administration Program at BGSU) and Dr. Tim Davis (Ryan Family Endowed Professor of Biology, member of the Lake Erie Research Center and the Environmental Protection Agency Subcommittee for Safe and Sustainable Water Resources) discuss algae blooms, water quality science, and policy in Lake Erie.       Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the Big Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer: Today I'm joined by two BGSU faculty members. Dr. Shannon Orr is a Professor of Political Science whose research focuses on environmental policy. She was recently recognized for her outstanding community involvement at the 2019 Faculty Excellence Awards, which lauded her for 100 service learning projects, among other activities. Dr. Orr is the director of the Master of Public Administration Program at BGSU. Jolie Sheffer: Dr. Tim Davis is a Ryan Family Endowed Professor of Biology, whose research focuses on algal blooms and aquatic ecosystems. He's a member of the Lake Erie Research Center and the Environmental Protection Agency Subcommittee for Safe and Sustainable Water Resources. Dr. Davis was recently honored in Washington DC for his work in the prevention of harmful algal blooms. Jolie Sheffer: Shannon and Tim, thanks for joining me. Dr. Tim Davis: Thank you. Dr. Shannon Orr: Thanks for having us. Jolie Sheffer: Tim, you've done substantial research regarding harmful algal blooms, especially around the Great Lakes region. How did you come to focus on that area in biology? Dr. Tim Davis: I mean honestly, it kind of started my senior year of undergrad. I was at Southampton College at Long Island University, and I went to the South Pacific with a research professor to do a winter term study abroad course, and even though you're supposed to have a project, I didn't have one. So I just started working with that faculty member, and he was working on algal blooms and we were doing some work with damselfish in Fiji and Solomon Islands. Dr. Tim Davis: So I started working with him, and then when I got back to a university, I joined his lab. Harmful algal blooms seemed to be a hot topic. Water quality is always something that's been a area that I think is really important, living and growing up either near the Atlantic Ocean or in the Great Lakes. I just kind of took off from there, and harmful algal bloom seemed to be popping up everywhere, and it presented a great opportunity to conduct meaningful science that would be applied to society. I thought this is a good way to spend the rest of my career. Jolie Sheffer: Shannon, your background is in environmental policy. How did you become interested in water issues in our region? Dr. Shannon Orr: Well, it was really because of the students when I first started teaching at BGSU. When I came here I had been working on climate change, and specifically looking at the United nations and the treaty negotiations that were going on around climate change. I was teaching in my very first semester, my very first class at BGSU, I was teaching an environmental policy class. I was using a lot of references to climate change. I had moved here from the Canadian Rockies, and so a lot of my examples were kind of Rocky Mountain based, Western Canada, Western US. Dr. Shannon Orr: And then the students started talking a lot about Asian carp, and they had so much passion for the issue and the concerns and threat of Asian carp as an invasive species posing a threat to the Great Lakes. So, I started reading about it based on their interest and then I got really captivated in it. Then I kind of caught their passion and then I started to become more involved in issues around kind of water quality, Great Lakes invasive species, from a social science perspective. Jolie Sheffer: So both of you are obviously doing important work on the Great Lakes and water quality. So, what does it mean? What are some of the particular issues that are maybe unique or distinctive in the Great Lakes compared to the South Pacific or the Rockies or other places. What do you think is distinctive about the issues locally? Do want to start us, Tim? Dr. Tim Davis: Sure, I can. Well I guess taking a step back, harmful algal blooms are not unique to the Great Lakes. They're happening pretty much on every continent except Antarctica, so they're a global issue that have regional implications. What's really kind of unique about this area is that we hold about one-fifth of the earth's available fresh surface water, and we rely on our surface water resources so heavily, especially for drinking water. That because of our actions in the watershed, we're impacting the water quality of the water that a lot of us are consuming. Right? Even in Bowling Green here, we drink water coming directly from the Maumee River that's obviously been treated. Dr. Tim Davis: So, when you look at the amount of fresh water, which is a finite resource, we need to take care of it, we need to protect it. The fact that we live in an area where we have to substantially treat our water even though there's such a ... It's not a quantity amount, it's a quality issue. To me, that's where it differs a bit from other areas where a lot of other areas are dealing with water quality and quantity issues. We don't have a quantity issue, especially right now. Our lakes are really high. We have a quality issue, and it's one that was self inflicted. Jolie Sheffer: Could you talk a little bit about what some of those causes are to our watershed problems? Dr. Tim Davis: Sure. So, the algal blooms in the lake are essentially the visual symptom of an unhealthy watershed, right? So when we look at our watershed, we essentially live in what was the Great Black Swamp. However, we've converted most of that area into agricultural land because it's very good agricultural soil. The problem there is that in order to farm, farmers routinely add fertilizer, nitrogen, phosphorus, to their land, and not all that gets taken up by the plants that they're growing, and if you don't apply it at the right time or there's a large rain, it can run off into our big river, especially the Maumee River and end up in our lake. Dr. Tim Davis: These algal blooms, they're essentially microscopic plants. They need sunlight, water, and nutrients to grow. Well, they have a lot of water, the sun's not going anywhere, and we're giving them an abundant of nutrients, so therefore we're going to see these blooms and they're going to continue to occur into the future unless we fix our watershed. If we fix our watershed, we'll fix our lake. Jolie Sheffer: Shannon, in terms of Asian carp, what are the particular conditions in the Great Lakes that are making this an issue here? Dr. Shannon Orr: So, building off of Tim's great answer just now about the science, now I turn and look at the politics and why can't we solve problems of water quality and why do we have these problems around Asian carp? So much of it is about competing interests. So, if we look at Asian carp in particular, Asian Carp are an invasive species that actually we brought to the US into Arkansas for treatment of aquaculture ponds. So one of the things about Asian carp is that they have a voracious appetite, so a great, clean, green alternative in the 1970s as an alternative to chemicals to clean these aquaculture ponds. When we brought them in, people said, "Well, they won't survive and thrive in the US, so it's fine, and they won't escape," but nobody told the carp that. So some epic flooding happened, the carp swam out of their aquaculture ponds, entered the water systems, and they've been slowly moving ever since closer and closer to the Great Lakes, and so now they're just a couple of miles away from entering Lake Michigan. Dr. Shannon Orr: The reason why it's so hard to stop it, it seems kind of easy and people say, "Well, why don't we eat them? Why don't we catch them?" It's a little bit more complicated than that, which we can go into later, but one of the biggest issues is that we have all these competing interests around water. So, we have farmers, we have the fishing industry, we have the barge industry, which is really dependent on using the lock system to transport goods. So then we have economic interests, particularly in the Chicago region. Even just here in Lake Erie and looking at the water quality issues that Tim was just talking about, we have farmers, we have homeowners, and then at the same time we also have competing political jurisdictions. Dr. Shannon Orr: So we're talking about the Great Lakes. So we're talking about the United States and we're talking about Canada. We're talking about multiple states and we're talking about the province of Ontario. We're also talking about counties and cities and tribal communities, and all of these different political jurisdictions have different ideas, different solutions, different ways of making decisions, so trying to solve our problems are really challenging in the Great Lakes region. Jolie Sheffer: Could you talk a little more, Shannon, about kind of what some of the approaches are to solving the Asian carp problem? Dr. Shannon Orr: Sure. So, there's lots of ideas out there about trying to solve the Asian carp problem, and technology is often cited as kind of an option. The big extreme option that is being proposed and seriously looked at is actually creating a wall. So we put up a wall and we stop the carp from being able to enter into the Great Lakes. So, very expensive proposition. It's about a 20 year timeline according to the Army Corps of Engineers. It would work, but the barge industry is against it because we have a billion dollars worth of goods transported along those water systems, so putting up a wall eliminates the barge industry and create some major problems for the shipping industry about how do we get the goods from one side of the wall over to the other. Dr. Shannon Orr: There are some technological options for that are being proposed, but they're all very expensive and have very long timelines, and the carp aren't that far away. Some people have proposed fishing and eating them, for example. I actually got to go Asian carp fishing, hunting actually, with a bow and arrow, which was pretty fun, but there's so many carp and they're actually pretty hard to catch on a large scale. There is a very government subsidized fishing industry for carp. Illinois has put in a lot of money to support the fishing industry, specifically for carp, and the processing industry. So, what do you do with all the carp once you catch them? So, one of the proposals has always been, "Well, you know what humans are really good at is eating things into extinction, and so why don't we do that with carp?" Dr. Shannon Orr: One of the problems when we think about a North American diet is that when we tend to eat fish, we tend to eat it as a filet, so we like a nice fish filet on a plate that you cut with a knife and fork. In Asia fish is often served as fish balls, fish cakes, fish that's flaked, and then served that way. The problem with Asian carp is it's really, really bony, and so people describe it as a very mild tasting fish, but in order to actually cut out a filet, there was a restaurant in Chicago that tried to do it. They're like, "We're going to eat the fish. The carp, we're going to make people like it." They realized that by the time they cut out a filet, they would have had to serve it at the price of a lobster, and who's going to pay lobster prices for kind of a mild white fish that's called carp, which we don't think of as a very good eating fish. So, the eating solution is a little bit challenging. Dr. Shannon Orr: There is an industry that's sending the carp back to Asia, kind of irony, because they're promoted as a clean fish, not a lot of pollution, a safe a healthy alternative. It's also being turned into fertilizer. There's pet food. My parent's dog is a huge fan of the Asian carp treats. Dr. Shannon Orr: So, those are some of the kind of the major solutions that are being proposed. Right now we have electric barriers that are in place that kind of, when the fish swim up to the barriers, they get kind of a tingle. It doesn't kill them. They get the sensation from the barrier which repels them so they turn away. It's not a perfect solution, and there are concerns that perhaps fish have gone through, that metal bottom boats disrupt the current so then fish could swim under a boat as it moves through the barriers. So those are some of the solutions, but there's no consensus yet about how to actually stop the carp. Jolie Sheffer: Tim, what are some of the solutions being investigated for the algal bloom issue? What are some of the approaches that you're studying? Dr. Shannon Orr: Sure. So what I always start out by saying is that there's no in lake solution. We have blooms that have these surface scums. Those big green surface scums that look like paint being spilled on top of the water, and they can be over 700 square kilometers, so they're huge. Four times the size of the district of Columbia. So really, really big events. There's nothing we can do in the lake. Once the blooms are formed, they're there, and there's nothing we can sprinkle on the lake. What we need to do is folks in the watershed, and that's difficult. Because we have to work with our agricultural community, and not that they're difficult to work with, but a lot of farmers work on razor thin margins, so there's just not a lot of money. A lot of the solutions, we talk about for R's, right place, right time, right depth, and right amount for fertilization on fields, and yo that's a good solution but a lot of the technology to get there is expensive. Dr. Shannon Orr: Governor DeWine just introduced the H2Ohio Initiative, which is a really great piece of ... it's a good bill because it provides $170 million dollars up front, and if we are able to get another round, if it's refunded again for five years, in total it's about $900 million in financial resources coming in to solve this problem. But we need to figure out one, how to use less fertilizer on farms, which there's about a third of the farmers that are always doing pretty much everything they can. There's a third of the farmers that would if they were incentivized to do so, and then of course there's a third that just are kind of stuck in their ways and are kind of recalcitrant to change. Dr. Shannon Orr: We really need to work on reducing the amount of runoff and reducing the amount of nutrients in that runoff, and that's going to be particularly challenging because climate change is going to make that more challenging. So, climate change is going to impact precipitation patterns. Right now, this past spring is a great example. We had a lot of rain over extended period of time and there was a lot of farm land that didn't get planted. So even though we had a lot of rain, we had a lot of runoff, and this was the fifth biggest bloom in recorded history. The amount of phosphorus that came in was about 30% less than what it would have been if all fields had gotten planted and fertilized. Dr. Shannon Orr: So, changing precipitation patterns is going to change farming practices, and climate change is going to continually impact our ability to fight the nutrient overload coming into the lake, and it's only going to get more difficult so we need to act quickly and aggressively. Dr. Shannon Orr: Again, it's a political issue. It really is. Farmers don't want to get regulated. There's a lot of folks that are worried about that we're going to turn into the nest next Chesapeake Bay, where there's a lot of regulations. So, we have a lot of scientists both at BGSU and across state of Ohio who are working with the agriculture community to implement new strategies, implement different ways of farming or just bringing back cover crops, for example. Winter cover crops can help stabilize soil, stabilize nutrients, reduce runoff. Dr. Shannon Orr: We have a lot more large animal farming operations. We call them CAFOs. It's consolidated animal feeding operations, and there's a lot of manure that is associated with that. So then what do you do with all that manure? Because manure is expensive to transport. Because a lot of it, manure is like 97% water. So if you can get rid of the water, you can transport that manure. It still has the nutrients, but that's expensive. So we're working on technologies to try to solve that issue. Jolie Sheffer: Tim, you're a member of the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors and part of the Safe and Sustainable Water Resources Subcommittee. How have you applied what you've learned in this position to your work as a Lake Erie center researcher and your work at BGSU? How are they informing each other? Dr. Tim Davis: I would say a lot of what I've learned through my research at BGSU has helped me more inform and advise EPA on their larger national policies, their national goals for their water research. So EPA is not just a regulatory agency, they also have research. What are their national goals going to be? What are their overarching goals going to be? So we take the expertise that we've built up through my work at BGSU and help them kind of define what their goals are for the next three years. Dr. Tim Davis: But then we can also kind of take what we know is important to EPA and then apply it when we're trying to apply for grants or assisting other colleagues in what's important to EPA, because we help advise them on ... They give us topics what they think are important. We help clarify and better define what their research is going to be, so we know what's important to them. And if we know it's important to them, we can write grants that BGSU researchers can help them do their work better, and it also helps BGSU and our research portfolio and individual faculty members. But it's really that that give and take. So we can take the knowledge that we've gained through our research here and help them, and then take the information and what we know is important to EPA and be able to apply it in our grant writing. Dr. Tim Davis: That helps us, quite frankly, maintain our research labs and, and help get students involved in research, which is something that we're all very passionate about. Jolie Sheffer: Shannon, you do a lot of work with students in your role with the Master's of Public Administration program. Can you talk a bit about how your students are connecting some of these policy issues with partners in the community? Dr. Shannon Orr: Oh yeah. That's a really part of our Master's of Public Administration program and the classes that I teach. A lot of it is that I want to give students the opportunity to make a difference. Our tagline for our MPA program is Education for Public Service. I also want students to understand that as individuals, they have a lot of power, and I want them to care about things and be engaged in their communities. Regardless of what careers they go off and pursue, that they can go out and do really great things and make a difference, and do impact studies and evaluations or strategic plans and help to make our communities better and stronger. One of the things that I really emphasize a lot in my classes is the idea of stakeholder collaboration, and really sitting down and listening to different perspectives, different ideas, bringing together different actors that so many of our decisions have to be made from that lens. That it can't just be people working in isolation or groups combatively arguing and yelling about solutions and decisions and the future. Dr. Shannon Orr: Aristotle defined politics as the search for the good life, and so that's kind of why I'm a political scientist, because I love that idea. People have different ideas about what the good life is. People have different ideas about what a Great Lakes should be, and so I really want my students to embrace the idea of listening to all of the different stakeholders involved in these issues and finding ways to come together and to create solutions and make meaningful, positive impact. Jolie Sheffer: We're going to take a short break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas podcast. Introduction: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: You're listening to the Big Ideas podcast. I'm here talking with professors Tim Davis and Shannon Orr. I'd like to ask next about some of the particular projects that each of you have on. So Tim, you're a part of a team at BGSU that received funding in October for a project titled Monitoring and Event Response for Harmful Algal Blooms. What are you learning from that project, and how are you hoping that that will directly be applied to solving some of these problems? Dr. Tim Davis: I'm really excited about this recent award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. This is a three year proposal or grant that we are taking technology. So, this is technology that allows us to measure these algal toxins. So, the toxins that caused the Toledo water crisis in 2014, it allows us to take these units out into the field. These portable rapid toxin detection devices, take them out in the field and measure toxins right in the field. These units that we're going to be using are about the size of a tissue box, about the size of a Kleenex box, and we have these cartridges that help us quantify the amount of toxin in a sample. What's really fantastic about that is that we're linking this advanced technology that's easy to use and rapid with citizen science, or community engaged science. Dr. Tim Davis: So we're working with water treatment managers, we're working with beach managers, we're working with the phytoplankton monitoring network, which is a volunteer network that's run through NOAA, and we are working with charter boat captains that are out on the lake every day. We're distributing these units to all of our partners, all of our community partners, and they're going to be out on the lake and they're going to take a sample. We're going to teach them how to do this, of course, and they're going to extract the toxins from the sample, then they're going to analyze it. Then they can go to their mobile phone, we're developing an app where they can open our app, it'll download their coordinates of where they are on the lake, and they can upload their data, which gets put into a central server. Dr. Tim Davis: So as scientists, we know that partnering with community stakeholders who really want to be part of the solution is a great way to expand our research. Because there's no way we can ever have enough students to do everything we want to do, but we definitely have enough stakeholders. So by partnering with them, we are going to be able to track the toxicity, or the toxin contraction of the bloom, in ways that we've never been able to do before, and that's really exciting. Dr. Tim Davis: So we're combining this new technology with citizen science, and hopefully be able to build a better picture of how the bloom is changing in its toxicity over time, over the course of a bloom season, which will then help us to better be able to predict when the bloom is going to be most toxic, least toxic, and that's really important for water managers. Because right now we can predict where it is, we can predict where it's going, we can even predict how big it's going to be on a seasonal scale, but we can't predict toxicity, and that's the one thing that we really need to improve on, and this work and partnering with citizen scientists is going to help us do that. Jolie Sheffer: Could you talk about that project in terms of its interdisciplinary scope? Because it sounds like you're not just talking about working with biologists, but there's also computer science. Talk about the scope of the project from a disciplinary perspective. Dr. Tim Davis: Yeah, absolutely. So, all of the work that we do is cross disciplinary. We have chemists, we have biologists, we have engineers who had to design this technology, and then of course, we have the computer scientist. So we're seeing this interdisciplinary work become more and more prevalent in our field, and quite frankly, it's allowing us to do work better than we have when we were working in silos. When we were just working with biologists or chemists. We were able to make gains. There's a lot of work that was done that was fundamental, and we build off of all of that previous research, but by combining these groups, not only are we able to do more, but we can now take these big data sets and actually analyze them in ways that we couldn't previously. That's really important, because scientists, we always get dinged for saying, "We need more data," but really we have a lot of data, it's how do we analyze all that data now? Dr. Tim Davis: So gathering data, we have been gathering data for years. Analyzing all those data to understand longterm and big trends, that's where the biological sciences is kind of really exploding, and it's an exciting time to be part of this work. Jolie Sheffer: How does interdisciplinarity function in the work that you're doing, Shannon? Because, you are also kind of really connecting different disciplines. Dr. Shannon Orr: Yeah, and so my work on Asian Carp, which is a book manuscript that I just finished, really draws on the work of biologists and the work of political scientists, but also the work of economists and sociologists, so I'm kind of bridging all of those disciplines to really look at the issue from what we would call a policy analysis perspective. So, I'm not trying to kind of advocate for any particular solution, it's to lay out kind of the complications and the political jurisdictions, the competing interests involved in the issue that really make it so hard to solve. Dr. Shannon Orr: So I'm not sure the book is kind of like, it's not really uplifting, because [inaudible 00:26:03] I think the end of it is, that it's just really hard, but what I hope is that people can see that the richness and the depth that comes by pulling in interdisciplinary approaches and understandings of an issue like an invasive species. I was doing an early interview when I was first starting to think about this project, and doing it as more than just something that I was adding to a class, and I had a biologist say, "Well, why would a political scientist write a book about Asian carp?" And so I said, "Well, it's all about kind of the decision making and the economics and the different interests in the barge industry versus the environmentalist's," and then he said, "Oh yeah. No, I get it. Like that really, really makes sense." Jolie Sheffer: What are some of the lessons that scientists, policymakers and others have learned from past mistakes in water conservation, and how are some of those lessons learned guiding current research and policy? Dr. Tim Davis: What we're learning now, what we've taken away from the success that we had in the late 70s into the 80s, and then the subsequent kind of failure is that one, we know that we can clean up Lake Erie. We know that it's possible to bring Lake Erie back to a spot, maybe not where it was pre-industrial revolution, but at least back to a state that doesn't have these annual algal blooms that are so large and toxic and disruptive to the environment and to the economy. We realize that one, it's going to take long term monitoring, so we are going to have to, once these policies get put in place, once we have these remedial actions that are put in place, we need to continue to monitor to make sure that what we're doing on the land is actually getting translated to results in the lake. Dr. Tim Davis: Even after we hopefully achieve those results, we're going to have to continue to keep our eye on the lake to make sure that things don't sneak back up on us the way that they did. So, we've learned a lot. We learned a lot from our failures. Sometimes we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. But I would say we have a much better idea now of what we need to do. Sometimes the problem comes in more of the political arena where we're in this for a career. Hopefully we have this solved before the end of my career. That would be ideal. But the politicians, it's a two or four year cycle, so sometimes priorities change. So it's continuing to say, "Hey, we've cleaned this up. We've made progress. There are other issues that are always going to come up and that need attention, but it doesn't mean that we take our eye off of the issue that we used to have just because we're not having it anymore, because that's what we did in the past and it crept back up on us." Jolie Sheffer: What about for you, Shannon? Dr. Shannon Orr: I think I would say three things. I think the first one would be, as Tim said, the importance of monitoring and evaluation, and particularly looking at how government policies come into place. That's not the end of the story. So now we need to look at longer time horizons and we need to see how, as Tim was saying, has the lakes changed, but we also have to be open to the idea of making mistakes. That perhaps we've made mistakes. Dr. Shannon Orr: That would be my second point, would be learning from arrogance. I think the carp is a good example about that, right? So we bring in the carp and then we say, "Oh, well they're not going to escape," and then they, in fact, do. I think a lot of the mistakes have been made because of a failure to think about longterm thinking, so that would be my third reason what we need to learn from our past mistakes. Dr. Shannon Orr: It's very hard for politicians to be able to say, "I stopped Asian carp from coming in 20 years," because they need to be reelected now. One of the things in political science we say is that politicians are motivated primarily by two things, which is claiming credit and avoiding blame, and it's hard to get a lot of credit for doing things like not letting a species invade the Great Lakes. Because it didn't happen, nobody knows what efforts it took to stop it. So I think keeping those in mind about those three things, I think. Jolie Sheffer: Both of you have mentioned, in different ways, the role of students and ordinary people in both creating these problems and also solving them. For each of you, what would you say are some of the things that local citizens can do to help with some of these water issues in the region? Shannon? Dr. Shannon Orr: I would say to be educated and to read about them, because, I mean, this impacts our daily life, right? I always tell my students there's no alternative to water. We need it for cleaning, we need it for drinking, we need it for cooking. So learning about, do you know where your water comes from? Right? Thinking about water treatment systems. Thinking about the issues that are facing the Great Lakes. We live in 2019, it's not hard to do a Google search using good sources, so I encourage people to stay informed, and if you're upset, to call your local representatives. Because they need your vote, they will listen if you call. Now they may not always agree with you, but it's that public record of individuals in the community, interest groups, whatnot, everybody standing up and making their voice heard, and there are ways in which you can do that. You can just pick up the phone and call a representative. You can send them an email. You can attend a public forum. You can vote. Dr. Shannon Orr: I mean, all of those things really make a difference. I think they are things that, yes, we're busy, you've got to get your kids to dance, and make dinner and go to work and do all of that kind of stuff, but a little bit of action can make a big difference. And because water is such at the heart of our lives and particularly here in the Great Lakes Basin, it's about more than just drinking and cooking and cleaning, it's also about livelihoods and economic development and the wellbeing of this region. Jolie Sheffer: What about for you, Tim? What would you recommend for citizens who want to do something? Dr. Tim Davis: There was a study that I saw, at least a slide from a presentation, where they polled Democrats, Republicans, Independents, what their top three priorities were. Number one was always the economy, but regardless of whether they're Democrat, Republican, or Independent, in this region the second was health of the Great Lakes. So as Shannon said, politicians listen. They don't always listen to scientists, sometimes they don't always listen to their constituents, but if you have enough of them, a lot of them know it doesn't matter what side of the coin they're on, they're not going to get elected if the Great Lakes aren't in their platform somewhere and health of the Great Lakes. Dr. Tim Davis: But if you want to get involved, there are many ways to get involved. Whether it's trying to join one of these phytoplankton monitoring networks or any other environmental group, best thing you can do, I'm just going to agree with Shannon on the too, is just educate yourself, because there's nothing worse than someone who's kind of half educated making statements that they think are fully informed. Right? So fully inform yourself, because there are no enemies in this solution. It's not a blue versus red, it's not urban versus rural. We are all in this region. We all live here, we all drink the same water, we all use the same resources. Jolie Sheffer: We have some students who'd like to ask you a few questions. Courtney Keeney: I'm Courtney Keeney, and I am a graduate student in the NPA program. I was just wondering if you could both talk more about the best ways to communicate with each other, especially with contentious issues. This one with Lake Erie, but also other issues in general. Dr. Shannon Orr: It's always hard when you have people on different sides and you're trying to bring together passionate environmentalists and farmers who it's their livelihood and they're just trying to provide for their families, and to bring together really different interests together. I think one of the most important things to do is to create forums in which people feel comfortable sharing their views. Not creating hostile situations where people yell at each other, but trying to find the things that truly are in common. Dr. Shannon Orr: No one wants to drink contaminated water, right? Nobody wants the lakes to have algae problems. I mean, we all agree on that, right? So if we can start from some of those. And at the same time, we all need to eat food, so we need the farmers, we need healthy lakes. So, starting from those bases, instead of saying, "Well, one interest is evil or the other one is." That doesn't get to anywhere, right? I think creating mechanisms to bring together people who are willing to actually discuss and engage in the issues in kind of respectful ways where we really truly listen, and people are willing to be open minded and perhaps change their minds on either side. I know that's hard, and in 2019 it's very easy to be very isolated and to kind of only connect with people who share the same views and perspectives that you do. But to be challenged and to really listen and to see what we all have in common, which are clean water and healthy food. Jolie Sheffer: Do you have any recommendations perhaps, for young scientists and how to their knowledge and their priorities in ways that the nonscientific community can be more responsive to? Dr. Tim Davis: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the biggest gaps that we have currently is that as scientists, we don't communicate our science well, because part of it is how we have been trained, right? We're trained to write scientifically. We're trained to present scientifically. We're working on developing science communication courses so you can take science and drill it down. We don't say dumb it down because people aren't stupid. You need to be able to package it in a way that you can communicate it to people that may not have taken a science course since they graduated high school, because their occupation doesn't require it. Dr. Tim Davis: It's practice. Everyone has friends who aren't in the sciences. Talk to your friends about what you do and if they don't understand you, keep talking to them until you figure out a way to get across your research in a way that they can understand and appreciate. Because we always say if people don't appreciate what we're doing, if they don't understand it, they're not going to care about it, and they're just going to write it off. Dr. Tim Davis: We can't be seen as just being in our ivory towers. For decades scientists, especially in academia, we are sitting in these ivory towers and we just look down and say, "Well, this is what science says, therefore that this is what you have to do," and a lot of it is somewhat in comprehensible. Even some of the science that goes on, I don't fully understand. So, practicing talking to people, getting people to care about our science, because we need them to care about what we're doing and see how it's actually going to be positively impacting the Great Lakes. Because if they understand and care, they're going to be more passionate about finding these solutions. Dr. Tim Davis: I would say also to young scientists, just listen. We are in an age now where it's so easy to voice your opinion on so many different platforms, and sometimes everyone has an opinion and maybe not everyone should have an opinion. We're all guilty to some degree of that, and I think the best thing that we can say is just listen. There's a lot of knowledge out there where you can not just inform, because again, in the way that we teach science, A is you get nothing wrong. Sometimes I feel like we're training these robotic know-it-alls. It's okay to be wrong and it's okay not to know something, and it's okay to listen and continue to learn. If we can do that, that's great. I've learned so much from my friends in the agricultural community that I didn't know before, and it's made me a better scientist and it helps inform the work that I do. Jolie Sheffer: Tim and Shannon, thank you so much for talking with me today. For more information on the water quality of Lake Erie, please visit the Ohio Department of Natural Resource's webpage on conditions. You can visit that at coastal.ohiodnr.gov/howslakeerie. Jolie Sheffer: You can the Big Ideas podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera, Marco Mendoza. Research assistance for this podcast was provided by ICS Intern Emma Vallandingham, and editing was provided by Stevie Scheurich. This conversation was recorded by AC Luffel in the Stanton Audio Recording Studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Dr. Amilcar Challu (Associate Professor and Chair of History at BGSU) and Dr. Nathan Hensley (Assistant Professor of Sustainability Education in the School of the Earth, Environment, and Society at BGSU) discuss their research as the first recipients of the ICS Team Teaching Program grant, which supports innovative interdisciplinary curriculum revision. In their course, Dr. Challu and Dr. Hensley plan to bring together the humanities and environmental studies, and aim to develop a new place-based curriculum at BGSU, with the goal of shaping students into stewards and sustainers of nature who can effectively narrate powerful human experiences of the environment.    Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie S.: Welcome to the Big Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Jolie S.: Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Amilcar Challu and Dr. Nathan Hensley. Dr. Challu is Associate Professor and Chair of History at BGSU. His research focuses on the history of poverty, nutrition, and economic inequality in Latin America. He teaches courses ranging from Latin American history surveys, to the History of Capitalism, to the History of Environmentalism in the U.S. Jolie S.: Dr. Hensley is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability Education in the School of the Earth, Environment, and Society here at BGSU. His research interests include understanding the intersection between curriculum theory, place-based education, and sustainability studies. In his most recent scholarship, he explores how to prepare young people to face challenges such as climate change, harmful algal blooms, and promoting an ethic of stewardship. Jolie S.: These two, together, are the first recipients of the ICS Team Teaching Program grant, which supports innovative interdisciplinary curriculum revision. In their course, Dr. Challu and Dr. Hensley plan to bring together the humanities and environmental studies. The team teaching project grew out of their National Endowment for the Humanities Grant called the Black Swamp Project. The Black Swamp Project aims to develop a new place-based curriculum here at BGSU with the goal of shaping students into stewards and sustainers of nature who can effectively narrate powerful human experiences of the environment. Jolie S.: Thanks for joining me today. Amilcar C.: Thank you. Nathan H.: Thank you for having us. Jolie S.: Let's start by talking about how each of you came to focus on sustainability. Nathan, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how it relates to your interest in the local landscape? Nathan H.: Absolutely. I want to say again, thanks for having us here. We're really excited to talk with you. Nathan H.: So my background in terms of sustainability I would say started way back in my junior year in high school. I participated in an outdoor education program that was called the Student Conservation Association, SCA for short, and it was a five-week wilderness-based program where we did conservation projects such as trail-building, trail maintenance, and outdoor recreation, you can't forget about that. That's important stuff there. And what we did is we were able to grow together as a group. There were six high school students that were there and one crew leader. And that really inspired me to pursue the field of sustainability, although it wasn't really called that at that time, and also to explore outdoor education. It catalyzed my passion for being able to take care of the earth and moved me in the direction of studying the field of sustainability. Nathan H.: And so after that I studied outdoor education for my undergraduate program way up in northern Wisconsin and absolutely loved it. It was up by Lake Superior, so another Great Lake connection there. And shortly after my four years over there I went to do some work with wilderness-based programs, such as Outward Bound, where we spent 21 days out in the wilderness. And by doing these experiences with students that had, usually emotional and behavioral challenges, they were able to be transformed. And I always would joke with them [inaudible 00:03:59] I noticed that it was very intense in more ways than one. Sometimes it would be in tarps, but that's kind of a different thing. And while we were out there on the trails, I was able to actually see these transformative experiences and how it would help shape these students into going a new direction in their life. Nathan H.: And so for me, I decided to go on and I wanted to be able to also incorporate that into sort of an academic direction. So after a few months of doing, probably about half a year or almost a year, of Outward Bound-type work I went on to get my Master's Degree in Experiential Education, so using direct experience as a way to instruct and also to learn. I fell in love with that and I was like, "Okay, I want to be able to do this some more." But I also, at that time, I met my wife in that graduate program. So we moved together at that point, after we graduated, to Vermont and I was able to do work with Killington, which is a ski mountain over there. It was amazing. Nathan H.: But what I wanted to do, though, is to build upon this background in experiential ed and also try to think about ways that I could potentially do some publication and be able to teach in a university setting. So after that I went to get my doctorate degree in curriculum studies. You could say that I almost had enough degrees to contribute to climate change, perhaps. And in curriculum studies my focus was on sense of place and sustainability and that's sort of what led me down the path of getting into higher education and this position here, actually, where I'm a tenure-track faculty member in sustainability education. A big focus of mine, though, is bringing students into the outdoors and finding ways to cultivate that connection to the land and encourage stewardship through direct interaction with one another and with the landscape. Amilcar C.: I ask that myself every day, I think. I think it's more serendipity that's a different approach, or a different way, in which I got into this. So part of my research, or my research, deals with famine and that famine is connected to drought, and that drought is connected to climatic crisis. I always analyze [inaudible 00:07:01] more from an economic point of view, but I was getting more and more interested in other sides of [inaudible 00:07:08] that had to do with how people use the land, what were the practices, how they coped with drought, and how those mechanisms to coping with drought change dramatically based on institutions, on institutional change. Amilcar C.: So that was a little bit my entry point. With that in mind, I started teaching a class, or I taught once, a class on Latin American environmental history. And I talked a lot with a colleague of mine, Dr. Ed Danziger, who passed last year, and he taught American Environmental History. And he sold that class for me. I said, "I want to do what he's doing." So he retired two years later and I took over that class, and that's been the happiest takeover ever because it's a great class. A) it's out of my comfort zone, I'm not an American historian. Amilcar C.: But more and more I've been drawn to comparative topics, so I've been attaching on American history a little bit more. And the fact that it's not my core specialty also freed me from lots of inner censorship, in a way. When you are planning a class that know a lot about, you overthink it, and this class was more simple to be to teach. It had a more clear narrative. So it's by teaching the class that I got more and more immersed in this. Amilcar C.: If I were to go back to my formative years in childhood, et cetera, yeah, I enjoyed a lot being outside. But I was a city person in a city of 50 million people and our yard was as big as this table, maybe. And that was too much, actually. We were lucky to have that. But yeah, I never thought that I was going to find a passion in this. Amilcar C.: Now, more locally, the way that my colleague approached the class was by dealing with the national narrative, but also with local examples. So he had something, I don't recall exactly the title of the assignment, but something like a place paper, and that's something that actually other scholars in environmental history do. And so you pick one location and you study the history of that location through [inaudible 00:09:44] interviewing people, looking at other [inaudible 00:09:47] newspapers, whatever you can find about it. And you choose the place, you own that location. And that gives, I think, a sense of ownership of the project you are doing. You have to go to the archive and you don't know what you're going to find. Amilcar C.: Typically, probably most cases, I don't know if one of you have done [inaudible 00:10:07] it could be a little bit boring, that you'll get one deed after another. And then suddenly, boom, you have like an oil lease and you figure out that this little place you are working with had an oil well and was part of the big oil boom. Amilcar C.: Anyway, so the interesting thing is, and I shouldn't confess this, I didn't do that research myself. So I was learning from each paper exponentially and I was getting more and more interested in it. I would be walking around the city and I would say, "Oh, there were like 10 oil wells in this super fancy Gulf neighborhood." And it's, I mean, the land where you're sitting is basically land that wouldn't be in such a pristine state 50 years ago and the same with many of the parks. I started learning a lot about [inaudible 00:11:01] anyway, that got me very interested [inaudible 00:11:03] place itself. Amilcar C.: Now, another way of working through this class was that we take a look at native views about the land. And gradually, I was getting more and more into it, and more interested in Native American perspectives, and particularly this idea of reciprocity and giving thanks, or Thanksgiving. So we are in the right season, as this is being taped the week before Thanksgiving. But that idea of reciprocity, giving to the land, receiving from the land, but also thinking about our activities in the land that's contributing to nature. That, to me, changed a lot of the ways that I approached my surroundings, but also how I approach the class because I figure out, "Okay, I'm giving something to this class, but I'm getting so much." Amilcar C.: And so the last iteration of that is more recently what I have been doing in the class is that the students are explaining [inaudible 00:12:02] the history of the land that they are studying so that we give back, in a way, what we are getting. Jolie S.: Both of you work together on the Black Swamp Humanities Project that was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. What was the genesis of the project, and how did interdisciplinarity fit into that? Nathan H.: So there's a lot of different pieces that came together. I guess [inaudible 00:12:28] very similar sort of theme to the serendipity that Amilcar mentioned earlier on in his remarks, a lot of really cool pieces came together. And part of it was I asked Amilcar if he'd be willing to be a mentor for me. That was my first year back here at BGSU on the tenure track and it was part of the College of Arts and Sciences program for mentorship with new faculty to try to help with retention and help increase the research productivity of new faculty members and also just help with the collegiality factor. Nathan H.: And so when I talked with Amilcar, and actually I was part of one of his learning communities the first and second semester of my tenure-track position here, so I think that was 2015 through 2016, something like that. And on that journey it was Amilcar and Holly Myers, who is a colleague of mine, that was running this learning community and I just thought that this was fantastic, it's great. We're talking about sustainability, we have different people that are part of this group that represent the humanities, the sciences, and political and social sciences, and also even the arts were represented. Nathan H.: And so through these different interactions I knew that Amilcar would be a good mentor. After that, I talked with him and said, "Hey, would you be willing to be my mentor?" And he said, "Heck no," actually. No, just kidding! He did not. He said, "Okay." And so that next year is when we kind of started the mentorship connection. And throughout our interactions we were talking about different programs that would be available to fund curriculum initiatives built around sustainability. And I remember at one point there was one through the National Endowment for the Humanities, I believe, that you told me about it, right? Do you remember? Amilcar C.: [inaudible 00:14:40]. Nathan H.: Or [inaudible 00:14:40] maybe something related to that. Amilcar C.: [inaudible 00:14:42]. Nathan H.: And so I kind of put an earmark on that and was going to explore it later, and I did some research that following semester after I started the mentor program and was being the mentee. I had mentee breath, I guess you could say. Had to throw that in there. And so then we would meet probably once or maybe even twice a month and I started this research looking at programs that could actually fund curriculum initiatives related to sustainability that would be interdisciplinary and bring in the humanities. And we found this National Endowment for the Humanities grant called the Connections Grant, and it was planning-level grant that we put in for. It's very highly competitive so we knew that there was a chance that we wouldn't get it, but we still did it even with that possibility. Nathan H.: But I guess in terms of the other pieces that came together is my passion to bring faculty and students into the outdoor environment and kind of connecting that with the curriculum needs that exist in terms of the multidisciplinary component, the MDC element that the College of Arts and Sciences is really getting behind, and then also the idea of trying to be more interdisciplinary. Nathan H.: And so all these different pieces came together and we were able to get another person, Ian Young, from the Philosophy Department. I was talking with him at one of the Faculty Association gatherings and I said, "Hey, what do you think? Would you be interested in exploring this grant?" And he said yes. So we got the three of us together and we all became co-directors on this initiative. And then we started to write the grant based on what our passions were and then we started thinking about the team that would assemble. And I think we'll talk a little bit about that. Jolie S.: Yeah. So Amilcar, for you, how did this grant project and working with colleagues across disciplines, how did it change your thinking about the subject of sustainability and about contemporary curricula on our campus? Amilcar C.: Yeah. Well, one interesting thing, when you are collaborating with a biologist, for instance, is that they see everything from the perspective of a fox, you know, or a bison or a fish, and that helps de-center your view in a way and start thinking in a different way. Historians, we are very naturally human-centered, and environmental history pushes you to think beyond that. So that, to me, was something that was helpful. Amilcar C.: The other issue, from the point of view of curriculum, is how many good ideas people have and they are willing to do. When you own the idea you want to carry it forward, and so we did not think initially... part of our planning design was that it was open-ended. So we wanted to do this grant not so much to conclude a project, but to open up possibilities, and we outlined the different possibilities. Amilcar C.: And eventually [inaudible 00:18:22] the two areas that we focused on were A) developing a sustainability minor, but B) developing classes. One of them is the one we are going to teach next semester, but then one is one that has been taught this semester by Margaret Weinberger in Sociology. It's a BGSU 1910 class about the Black Swamp. It's the third time that she's teaching it, but this time she incorporated a lot of the stuff that we were working with in our NEH grant. Amilcar C.: So it's amazing to see all these ideas coming forward. And then just in these meetings we had people having these ideas of a Black Swamp Festival, and cheering things up in a way. Jolie S.: So Nathan, could you start telling us a little bit about the class you'll be teaching next semester, Sustainability (Hi)stories, with both history and stories. Why did you want to teach this class as a team and what are some of your goals for the course? Nathan H.: Well, so it started when I saw the posting through the ICS website about the opportunity to put a proposal together to team-teach an interdisciplinary course. And as soon as I saw that, I knew that it would be great to contact Amilcar and then start this process of putting together an application. When I saw that, it almost looked like it had our names on it because it's just the kind of work that we were doing. And again, that idea of being open-ended that Amilcar mentioned, I think there's always going to be some more room for development and growth on this type of course. Nathan H.: But yeah, the course's name I think does tell a lot about it, just the idea of Sustainability (Hi)stories, with the H-I in parentheses, because there's a focus on stories and narrative and also that historical perspective. And we also were limited with the characters we could have in the name, so that was part of it. We had a much longer name that we were going to initially use. Nathan H.: And in terms of the genesis of the idea, we definitely wanted to incorporate what we had been talking about throughout the planning grant process last academic year, and this sort of served as a great sort of capstone for that particular aspect of the grant, the planning process, to implement a course that involves the stories of the landscape and incorporates students from several different disciplines and then also involves students in a way with the land that pushes them to go outside of what they're familiar with, from a disciplinary perspective. So the scientists will be working within the humanities' realms of thinking and the students that are coming in [inaudible 00:21:30] from the humanities will have the chance to also work with the scientific realms of inquiry. That's going to be a big part of the discussion that will happen throughout the semester. Nathan H.: And so it just fits it really well with the research that I've been doing in terms of the scholarship and the publications that I've been generating all fall along with these lines about sustainability, sense of place, stories, ecology, and the human experience. So that's a big part of it, too, is what does it mean to be in the natural environment and to go through that natural immersion even when it's winter. So we'll have field trips even in February when there's a few feet of snow on the ground. If there's two feet on the ground it might walk away, but that's kind of a different story. And we'll get to see the changes throughout the season from winter into spring. So that spring transition, now that classes go into May, will allow more of the story to be told from the landscape perspective. Nathan H.: And we both have a lot of ideas in terms of how we'd like to keep the course to be very active learning-based, project learning and focusing on the realms of the humanities' forms of inquiry that really focus on deep reading. So, reading material very deeply and then finding ways to kind of build on the conversation that's there, and then also recognize that there's these complexities that we may not know the answers to. And that will be a part of it, too [inaudible 00:23:18] being comfortable with not knowing. And I think that's a lot of what happens when you're doing interdisciplinary work, that even though these different fields intersect with one another, a lot of it is the recognition that we don't know certain answers. And it's possible we never will know, but it's an excellent adventure to work towards getting closer to having more understanding. Amilcar C.: It is an open-ended design in that it will depend a lot on what the students in the class are going to be doing and what they want to do. Jolie S.: And Amilcar, what are you most excited to kind of explore? Amilcar C.: Well, "explore" is an interesting word, right? So I imagine myself suddenly as Alexander von Humboldt, exploring the world and telling about it and talking about it. I'm very interested in this storytelling idea throughout the class. The other issue that I'm personally very interested in is, and from the point of view of curriculum design, it's like we shouldn't have done it and we did it on purpose because one learning outcome and one big requirement of the university says "contemplate" and how you measure that I don't know, but we plan on that. Because contemplation, I think it's essential to that deep reading that Nathan was talking about. So I'm very interested in seeing how that contemplation works and what kind of framework we can create in the class for that contemplation to happen based on the readings, but also based on that immersion in place. Amilcar C.: The field trips, and we're still working on that more, but basically the students are going to be going to the same place over and over to see the differences, although they may not be organized field trips. We may leave that. We're still debating about that, and that's the interesting thing about team teaching, too. But there's going to be a lot of observation and reading and putting these together. And at the same time that they are reading, observing. They are putting together a story that they want to tell. And I think that that's a fascinating thing. We don't know what you guys are going to be doing and that opens up lots of opportunities, I think. Jolie S.: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the Big Ideas Podcast. Speaker 1: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us as ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie S.: Welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Amilcar Challu and Dr. Nathan Hensley about sustainability education and the environmental humanities. Jolie S.: Amilcar, could you tell us about the project that you developed this semester about integrating place-based storytelling into local nature education? Amilcar C.: Yeah. It's an environmental history class taught as a graduate seminar, although I also have an undergraduate that's a visiting student in the class. Not visiting, a regular student that is an undergrad. And again, as I was planning it I sent an email over December saying, "These are big themes, ideas, but tell me what you want to do," and... yeah, actually, we shouldn't do that because it's a terrible idea. You get nine different, completely different ideas of what to do. But one question I asked is, "Would you be interested in a service learning project?" And the majority of the replies I got were "not really." One said, "I'm kind of intrigued." One said, "No, because I don't think it adds much to what I want to accomplish in the class." Amilcar C.: So, over the summer I was thinking, "Okay, service learning idea, thumbs down." Then I was walking in the woods in the Nature Preserve close to my house, Wintergarden/St. Johns, and they put like these yard signs with blown-up picture books or photos taken from picture books, and so you could read these picture books by walking in the woods and following the sign one-by-on. And it was very simple and I liked it. I didn't read the whole thing, and it was more planned for kids than for adults, even the height, but I loved the idea. And I suddenly started thinking because of all the work that [inaudible 00:28:25] done on that property in particular, I knew a lot about the history of that place. And I said, "Wow, that would be a great way of telling a story, the history of the place, through signs," and again, getting into those other modes of narrative and storytelling. Amilcar C.: So I went the first day of class and I said, "Okay, you told me not to do service learning project, but we're going to do this," right, and "Guess what? We are still going to be reading our one, fat heavy book as well. And we're going to be putting the two things in dialogue, how we operate at the local level with this creation of a trail, plus all this other global knowledge [inaudible 00:29:15] and global knowledge about environmental history and we are going to put the two dimensions in dialogue." Amilcar C.: And it has been working really well. The students designed nine signs. I designed one. Mine is about the Boy Scouts. But we uncovered a fascinating story about this place, things that we never knew about. Someone who got lost in the woods, it's 60 acres, but someone got lost for hours and hours and finally could find his way back because he overheard the train in the background and then could get back his bearings. So you kind of get an idea that this was really thick, at least underbrush, that you couldn't really move that easily if you were lost in 60 acres. Amilcar C.: Other stories about the wild man lost from a circus and lost in these woods or appeared in these woods, many different stories like that, like the Nature Center used to be a youth hostel. So you would have activities related to outdoor recreation, and then suddenly you would have a camper who crashed into this place coming on a bike from another youth hostel in another place in Ohio. Amilcar C.: So stories like that, that each one made one sign. Of course, in a sign you cannot tell much. And historians, we love being long-winded, we cannot count our words. And you have to put this in 50 words and a photo, very visual. But the idea is to just spark the interest, and then if you're more interested in that there's [inaudible 00:31:09] and you can check that out. Amilcar C.: We have been working with City Parks and the Park Naturalist, Cinda Stutzman, and the Natural Resource Coordinator, Chris Gajewicz, from Bowling Green City. They have been fantastic, very supportive. We met with them three times. We did a marketing spiel, "This is what we want to do, but how does it work for you and what do you want to accomplish in this?" For City Parks, it's important to broaden the base. They want to make sure that the parks reach all the community. And so this was a way to enhance the experience of the parks. Amilcar C.: And right now, yeah, it's a trail that we designed. We went through a design thinking process in The Collab Lab here in the university, talked to a graphic designer who told us, "Just be careful with how many words," font size, and things like that. Consistent appeal. So we had put that all together and last we looked at it all together we said, "Okay, we have here something that we can actually implement. It's not just an idea." And so City Parks is absolutely on board, or at least Cinda and Chris in the Wintergarden park, they are on board to implement this in April. Amilcar C.: But we need funding for that. So we put a grant proposal to Ohio Humanities. It's actually going into [inaudible 00:32:45] in a couple of weeks, so we don't know if we are going to get it or not. But it's been an exciting experience overall. And I think for the students, it's another way to think about history. Yes, it's a lot of deep reading, discussion, writing. But also it's a lot of collaboration, thinking a lot about your audience, about those who are going to implement this project as well. So it's been a lot of fun. Jolie S.: Great. Let's now turn to our studio audience and hear some questions from BGSU students. Please introduce yourself and ask your question. Rob F.: Hello, my name is Rob Fountain and I'm a senior here at Bowling Green State University studying environmental science. And this question is for both Dr. Challu and Dr. Hensley. So, going behind the curtain a little bit, as professors do you guys ever get nervous when you're planning and proposing a new class? And then on top of that with the class that you guys are going to be teaching together, how do you see yourselves working together to bring the best of both of your background to make the class interdisciplinary experience? Amilcar C.: No, you're never nervous preparing [inaudible 00:33:59]. Jolie S.: Liar. Amilcar C.: Yeah, I mean, you never know what you're getting into. And even when you teach the same class over and over, it's very different each time. And it's fascinating, I think, to think about your last experience and what you're going to change. But you never know how it's going to work. When I was interviewing here a professor, my interviewer, asked, "What errors do you make?" And I said, "Wow, I never thought about that. I was here supposedly to talk about my strengths." Amilcar C.: And then I don't know what I answered but then the follow-up question is how do you learn from those mistakes, right? And that's what I feel in every class, every time I'm getting into a classroom, is how am I going to screw this up and how I'm going to fix it and how I'm not going to repeat the same mistake next year. So yeah, that's [inaudible 00:35:07]. Nathan H.: Yeah. Well, it's funny because it makes me think about that quote from the Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," because you were talking about kind of going behind the curtains there in terms of the planning of a new course, even proposing a new course and applying for grants, and things like that. Yeah, I'd say I would agree. That uncertainty is always there, even when something is being implemented, but I feel like there's much more growth from something that is so new for both of us. Nathan H.: So I'm hoping that that's one thing that, with this particular class that we're going to be team-teaching in the spring semester, is that not only will we grow as professors but also students that are in the class, the learning community, perhaps will find ways to be more patient and also feel like they have more ownership in the direction that the class is going. Nathan H.: And I would say also, if you think about what is sort of behind the curtain there, we have so many different perspectives that we're also going to bring to the table. And sometimes what can be difficult is to try not to talk. Amilcar C.: Yeah. Nathan H.: Sometimes that's the hardest thing. For example, even in the class that I'm teaching right now, when I'm able to, we have student-led discussions. There's a time period, about 20 minutes, where I'm committed to not talk at all when the students are having their discussion. And I feel that that's where, from my perspective, I feel like there's more learning that happens there even compared to when I do a lecture, which, actually, I don't feel like there's a lot of learning that happens in a lecture format but I do think it's important. Nathan H.: But I think that also brings in there's also discomfort for me. And it's a good thing. But as the professor, we realize that we don't really have control over everything. And so especially in those student-led discussions, they could go any direction. But I see the role of professor, in a situation like we're going to be teaching in spring, is to be a guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage. And I would say being a guide on the side can be uncomfortable and, I guess going back to that Wizard of Oz metaphor, "there's no place like home." I think that in terms of the teaching that I intend to do, one of the goals is to help students feel that they're finding elements in this location that make them feel more at home and more home-like because I feel like students are more likely to be invested in their local community, which has so many cool things connected to that. Nathan H.: Thanks for the question. Jason G.: Hello, my name is Jason George. I'm a junior here at Bowling Green. I'm studying environmental policy. So this is a question for both of you. Were there any sort of conflicting ideologies or directions that came up while you were talking to so many different faculty members and planning the grant and the course? Amilcar C.: Yeah. Nathan H.: Yes. Amilcar C.: Yeah, I mean I think the interesting aspect of all this is you never know exactly what you're getting into. There are many different perspectives. But you gain a deep respect for each different way of approaching an issue. And I think, yeah, sometimes defining... what was it? Defining what was sustainability. That was a few years ago. It was very controversial. Nathan H.: Hot topic, yeah. Very hot topic. Amilcar C.: Yeah. Very, very. Nathan H.: Hotter than climate change. Amilcar C.: Yeah. But I gained new perspectives from that discussion that I never thought. I always thought my ideas were the best and then I [inaudible 00:39:11] with a new realization. Nathan H.: Then you realized that mine are the best, right? No, I'm just kidding. Amilcar C.: Yeah, so then that's why... But yeah, there are different ways of approaching. But I don't feel that that makes it harder. In a way, it makes it more fun. Nathan H.: Yeah, I agree. I think conflict can be a vehicle to growth. And through these points of disagreement that we as faculty, in our learning community, that we had when I first moved here I think is the example Amilcar was giving, when there was some contention around trying to define sustainability. And a lot of that was because we had so many disciplinary viewpoints and there were some individuals that were so married to the way that they saw sustainability that there was resistance to being able to see it from a different way. And that resistance came out in different ways. Nathan H.: In terms of the different disciplinary perspectives that we bring in, we always have different viewpoints on how different... well, even just the way that an assignment could be created, the way that it could be graded, and then also what the content of that assignment is going to be. Those are always fun things. But I feel like we've worked together in several different capacities already that I think we've figured out how to use our boxing gloves in more productive ways than ways that could be destructive, I guess. Amilcar C.: It's more like sumo [inaudible 00:41:00]. Nathan H.: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Tai Chi, right? Jolie S.: [inaudible 00:41:03]. Nathan H.: Yeah. It's more of a dance than a fight. Great questions. Jolie S.: Thank you both so much. It was great talking with you. Jolie S.: Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by ICS intern Renee Hopper, with editing by Stevie Scheurich. This conversation was recorded by Erin Dufala in the Stanton Audio Recording Studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Keynote speakers for the 2019 Women of Color Leadership Summit Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johnson (Director of the Women's Center at Northwestern University) and KaeLyn Rich  (queer feminist, a direct-action organizer, a nonprofit leader, and a sexuality educator in upstate New York) discuss women of color in places of leadership, as well as collaboration across universities between women of color.     Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome back to the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I am Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer: Today we are joined by two very special guests, Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johnson and KaeLyn Rich. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johnson currently serves as Director of the Women's Center at Northwestern University. KaeLyn Rich is a queer feminist, a direct action organizer, a nonprofit leader, and a sexuality educator in upstate New York. On behalf of ICS and the Center for Women and Gender Equity, I'd like to welcome you both to BGSU. I'm thrilled to have you here as keynote speakers for the 2019 Women of Color Leadership Summit. Jolie Sheffer: The summit is designed to increase the number of women of color in places of leadership to encourage collaboration across the university as well as share the lessons and knowledge on leadership practice developed and modeled by women of color. Thanks again for joining me. I'd like each of you to give a little background on your current work, then how you came to the role you now occupy. What has been your own path to becoming a leader? Sekile? Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: That's a great question. I appreciate you asking. I often interpreted my career, up until a few years ago, I interpreted my career as being disjointed. Every time I took a pivot in my career I felt like I was adding all of these kind of disjointed parts of myself. I started as a clinician, and then I'm a researcher, and now I'm really focused on training social workers as a professor. And I couldn't quite see what the narrative was or what the arc was in my career. And then I came to Chicago and continued my work as a professor and scholar and researcher and began also doing policy work. And again, I felt like these were all very disjointed. I couldn't see that where the thread was. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And then I was interviewing for my position at Northwestern and it was within that interview that it all began to gel for me. And I realized that each and every one of these pieces, being a clinician, being an activist, working in policy, working in research, being an educator, that each one of these pieces prepared me to now step into my role as the Director of the Women's Center. And that was my narrative and it wasn't disjointed, but actually that they were building me in all these different skillsets that I would need to move into this leadership role. Because I actually like doing all of those things. I like doing research, and I like policy, and I like being able to be empathic towards people, which is a use of my clinical skills. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And I also like to educate folks and I love to be in community and in collaboration and coalition with folks. And so, all of those things are pieces oof my leadership style, and they're things that I think we actually need if we're going to be change agents, a catalyst for change within institutional settings. Jolie Sheffer: And so what is your vision now for the Women's Center and you taking over this role? You've been there a little while now. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: Yeah, so I've been there about a year and a half. And I think one piece for me is the vision is to articulate who we are and who we have been, and shining a light on the things that the Women's Center has contributed to the institution. So historicizing our work is really important to me. And then being able to then amplify it. So, that's a vision of mine. So to remind the university of what we've done and what we have the capacity for, and to assert ourselves within the institution. Another kind of vision for me, because we sit in the Office of the Provost, so we're faculty staff and student serving, is to make sure that as I think about programming that I'm thinking about programming that actually impacts the larger campus community. And so, it doesn't just kind of serve one piece. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And then I'm also the co-chair of the campus-wide task force to support gender queer, non-binary, and trans faculty staff and students. And so to also imagine the Women's Center as not only a safe space for women, but other gender and sexual minorities. And so, to expand out our notion of what it means to respond to gender inequity and not just that it focuses on women, but also trans and non-binary folks. And so, that's a real big commitment of mine. And I see myself to be leading that institutional work, and not just at the institutional, but even transforming some of our practices within the Women's Center. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And then the final piece is to always center the experiences of the most marginalized at Northwestern University's campus. It's a very elite institution. And so, how we think about marginalized communities is even amplified in that setting. So first generation students, transnational folks, gender and sexual minorities, women of color, indigenous people, first gen, and I might've said first gen already, but first gen and working class folks, all those folks are truly on the margin at Northwestern. And so, keeping them at the center of my program is really, really critical for me. Jolie Sheffer: Okay, thank you. KaeLyn, what about you? What has been your journey to the work you're doing today? KaeLyn RIch: Yeah, so a great build off of what Sekile was talking about, the Women's Center, I actually was Co-Director of the Women's Center at my university for undergrad. So I went to a state school in New York, State University of New York College at Oswego. A little rural, actually the town, the city of Oswego, was a lot like the city of Bowling Green. So I feel that like kind of downtown, one main street surrounded by rural expanse, and then one, we had a Walmart, you have a different store, but one like big store where all of the things are. Jolie Sheffer: We do have a Walmart, too. KaeLyn RIch: You have a Walmart, too? Yeah. Driving out all the moms and pops, but that's a whole other podcast. So anyways, our women's center there came out of that sort of history of women's centers. It was started in the '70s, 1974, I believe, by a group of women who wanted to respond to sexual assault and to employment issues, to wage issues, and employment access for women. And it started off campus actually and eventually came on campus. The difference is, that was a student-led, student-run organization. So both myself and my co-directors were all undergraduate students. It was funded through our student association, our student government, but it was through that, that I really began to sort of actualize myself as a leader in activist movements. KaeLyn RIch: I think activism has always been part of my personal narrative. My parents were both public school teachers, they were both union leaders. So I like to joke that I'm a community organizer and my organizing experience goes back to stuffing folders around the dining room table for my mom and dad for the union meetings, because that's sort of my earliest memory. I grew up with this sort of idea that if you want to see something changed or if you want to advocate for your rights, you have to do it yourself. KaeLyn RIch: And college was really the first time where I actualized that and internalized it. It became part of who I am, not just how I grew up. One of my first jobs was working in a shelter for women and children escaping family violence. And I made those connections through work I was doing as a student leader at the women's center as well as some of my kind of additional, that long list of things that I do come out of that time. So I was a sexuality educator for a period of time, for about five years. It was sort of a side job on top of my full-time job and I would travel around the country talking about sex ed. I did a lot of freshman orientation programs. I also did a lot of the LGBTQ, et cetera, programming and that company I worked for, Sex Discussed Here, discussed, talked about, not discussed, like you, they're most popular for the I Love Female Orgasm program. Some people might recognize them from that. KaeLyn RIch: We actually brought them to bring that program and some of their other programs, when I was a student leader. So at the women's center we'd brought this group in, it's a couple who was really doing the work, just them at the time. And then they started hiring more people and they remembered me, weirdly enough, from college all those years ago, and reached out and asked if I would be on their team. So I've been lucky to cultivate a lot of relationships and a lot of what community organizing is about is in fact about cultivating relationships and building meaningful connections between people of various kinds of lived experiences. And it all goes all the way back to the women's center. KaeLyn RIch: So similarly, I've worn lots of hats. I've tried out lots of different things, which is why it's hard to sort of define what I do. I would say professionally in terms of my day job, I've been a, I would say my skills are community organizing. What I've done is sort of professional activism. So, right now my job is Assistant Advocacy Director. I oversee our statewide offices outside of the main office in New York City. And I used to run one of those regional offices as well. And then on the side, not on the side, in addition, too, I'm also a writer. I write for autostraddle.com. It's a queer independent website for women and non-binary folks, for and by, and writing for that site is actually what got me the book deal for Girls Resist. KaeLyn RIch: So, I'm a first time author of a YA, young adult book, called Girls Resist, a guide to activism, leadership, and starting a revolution. So, Girls Resist wasn't actually an idea that started with me in a direct way.It started with, I was writing for Autostraddle, this column called Be the Change. And this all happened after the 2016 election. The reality is, the idea for writing this organizing column was based on my personal experience as an organizer started way before the election. It wasn't like a direct response to it. It's just an idea that I'd run by my editors and they were like, "Yes, let's do a little mini series on organizing." Then we kind of put it on a shelf and I just hadn't gotten back around to it. KaeLyn RIch: After the election, it seemed like the content that we already had planned on creating, so it was relevant then and it's relevant now, was information people wanted. People wanted to know, "How do I take action? How do I get involved?" And a lot of people were either entering activism for the first time or were coming back to it after a long time and just were really looking for this kind of stuff. And Autostraddle were also bringing it through a queer and feminist lens. So I decided to take that project off the shelf. I started writing this column called Be the Change about community organizing. Similarly, at my publisher Quirk Books, my editor there had this idea on the shelf before the election of a teen activism handbook. KaeLyn RIch: She handled a lot of YA titles, a lot YA feminist nonfiction. And similarly after the election she was like, "Okay, this is the time to find someone to work on this project." So my publisher actually reached out to me, not the other way around. It was a traditional publisher, not an academic one, and asked if I wanted to collaborate on this project, and from there it became mine. So I mean, once I signed on, and came under contract, I did all the work of writing the book and the way that it's framed is like 100% in my words and language. But the idea for it was sort of a collaboration between two people that were having similar ideas at the same time. Jolie Sheffer: What are some of the challenges, from where you sit and the work that you do, what do you see as some of the greatest challenges women of color face in terms of accessing or succeeding at leadership roles? Whether it's in the academy, at not-for-profits, in community organizing, in politics? Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: Yeah, so I'll talk, I'll take a couple of those. I think, so in addition to my academic work, maybe it's because of my role as a social worker, I've always done also community-engaged work, activist work. And so, I've been serving on the board of the Chicago Abortion Fund, actually, for the last six years, and have been both in a leadership role as the board chair and co-chair. But also, just serving on the board more regularly. I think that when I think about the Chicago Abortion Fund, and I think about the last decade, or the last 15 years, where we've had women of color at the helm as far as being the executive director of the small not-for-profit as well as being in leadership capacity on the board, I think that it's a microcosm, I think, of broader challenges. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: Which is, those spaces that serve women of color, and indigenous women most directly are also the most underfunded and under-resourced. And so, we are often doing so much with so little. And when I look at organizations like Planned Parenthood or even the ACLU, I mean, they are funded in a way that allows them to do their work. But we are most directly on the ground connected to the everyday struggles and everyday experiences of communities of color, people of color, working class communities, rural and urban, and often don't have the resources to do. But so the expectations are high that we're successful, but were not given staff, we're not given grants, we're not given the funding, the community support, the institutional support to do the work well. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And so, women of color are often seen as failures when they get into leadership capacity, leadership roles, because they didn't do well. They didn't end ... But my question is, have we been given the resources to do well? Whether that's even access to education. Many women who step into leadership roles are doing it because they see the need in their community. They roll up their sleeves, they become activists, then people see their promise, they are hired. But they aren't always given the access to education and the skills training, professional development they might need to do maybe the operation side of the work. And so, I think that ... Or, we do have all those skills but we're faced with issues around racism and sexism and a notion that we're incompetent, right? Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And so, I think from the reading of our bodies as incompetent, the lack of support that we get structurally that don't allow us to succeed, and I think the very, the complexity of issues that we also take on, we are fighting for, for instance, I'm engaged in the reproductive justice struggle. And that means that I'm not only mobilizing around abortion access, I'm mobilizing around sterilization abuse, I'm mobilizing around access to healthcare broadly, to clean drinking water, because it's toxic due to lead, high levels of lead. I'm concerned about public education, and housing access, and food security. So all of these, from environmental issues to bread and butter issues, are reproductive justice issues. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And that means women of color are often dispersed, because we're engaged in all of these struggles, right? And we see them as connected. And that means that it really impacts our capacity sometimes to be impactful in any one struggle, because we see ... and the fact that we have to choose which struggles we should be connected with, I think, is really problematic. But we often see the connections between struggles. So I think those are challenges, because people who are in the environmental justice movement or people who in the food justice movement, or the clean eating, for instance, I don't know if I even call that a justice movement, but this notion around clean eating, not looking at the larger social issues, and not thinking through the connection between social struggles means that women of color are doing that work. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And I think then, and that produces for me, burnout. That produces a sense of betrayal, that you don't see the connections between all of these. And then I also think that can impact then our effectiveness if we're burnt out, if we're not supported, if we're not getting funded in the ways that we should get funded, if we're expected to do more with less. So that's what I think is on the community level, what I've seen. And within struggles, what I've seen is some of the real, real barriers to our success, that they're not about us at the individual level, but really structurally the pieces that are swirling around us. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: From an institutional level, when I think about higher ed, I think it's the same thing, that we are often in marginalized spaces in institutional settings. It is no surprise that most women of color are in the health fields. We're in the professional fields like education, we're in social work, we're in the liberal arts and sciences, which are completely being erased and underfunded in higher ed. And at the center level, we're in the social justice education, we're in the women's centers, we're in the multicultural student center. And so, all of these spaces are the marginalized spaces. So we're marginalized people also occupying marginalized spaces within the institution. We're precarious people occupying precarious spaces within institutionalized settings. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And when you have that compounded amount of reality, that is going to impact your capacity to be a leader. And so, you're navigating what it means to live in this body, but also what it means to even navigate and live within these units within higher ed. And so I think, and then you have people also lined up outside your door. So outside my door, are my students, they're my peers, they're my colleagues, they're community members, who now see me with a particular title and think I might be able to impact their lives in ways that I sometimes and often don't have capacity to. And sometimes they're even people who are administrators who are above me, but who look like me and also need support. And I don't have, even with my title, institutional power to transform their, to change their reality, which really often has be done at a policy level or a culture shifting level. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: So I think the expectation that we even once we get into a leadership role have the capacity to transform centuries of injustice and inequity and really, is overwhelming. And also demoralizing, because you can only do what you can do within a workday. And we do make contributions, but we're expected, I think, because of our roles and our identities to somehow do bigger work and more impactful work than the next person. Jolie Sheffer: So the work isn't always visible and it isn't supported in ways that allow that capacity to build. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: Yeah. And I also think that much of the work that, and we had this conversation yesterday as we were visiting the graduate students at our graduate course, was that the work is invisibilized, because you don't see it in part of your annual review. With regard, if you're a faculty member, we know, even at teaching institutions, service is invisible. And we know that women, queer folk, people of color, first gen folks are doing the majority of that emotional labor, that service. And that is retention work. That keeps colleagues and students here. But it often doesn't count towards our annual review. If your staff, it doesn't go, there's often not a space for it on your tenure portfolio, or it isn't weighted the same. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: It matters. We know it matters, but it's not weighted the same. We're giving contradictory messages, focus on your scholarship, focus on your teaching, but also be available to students and mentor. But so I think, so it's those pieces, that those kinds of contradictory spaces, this what I call invisibilized work, versus invisible work. Because the work, as our colleague said, yes, it's very visible, but we're choosing not to count it. We're choosing not to. So that's an active, actionable thing to not count the leadership work that looks very different sometimes. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: But to count, if someone, for instance, at Northwestern, they get a patent, right? So that makes the front page of the paper. They get more resources for their lab. But someone who actually has been committed to retaining faculty, staff, and students, and Northwestern also contributes to the university's growth in development but doesn't get the same type of accolades, you know? Yeah. Jolie Sheffer: What about you, KaeLyn? From your position, your roles, what are the concerns that you really take up in terms of women of color, accessing and mobilizing leadership opportunities? KaeLyn RIch: Yeah, they're very similar in the nonprofit world, in the social justice world. Even when we were talking about working in communities and in community with folks, these same things come up. Because who we are can't be separated from the work that we do. Especially those of us that choose to work in helping, teaching social justice fields is there, and things follow us. So we can create safer spaces for each other, but there's always going to be triggers of racism and classism, and homophobia, and transphobia, and ableism, and just things that show up in those spaces, because we're all complex people. And when you hold those marginalized identities, you also really can't separate who you are from the work you're doing, sometimes. You have to really work hard at that. KaeLyn RIch: I think most superhero stories start, someone gets their superpower is because of a traumatic event in their life. And I wouldn't say that I want, I don't want to mischaracterize my love for my family by saying it was a traumatic event, but being a trans-racial adoptee was a literally life-changing event for me. So, I came here at the age of 17 months. I grew up Korean, and a very visible minority in a very rural area of Western New York, where my family was white. My sister is also adopted and Korean, but we were really the only Korean kids in our school. And I grew up with all friends that were white, all teachers that were white. When you think about sort of my standpoint, I occupy space as a woman of color, but it took me a really long time to get there. KaeLyn RIch: Even, to be honest, I identified as a feminist first, I identified as queer first, as a writer, as an activist for social justice movements, as a student organizer, all of these things. It really wasn't until I was a fully-grown adult that I came into understanding myself as a woman of color, which is bizarre to think about for white people, I think, because it's so visible on my face. Like you look at my face and you think, "Oh, well, she's Asian." But for me it wasn't so clear, because I grew up so separate from my culture. And the trauma is around being separated from who you are, and being fed instead sort of the dominant narrative, which is a white and male narrative of who our country is, how we came to be, when none of that was my history and I was completely cut off from it. KaeLyn RIch: But through adoption, not through any one person's choice, but through the system of international and trans-racial adoption, and the lack of thought about how that works. So on the flip of that, that's the superpower that came out of something that wasn't so great. The superpower I get from that, which I try to use to open doors for other people, but also is exhausting, is that I'm exceptionally good at meeting other people where they are. I'm exceptionally good at respectability politics and adopting how I talk, how I dress, how I show up, and thinking through those things very actively every day. And so that I'm not threatening to white people. KaeLyn RIch: As an Asian woman, I also get to show up differently in spaces sometimes than my black colleagues. Because the stereotypes, at least in New York State, around who we are, are so different and all of them are harmful. But the sort of microaggressions I get are very different than being seen as threatening, or as violent, or as angry. If anything, I have to do more to prove that I am strong and capable and that I'm not so like passive and like a receptacle for information. Or for honestly like white, like b.s. Sometimes people come to me and I think because Asians are light-skinned because we have a lot of racism in our own communities. There's a lot going on there. White people feel more comfortable talking to me than talking to, let's say, one of my black peers about race, about issues, because they think we're going to have some sort of kinship around there. And my kinship is 100% with women of color. And especially with queer women of color. KaeLyn RIch: That said, it gives me access to open up spaces. And for me, I choose, I don't think it is anyone's job to be, to work with gatekeepers to try to hold open those doors. A lot of people are just working on survival and that's 100% fair, and really, all we can ask of people. I choose to sort of use that earned and learned superpower to try to build bridges for people to try to take on some of that emotional labor that can be truly exhausting in order to make things a little bit better, take a little bit of burden off of someone else. KaeLyn RIch: I mean, I think it's part of, to be honest, I think it's why I've succeeded at leadership, in so many ways is because a lot of people feel like they can relate to me, right? I have that reputation, and it's afforded me leadership opportunities because there's often, often people in power are white. Often people in power are of dominant identities a lot of different ways. I've worked primarily with women in my career, in terms of leadership, but a lot of those women have been white, a lot of them have been, all of them have been cisgender and most of them have been straight, and generally come from a place of systemic privilege, systemic power, and they get to broker who else gets access. KaeLyn RIch: And I think a lot of why I've been given access, and I want to be really honest about it, is that I've learned and sometimes don't even do it intentionally, how just sort of adapt to what white people think is the right way to act or the right way to be in the world. Because I've had to do that literally from as early as I can remember in school, in life, in my family, in my relationships, I've had to navigate being the visible other, and what that means for me in terms of both self-identification and how I show up. I mean, now, obviously I'm more thoughtful and critical about it, but it does show up in everything you do. KaeLyn RIch: So how I wrote Girls Resist would've been really different than how my editor who was a white woman, like a woke, smart white woman would have written it. But she wouldn't have thought of some of the things that I thought of just off the bat. And that showed, even in the process, there were several times, because all of the staff at that publisher at that time, not anymore, were white and all the people working on my book were white. There were definitely times where I had to sort of do extra work of kind of like, at one point they were putting quotes into the book and all the quotes that they'd added were by white women, every single one. KaeLyn RIch: And I was like, which was very, the book is written in a way that's intentionally intersectional and intentionally accessible to young people obviously, but I want like trans girls to see themselves in it. I want black and brown girls to see themselves in it, and Asian girls. And queer and trans people in general. Really anyone who has a marginalized identity, even though girls is sort of very binary language. I tried to break that down as much as possible, right? So if you're on the margins, this book is about giving this information to you. When that comes up there's a whole chapter on, there's actually a whole chapter on intersectionality and what people are now in social justice fields are calling being an accomplice, but I call it sort of like meaningful allyship, like really standing up and standing with. KaeLyn RIch: And then you put in all these quotes from all these white women. And I was like, okay, I see what you're doing here. And not even like, I don't know, they were not thoughtful quotes, either. And just one example ... and my publisher was great in that they did go back and change them out when I sent sort of the email. I was like, "This and this and this is problematic. Here are some other suggestions of quotes you could use." And I did a quick Google search. It's not like this information is hard to find. I was like, how about we have like a black trans women talking about gender equity instead of, no offense to Gloria Steinem, she's great, but instead of Gloria Steinem. And even that quote was like very heteronormative, it was about men and women and like, "Behind every man," and I was like, "No, no, no. This isn't like for teens. It's also not like how we would frame this issue for people of color or for trans women, for people who are even more marginalized by the gender wage gap." KaeLyn RIch: So a lot of it is that. It's like the doing, that constant awareness, and the constant emotional labor, and the constant, especially something like a book that's going to have your name on it, you know? I couldn't let it go out in the world with just added quotes from important women, but there are lots of women who don't get that platform and I wanted to make sure their voices were included too. KaeLyn RIch: So, a lot of being in leadership is taking that step of putting yourself at risk a little bit, because there's always the risk that someone's going to think you're difficult to work with, or even as an Asian woman, or that you're too militant or you're being, I think earlier today we were talking about being feminist killjoys, but being that person that's always making things hard, and you just have to do it anyways. Jolie Sheffer: Good. One of the things that we focus on at ICS is interdisciplinary approaches to important topics, and the importance of sort of crossing over those conventional silos. So Sekile, since a good deal of your research is particularly in relation to different disciplines and intersections of race, class, and gender, could you talk about how interdisciplinarity shapes your work? Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: Sure. Sure. I'm really excited to talk about this, actually, from a teaching and a scholarship perspective. So I mentioned earlier, my career started in the professions as a social worker. So, but luckily I went to an undergrad institution that grounded my professional development or my professional skills in kind of a really critical race theory, intersectionality, liberal arts education. So I was, and I feel like liberal arts is where the beginnings of interdisciplinarity emerged. And so, I was really grounded in what it meant to be a critical thinker, what it meant to be an engaged person in your community. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And I was able to model, as a professor, what it meant to have a strong liberal arts foundation before you had your ... Because I feel like any social worker needs to know how to engage in humanity, needs to have critical thinking skills, needs to have depth in their analysis. And so, that is critical for me as someone who received that kind of education to also deliver it to the next person. After working in social work as a professor, I also began to teach in women and gender studies and in psychology. So I'm interesting in the sense that I have been an educator in a professional field. I've been an educator and researcher in an interdisciplinary field like women's studies, and also in psychology, which is a social science. So it's been a wonderful ... so, interdisciplinarity is actually at the core of my teaching and my research. And of course, in the field of women's studies, it's an interdisciplinary field. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: So how that shows up in my research is actually, I'll talk about both of my books which somehow I have not talked about. But my first book, which is an edited volume called Black Women, Mothering and the Academy, which is an edited volume that really looks at the theorization of maternity as well as the experience of maternity in higher ed. And so, myself and I believe, 12 or 13 other scholars, some in academia, some in not, wrote about, contributed chapters there. And my intention was again, to offer an interdisciplinary intersectional way of thinking about motherhood in higher ed. And so, sometimes people wrote about their experience as mothers and their marginalization as mothers in higher ed. Also as black women navigating that embodied reality. Sometimes people talked about maternalized labor. I define maternalized labor not only as the emotional labor, but also the gendered labor and this assumption that we're going to take care of the university's children. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: But using and drawing upon social sciences, drawing upon personal narratives, deciding to allow people to write in a way that incorporates their personal narrative and with research, right. And so, allowing for that fluidity, that boundless way, that disruptive way of thinking about academic work. So that's the first book. And I really enjoy just that each chapter feels very, very different from the other. And so, I think that that book represents a nice example of the benefits in the interdisciplinary. And for me, the inclusivity, because it allowed black women to write in a way that was freeing and liberatory. So in my current book, I also am doing the same thing, which is inspired by a chapter in the first book, which was written by a black queer woman who talked about being a mother and actually being a working class, struggling mother as an academic. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And so, I became really fascinated by that sub-theme that showed up in that first book about these black women who were highly educated and also receiving public assistance and receiving welfare. And so, looking at that paradox between highly educated and also poor as a black woman. And so this, the second book, which is called, currently the working title is Laboring Positions, Higher Education as a Hyper-Producer of Inequity. And so, within this book I'm doing the same kind of engagement from an interdisciplinary perspective in which I am using black women's narratives around being highly educated, and also navigating poverty and also using data from educational data, sociological data, and historical data, so both the what unfortunately we call the hard data, right? But including the narrative as well, and again, allowing them to blend and bleed together and be boundless and how I think through this work and to also be disruptive. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: One of the pieces that I took a risk, and only because I was encouraged by a black feminist who's my mentor, Julia Jordan-Zachery, who I encourage you to read any and everything written by this wonderful scholar. I struggled really hardly with finishing my final chapter, my conclusion. I just couldn't, I was just stuck. I had writer's block. And she said, "It's time for you to tell your story." Because I had been trying to stay emotionally disengaged from the work, because that is the way we are trained as scholars, particularly those of us who are in the social sciences to stay distant from our work, to be objective, use the scientific method. And so, I had been keeping some emotional distance from the work. And she said, "It's time for you to to write." Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: And so, usually you might kind of do a little testimony in the preface of your book and as the setup. But instead, I actually did it in the conclusion, and I said ... and I'd use a not very nontraditional ... I was a rule breaker. And so the conclusion of my forthcoming book actually tells my story as an academic. And it's breaking lots of disciplinary rules by doing so, even the structure of the book. And I'm lucky enough that Johns Hopkins University Press is allowing me to go on that journey. So when I sent it to the press editors, they said, "This actually traditionally fits in the preface, but I like where you put it, and I think your story matters. And I think it goes here." Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: So I think for me, that's the crux of what it means to be an interdisciplinary scholar is also just deciding to break the rules, deciding, but intentionally deciding. That there's thoughtfulness. And I actually say within the text, "I know I'm breaking the rules, I am taking a risk here, but I want you to come on this journey with me. And I think that it is part of my method." So there's a methodological intention to it that I need to include my voice in this book. And I think that I wrote the book initially as this researcher, this outsider within, but I realized that I actually am a character in my own book, and I wanted to disclose that. And I'm disclosing it here in this final chapter. Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johsnon: So that was the kind of journey I went on. And it's, my latest, I guess, articulation of what interdisciplinary means for me. And of course, that's at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. But I would say that this book really focuses on really critically class, because I think we take up race and gender quite often in academia, but I really wanted to point out the class struggle that women of color are facing within higher ed. And that is often not, the light is not shined on. So this book really forefronts our class-based struggles and ... Yeah. So I'll just leave it there. Jolie Sheffer: So KaeLyn, I want you to tell us a little more about Girls Resist. You've talked about kind of what started the book, but how did you go about thinking through the form of the book, related to some of the things Sekile was talking about interdisciplinarity. How did you decide that a young adult book was the right approach? And then how did you tackle what that book should look like? KaeLyn RIch: Yeah, so those are great questions. I think that ... We knew from the beginning it was going to be a young adult book. It wasn't immediately apparent whether it was going to be middle grade and up or high school and up. I initially conceived that it'd be middle grade and up. Ironically, we ended up writing it for high school and up. But then now as it's getting different starred reviews and things, a lot of educators are seeing it as middle grade and up. So, my first fan mail was from a nine-year-old girl, so it really is exciting to me that it seems to be accessible to people at a lot of different levels. KaeLyn RIch: My goal, in terms of the tone of the book was not to come across as your mom or even though I am a mom, or as like this older person that knows better how to do it, but just say, "Here are the tools that I was given. This is a very basic recipe for a cake, and I'm going to hand you this same recipe, but you may do something totally different with it. You can put your own frosting on it, you can add sprinkles to it. Maybe it's not a cake. Maybe it's actually a muffin or a cookie, and you're going to like totally reinvent it. But I just want you to have a place to start." Much like a, this is a very typically gendered thing, much like someone passes down a recipe through generations. I kind of want it to be that, like, "This is my basic cake recipe. You are going to lead us into the future, making it your own in so many ways." KaeLyn RIch: So that was really the goal. I think I've lost sight of the question, but that's fine. That was really the goal for me with the book in terms of making it accessible, making it inclusive, and really making it about, like trusting that girls already know. And already hold that knowledge in their bodies as young as middle school and even younger. They know that the world's unfair. And they know that it's affected them. And then giving them the tools to say like, "Okay, you want to do something about it. So how can I help you figure out what to do next?" Jolie Sheffer: Thank you both so much. I've enjoyed this conversation. Jolie Sheffer: Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera, Marco Mendoza, and Joseph Starks. Special thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Women and Gender Equity. Research assistance for this podcast was provided by ICS interns, Olivia Davis, [Strati Mustokayis 00:39:18], Melanie Miller, Alasia Parks, and Sarah Schaller.

Dr. Justin Rex, Assistant Professor of Political Science at BGSU and chair of an interdisciplinary ICS research cluster studying US poverty and its many dimensions, discusses his work on housing affordability and equity in Northwest Ohio.   Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: This is the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Today we are joined by Dr. Justin Rex, an Assistant Professor of Political Science here at BGSU. Dr. Rex's scholarly research examines First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court as well as regulations of food, consumer transactions, and advertising. He's also the chair of an interdisciplinary ICS research cluster studying US poverty and its many dimensions. I'd like to welcome you here today, and I'm thrilled to be able to discuss your work on housing affordability and equity in our region. Thanks for joining me, Justin. Justin Rex: Thanks for having me. Jolie Sheffer: I'm curious about, given your background, how did you come to be thinking about housing-related issues? Justin Rex: Sure. I think part of it came from some of my background teaching at Wayne State University in Detroit. And after I graduated from grad school there, I taught in the Honors College, and we taught a series of interdisciplinary introductory courses for all Honors College freshmen on Detroit and an American Government course that was attached to it. Learning about the history of Detroit, one thing that really surprised me is somebody that was new to really urban studies was seeing how central housing was, as a battleground and a political battle for the development of that city in terms of people fighting neighborhood integration, literally fighting, and also the sort of de facto fighting that went over who was living where that you saw through practice like redlining and so forth throughout its history. That kind of just opened up my eyes that housing was really a central fight politically that was going on, and it really shaped a lot of the politics of that city, and Detroit being a microcosm for what was going on in a lot of different cities. Justin Rex: That was kind of the first thing that opened up my eyes, really, to thinking about housing as a central issue, for thinking about urban issues, but also just some of my interest more broadly in inequality. Housing is central there too, given past housing practice and the way federal government policies and other policies have shifted wealth to certain classes of citizens through housing policy as well. Jolie Sheffer: Could you explain a little bit about some of those policies in history? What is redlining? How did mortgage practices work to further inequality? Justin Rex: Yes. Redlining came from the Federal Housing Administration when it decided it was going to start trying to promote home ownership and give out loans to people. They had to, like anybody making a loan, had to make a decision about what's a good investment. Who is somebody that's going to be able to repay this loan so that we're not going to lose our money? They had to decide what kind of neighborhoods they wanted to lend to, and in practice, what that meant is that quote unquote good investments tended to be in white neighborhoods because they thought those would maintain values. The redlining, or the term, comes from literal red lines that were drawn on maps to indicate which neighborhoods were good places for investment and which neighborhoods weren't. The practices came about that lending went to those neighborhoods where primarily were white-dominated and tended to be in the suburbs, as those were growing as well in addition to new money flowing in for highways that helped people reach the city while they could still live in the suburbs where a lot of this new lending was happening. Justin Rex: That was in some ways a massive wealth transfer to those populations given that it allowed them to get a home, build up equity. They could use that equity to maybe take out another loan for a small business. There are initial transfers of resources, but then there are ripple effects from those later on as well. Jolie Sheffer: Well, and that's something that there's been a lot of talk about lately is the ways that generation, sort of the postwar extension of home ownership to the middle classes has now, several generations later, has really deepened the inequality in America. Could you just briefly explain how that works? Justin Rex: Yeah. I think a big thing with home ownership is that a lot of things in our life, not just the home that we live in determines a lot of other things, that your neighborhood gives you is a gateway to a lot of other good or bad things. If you're living in a good neighborhood based on property taxes that fund the schools, that also leads to better schooling. There's cumulative advantages or disadvantages from the zip code that you're living in. Some people now say that your zip code is more important than your genetic code, meaning that a lot of things in terms of health outcomes, inequality can be explained by where you grew up, and is in some ways more determinative than the genetic endowments that you've been given. Jolie Sheffer: Can you talk to us a bit about Wood County Continuum of Care's housing-related efforts? We've talked about the urban environment. How are things working in Wood County and what can you tell us about that work you're doing? Justin Rex: Sure. When I was starting to develop the course I'm teaching on poverty, I wanted to build in some community engagement for my students. As I was a new professor here, I wanted to get engaged and see what was going on in the area. And one local group that's doing a lot for housing is the Wood County Continuum of Care, which is a coalition of government service providers, nonprofit groups, religious leaders who have a regular daytime job but come together to pool their resources and expertise and ideas related to housing and homelessness issues in the county. The designation Continuum of Care comes from how the Department of Housing and Urban Development changed funding a couple decades ago. If local people want to get funding for housing-related issues, they need to form around this idea of a continuum of care, that there's a collection of service providers that are working together to try and address housing issues in the area. Justin Rex: That's how you start seeing these groups form, or Continuum of Care all over the country in areas. In Bowling Green, they're working on a variety of direct service provision, but also more recently, they're starting to make a push for trying to figure out how to address and raise awareness on affordable housing in the county. That's where, when I came in, a lot of my students had been doing some research related to affordable housing and really just trying to document what are the problems in the area. And once we can figure out what the story is, then we can take that story to either the public elected officials and make an ask for what is it we should do given the specific problems in the area. Jolie Sheffer: And what are you starting to see as the particular challenges here in Bowling Green? Justin Rex: Yeah. I think one issue, and I hear this a lot from the people on the COC, is that there's a perception that there aren't housing-related issues really in our area. Most housing issues, we tend to think of homelessness, because that's the most visible kind of visceral experience that a lot of people have with housing issues is that you've seen somebody who is homeless, primarily in urban areas where you see it. It's a very visible thing, and so people can get a direct connection to it and maybe be more attached to want to find a solution. But in Wood County, housing and homelessness tends to not be as directly visible. Justin Rex: Some of the issues are homelessness, although there's no homeless shelter in Wood County. But a lot of the issues are related more to housing affordability and more broadly some of the economic insecurity that comes from having lack of access to affordable housing, but also transportation and other things like that. I think starting to tell the story about how those things are interrelated, and the housing issues are more about people maybe needing short-term help and to help them get back on their feet is some of the things we're starting to find. Jolie Sheffer: In what ways is Wood County typical of national trends, and in what ways is it not? Justin Rex: I was just looking at... I had students do some research on the eviction rate, because that's gotten a lot of attention with some recent research on that. We're seeing about BG... Or excuse me, Wood County last year averaged about one per day, so over 300. Those are official evictions. That's definitely a lower rate than we're seeing in some urban areas. We've got more highly concentrated populations as well, where they may be four, five, six times as many as that. Eviction is still happening here at a fairly high rate, given it's about one a day based on some of the data the students found and some of the data that the COC is starting to collect. That's still, I think an important issue, and the official rate doesn't count a lot of the unofficial evictions that happened where somebody realized, maybe a landlord says that, "I'm going to evict you," or "I'm going to ask you to leave," and somebody leaves without going through an official court proceeding. We know that even that one per day roughly understates the amount of eviction that we're seeing. Jolie Sheffer: And in terms of within Wood County, although most of Wood County is fairly rural or suburban as opposed to densely urban, the transportation challenges that you alluded to and the ways that that can contribute to housing insecurity, is that typical? Justin Rex: Yeah. One thing you hear a lot from talking with people on the COC is that a lot of people tend to live in the outer-lying areas outside our bigger cities. We have them in Wood County. Bowling Green, for example, is where a lot of the jobs are, but people can't afford to live here so they're living in outer-lying, more small rural towns around the area. One thing I wanted to mention, and I think this speaks to BG and Wood County but also the nation at large, there's a group, a national coalition that puts out a report every year on affordable housing. And one of their alarming facts that they've been documenting recently is that in no county in the entire United States can somebody working a full-time, 40-hour a week job at around the average wage afford a two-bedroom apartment in any county in the United States. Justin Rex: That speaks to these broader trends of housing affordability. And what some people have done is looking at that measure of lack of a housing affordability, combine that with housing plus transportation, because you can find more affordable housing but it may include transportation costs, because you're living further out from where your job is. So that compounds it. Jolie Sheffer: Right. Justin Rex: So that compounds it. Jolie Sheffer: Right. We tend to think, "Oh, we live in an affordable part of the country." But what you're showing is that in fact when you factor in transportation, it isn't in fact affordable at all. Justin Rex: Yeah. It's not affordable, even based on a lot of rents for most people. But then, yeah, when you add in, even sort of try to make the cost more complex and realistic, yeah, the transportation makes things even more unaffordable. I think that's definitely an issue that's a national trend, but also from speaking with a lot of people here and their dealing with people, a lot of these service providers are dealing with people on a daily basis seeking some rental assistance, seeking a new place to live, and transportation seems to be a common problem that they're citing. Jolie Sheffer: Can you tell us a little bit about the work you and the housing and poverty cluster are doing to establish a relationship with United Way of Greater Toledo? Justin Rex: Sure. Our housing clusters got a variety of expertise... Or excuse me, the poverty. I'll redo that. Jolie Sheffer: Want me to re-ask the question? Justin Rex: Sure. Go ahead, yeah. Jolie Sheffer: Can you tell us a bit about the work you and the poverty cluster are doing to establish a relationship with the United Way of Greater Toledo? Justin Rex: Sure. The poverty cluster has a variety of expertise on it from people in sociology, architecture and planning, political science. We're trying to help the United Way establish and create a data analytics department within the United Way that would be partly based on some of their staff, but also external partners from BGSU, the Data Analytics department at BG, and then some people on the poverty cluster as well to really start trying to collect and document a lot more of the problems that are going on here in the area. One thing that they found is that there are a variety of groups from healthcare providers to nonprofits in Toledo in the region that are collecting a lot of information, but there tends to be a data silo problem and just a problem of people, maybe not necessarily working across purposes, but not being fully aware of what all these other partners are doing. Justin Rex: In some ways it's a good story that there's lots of activity around poverty-related issues, but what they're finding is that the United Way could potentially serve as a hub for coordinating, documenting, and really sharing a lot of information, and using that information to better coordinate resources in the area. Our group is hoping to work with them as they establish that, and serve as some technical consultants, and help them either collect, analyze, and disseminate some of the information that they want to start collecting as they roll out. Jolie Sheffer: That's a really profound partnership, where the idea of bringing some of the scholarly expertise of BGSU faculty to helping the United Way and the agencies who work with it to sort of solve some of these problems with better, cleaner, more consistent data. Justin Rex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I think that's one thing that, as part of the broader university effort to be a university that's a public university for the public good, establishing those kinds of partnerships where we can use some of the knowledge that academics have here to put them towards problem solving. That people that are out working on the front lines on these issues, that we can try and improve their efforts. Jolie Sheffer: Great. What are some of the primary issues we should be thinking about when organizations are beginning community development initiatives? What are some of the concerns that need to go into that to better serve under-invested communities? Justin Rex: I think what you see a lot of times is that there's a need to really engage the local community, to help them articulate the needs that they have. I think there's a lot of efforts to want to try and open a lot of great ideas out there, but a lot of times there's a need to build in some community investment and utilize some of the community knowledge that people have to really figure out what solutions they want to get behind and what solutions would work best for their particular needs. I think just as a baseline or a starting point, there's a need to really try to engage the community, whatever community it is that you're trying to fix, because there's a lot of local particularistic needs that people have. I think trying to first figure out what those are and then use that as a baseline for tailoring solutions to the local needs is important. Jolie Sheffer: And really, that speaks to the way that no one is more of an expert than those living their own lives, right? The people in our community who are dealing with these things, they know best what the problems are, and the solutions need to match those problems. Justin Rex: Right, and I've talked about with students in the Public Policy course on poverty that I'm teaching, that there's a whole host of history of a variety of different solutions we've tried. And there's one dividing line or one way to think about different types of solutions as sort of more top-down ones where there's more control from those providing the resources, whether it's federal government and providing welfare money or housing money and things like that with strings attached, saying, "Here's how the resources should be used." But you're seeing a growing movement from people across the political spectrum towards trying to provide resources towards the poor, whether it's poor in developed countries or developing countries around this idea of universal basic income. It's basically unconditional cash transfers. Justin Rex: The idea is that people know what they need and how their money could be used, what immediate needs they have. Rather than tying money to food vouchers where the money's got to be used in a particular way at a particular place for particular things, if we can give people money, they know how to spend it and spend it well. I think what you're seeing is kind of a reversal of this idea, or at least fighting back against this common idea that people in need can't make good choices and so we need to make those choices for them. And the pushback, and why you're seeing some more consensus around that idea is that what we tend to find is that when money and resources are given out, people tend to use it fairly well and fairly wisely. And this idea of fluttering it away on unnecessary things, some of the experiments that people have been doing in the developed world show that people are using the resources well, actually. Jolie Sheffer: You talked about teaching on poverty-related issues this semester. Can you talk to us about some of the research your students have been conducting? Justin Rex: Sure. The local Continuum of Care in Wood County that deals with housing issues, we've been partnering with them. I've been asking them what needs do they have, given that they've got more needs than they've got resources to deal with it. The students have been doing some research projects for them. One project they did last year was the COC held a series of community conversations in all of the towns throughout Wood County. A person on the COC would organize one at a public place like a library, and my students would also attend the community conversation, record what the community was saying. They were basically inviting anybody who's had housing struggles or has an opinion on housing to come in and basically tell your story, tell what you've been seeing in your area. The students collected that information and tried to put it together, and basically use that as a piece to tell this larger story of what are the needs in the county and once we know the needs, how can we best address those? Jolie Sheffer: Okay. We're going to take a quick break. Thank you for listening to the BG Ideas podcast. Speaker 1: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Hello. Today I'm talking with Dr. Justin Rex about his work relating to housing affordability and equity in the region. How would you like to see the public more aware of and involved in this issue? What would you like audience members or students... How can they get involved? Justin Rex: Sure. I'm a Political Science professor, so I think one way that I think students can get involved is through the political process. Once you've seen housing as an issue or whatever issue it is that you're interested in seeing what the problem is, and then oftentimes, there are politicians at the state, local, or federal level that are trying to develop policies to address that. Sometimes they're not, and that's an area where you can try to push them to do that. But oftentimes these issues are being at least attempted to being addressed by politicians. I think figuring out what the problem is, what some of the solutions are, and then seeing who is pushing those solutions at a level that you think they need to be pushed at. And then getting politically involved, either voting or involved in the campaign, I think is one way to help get those issues pushed and people into office that are going to push the solutions that you want. That's kind of the direct involvement on the political side. Justin Rex: Another avenue is through, rather than advocating, you can get involved more on the direct side in terms of directly providing needs on the back end. Rather than looking at the systemic issues and trying to change those through political decisions, you can get involved directly in your community. In some ways that can feel more immediate, and that's important too, I think. It's important not to lose sight of these immediate needs, but also the larger structural political issues that are leading to those immediate needs. For example, in Bowling Green and Wood County, you've got the local Continuum of Care that's working to do some advocacy on those issues. There are a variety of food banks in the local community that are dealing with that. Justin Rex: And another big one that the COC works on every year is Project Connect that they've been doing for the last four or five years, where they basically have one day in October where almost over a hundred service providers from around the community come in at St. Mark's Church, just north of campus, and they basically create a one-stop shop for any kind of services people in need may have. You can get a birth certificate. You can apply for some kind of public assistance if you need it. You can see a dentist. Whatever issues it is that you have, you can get those addressed in one day and it really cuts down, given that transportation is a big issue, you can come to one place and get a variety of different things done just by walking throughout the church. Jolie Sheffer: Great. Justin Rex: I'd encourage students to get involved with that coming up in mid-October 2019. Jolie Sheffer: Great. We will now turn to our studio audience for some questions. Fallon Smeal: Hi, I'm [Fallon Smeal 00:00:24:07]. I'm a third year Political Science major here at BGSU. A lot of my interest currently in poverty is coming from students in poverty and students in homelessness particularly. I feel like it's a silent issue. Are there any thoughts that you have towards making it either more public or more accessible for students to either to get housing or to get help from a university campus? Justin Rex: Sure. Before I answer the question, can you maybe tell us a little bit more about how that issue came to you or what you've heard from students at Bowling Green, given that, like you said, it is an issue that's not talked about as much and we don't tend to think of college students dealing with that issue? Fallon Smeal: Yeah. One of my friends last year was actually living in homelessness. She was in a relationship with somebody. She was the extra person on the lease, so she wasn't written in on the lease. They ended up breaking up, and he kicked her out even though she was paying rent. So she still had to pay rent for the rest of the year, because they'd entered into a contract themselves, but she wasn't living there and wasn't able to afford to go to someplace else. So she ended up living out of her car, taking showers just anywhere that has a shower on campus, whether that's in the theater department or in the locker rooms in Eppler, and really struggling to make ends meet while working a job and going to classes. She didn't tell anybody about it until after it had already happened. Is there any way to make it maybe less shameful, I guess? Justin Rex: Yeah, I think there's some growing attention to this issue, particularly on food, but also homelessness on college campuses. There are some universities that are trying to study this and doing a national survey related to that, and there are also a couple states that have introduced bills on the West coast. I think Washington and California have created some bills to create more wraparound services for students experiencing food-related, housing-related issues at universities to push them and provide the resources to provide for students in crisis. Justin Rex: I think that's one way to start trying to address those issues is one, having people tell their story, and two, then once that story is told to try and push either universities or potentially city or state legislators to try and address that issue. But I think the first part is really trying to tell that story. This sounds like a great student project where we could do some survey research of students on campus to really document that. Because I know we've been doing a lot at the university to address food insecurity and there's groups working on that, but I haven't heard and not aware of people working on housing-related stuff. Isabel Bregar: My name is [Isabel Bregar 00:27:00]. I'm a third year Political Science student. My question is, for us, we have the ability to take your course and learn the actual endeavors that people in poverty face and how we can go about helping them through policy change and things like that. But how do you recommend other students on campus get more informed about it, or what can the university do to provide more awareness for the issues that we got to discuss throughout class that many other students don't have the ability to learn about? Justin Rex: One thing we tried to do through the class to raise some more awareness is the poverty simulation that we hosted for... That both of you participated in, where we basically tried to give students characters based on real life stories of people in poverty, and have them simulate a month in poverty where we've got other volunteers representing resources that people in poverty would particularly use, whether it's food banks, social service agencies, churches, employers, and try to simulate that. I think that's one way to start telling the story a little bit more is to give people who may not have ever experienced poverty or known somebody in poverty to simulate what that might actually be like, and that can be one stimulant to pushing them to get a little more engaged. I think part of it is you can hear all the statistics about a problem that you like, but that tends not to really engage people or push them to really get involved in an issue, so I think developing that emotional connection can be important. Justin Rex: Also having students tell their story can be a particularly good way to get them involved. Maybe they'll hear about an older adult living in poverty from reading in the newspaper, portraying them in the simulation, but I think if we have more students telling their story, that can be a way for other people to feel comfortable coming forth and telling their story. And then raising that awareness and developing that emotional connection can potentially be a good way to push people to get more involved. That's one way, I think. Fallon Smeal: Okay. We've talked a lot in class this semester about systematic oppression and how that can often further poverty through generations. I know you talked a little bit in the questions earlier about that, but is there anything that you care to expand on about anything that we've talked about in class that might pertain to systematic oppression and poverty? Justin Rex: Sure. I think there are a variety of more systemic causes of poverty. One common explanation and one of the dominant explanations we've used in the United States in particular is that we situate it individually. That individuals in some way through cultural practices, poor choices, are causing poverty. But as you said, we've talked about there's been a long history of people trying to push back on that narrative, that there are other more broad systemic causes through political practices, institutional practices. I think one way to think about or sort of delineate some of these causes is to think about official government policies and government practices that have perpetuated or created inequality. Some of those have been related to racial oppression, and so we sort of got a long history from slavery on up through [inaudible 00:30:53] Jim Crow practice in the wake of the Civil War. And then some of the more institutional, less overt forms of discrimination that we talked about related to housing has been a primary one after some Jim Crow practice ended. Justin Rex: Those have a legacy leading on up to today, given that they involved a lot of resource transfer that still hasn't been accounted for. I think that's one way to think about those. There's also a variety of economic practices that you can point to systemically that lead to poverty. Part of the issue is joblessness or jobs that aren't paying enough. In the economy, we tend to see that as a big source of poverty as well, in terms of thinking about some of these systemic things. And as we read the book Evicted in class as well, and one word he brings up a lot in that is talking about this idea of exploitation, that in some ways in a market economy we have normal business transactions, but to what extent do those crossover into exploitation in some situations? Justin Rex: He talks about the rental practice between landlord and tenant that he studies in Milwaukee. This idea of economic exploitation between landlords and tenants, and also political practice that allow them to do that. I think some of the economic practices on the front line that people deal with. And there's other ones, not just housing-related, but things like payday lending and things like that too are another source of arguably exploitation, taking advantage of people in poverty. Those are at least a few. Jolie Sheffer: Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza. Special thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Community and Civic Engagement. Research assistance for this podcast was provided by ICS interns Olivia Davis, Emily Malloy, [Strati Moustakais 00:33:07], and [Alaysia 00:33:18] Parks.  

Dr. Nicole M. Jackson, Associate Professor of History at BGSU, discusses her research undergone in the Fall of 2019 as an ICS Faculty Fellow. Her project, titled “Women Writing Black to the British Empire,” considers black British women's contemporary popular literature as a site for working out ideas about race, sex, gender, love, and national belongings.  Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute For the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this. What a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the Big Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute For the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, Associate Professor of English and American Culture Studies and the Director of ICS. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Nicole M. Jackson, who is an Associate Professor of History. She researches the contemporary African diaspora with a focus on post World War II black social movements, migrations, race, and imperialism in Britain and the United States. She joins me today to talk about research undergone in fall, 2019, as an ICS faculty fellow. This project considers black British women's contemporary popular literature as a site for working out ideas about race, sex, gender, love, and national belongings. I'm very pleased to sit down with you today and learn more about your work and an alternative canon of black British women's literature. Thanks for being here, Nicole. Nicole Jackson: Thanks for having me. Jolie Sheffer: Why don't we begin by having you give a little background on your research and how you came to be interested in this particular project. Nicole Jackson: So my PhD research, what this shoots off from is I look at black British and African American postwar social movements about migrant populations. So in the US, I'm looking at people who are migrating at the end of the second World War to primarily the West. I'm looking at California. And then in the UK, I'm looking at Caribbean people who are migrating to primarily London. And all of my work is about community activism, so I want to understand how these migrants become socially active around things that are affecting their community. And in particular, for the dissertation I was looking at three frames, so education, reproductive justice, and policing. And then that blew out a little bit more to looking at belonging and citizenship. Although that was embedded at the time, not that I realized that it was important. Nicole Jackson: And so in the UK, part of what I saw was that so much of their community activism was institution building. And probably the most significant institution were black bookshops. They were spaces of congregation, they were spaces of education, so there were a lot of like extracurricular educational things happening, like Saturday schools and afterschool programs. And they were also printing houses, so they were printing a wide range of work. So some academic texts, some informational pamphlets, and a lot of poetry from community members, and then as well novels. So that's the connection between community activism and social movements and black literature. Jolie Sheffer: I'm curious as to, you're a historian, but this project has you looking at literature. So how do you approach the study of this literature from your perspective as a historian? Nicole Jackson: Carefully. I think I'm aided in the fact that Caribbean people have a really long history of artistic production. So there is a really large body of work, especially for instance Carol Boyce Davies, who was looking at migrant Caribbean population. She does the US and the UK. So there are people who are looking at Caribbean, in particular women's writings, as connected to the historical context in which they live, so I don't have to make a leap. I would say the literary criticism makes me really uncomfortable because that is not my area. But so much of this is embedded in Caribbean cultures anyway, so that I don't have to feel as if I'm stepping out on my own. So I thankfully am able to look at these other Caribbean scholars in particular who have done a lot of that legwork. Jolie Sheffer: So is part of your approach a kind of social history or cultural history? Nicole Jackson: I'm a social and cultural historian, so absolutely. Jolie Sheffer: So for folks who don't really know, how does that differ from a lot of the maybe more conventional focus of history that other folks might be familiar with? Or assume from watching Ken Burns documentaries or something? Nicole Jackson: Oh man. You can cut that out. So I would argue that a social and cultural historian, as opposed to a legal or political historian, is interested in people and their lives. So for me, I really am always asking, what do people think about the world in which they live? Which includes a legal structure, it includes a political reality, but it is not focusing on lawmakers or politicians, it is focusing on those people who have to live that political and legal reality enacted. And at least for me... And that's different in these populations. So for African Americans, the black bookstores don't publish, so I'm not looking at literature in those contexts because they're not producing it. Nicole Jackson: What I am looking at, there's a long history of protest, so I have looked at literally protest actions. There's a really great record of that. But the black British and Caribbean people don't have the same kinds of protest reality, so I can see some of that reaction literally in their work. So a lot of the groups that I study have newsletters. I was really shocked to find that almost all of those newsletters had poetry in the end or they had cartoons. Literally, their artistic production was a part of their protest, and so I let them lead me to this. And that's what a social and cultural historian is doing. Jolie Sheffer: For listeners who may not be familiar, what is some of the essential historical context that shapes the contemporary period in black British history and cultural production? Nicole Jackson: Oh man. So pretty much all contemporary black British history starts, for better or for worse, with 1948 and the British Nationality Act, as well as the docking of the Windrush ship in London. I say for better or for worse because that is where we get the large scale beginning of the migration, and they are able to move because of the British Nationality Act in an easier manner. But there is migration that is happening before that period. The biggest distinction is that the period before is actually usually transitory, so people are coming for a few years. So Caribbean people are coming for education or something like that. African people are also coming for the same thing, and probably African people are coming in larger numbers. But they are not settling. After 1948, we start to see people settling in larger numbers, and also settling really all over Britain, as opposed to just in port cities or major metropolitan areas. Nicole Jackson: After that, there's a riot in 1958. It's called the Nottingham Riots, where these young white youth called Teddy Boys rampage through London and beating up and attacking Caribbean people as well as white women who are in relationships with black men. The next year, Kelso Cochrane is murdered, and so the two... And Tegan Mann, a migrant, he lived in London. So those two are usually connected together. And then there are a whole bunch of legal things that happened, those are boring. Nicole Jackson: And then for me, probably the next significant thing... So after the Notting Hill riot and Kelso Cochrane's murder, the Caribbean community responds in a way they had not before, because that's not the first time there had been any antagonism. Also not the first race riot in England, although people write as if it is. But so they begin to respond in a community building kind of way. So before that we, see Jamaicans, people from Barbados, Antiguans, Guyanese people who don't really see themselves as part of a singular community. They see their community as people from their island. But after the riot, because it's indiscriminate violence, they begin to think of themselves as a pan Caribbean community. Nicole Jackson: And so they organized the first Notting Hill Carnival, which actually still happens to this day. It's the August bank holiday, if you were in London. And so they organized the first one, I think in 1959. And then it actually happens almost every year until 1970, there's not a period where it doesn't happen. But in 1976, there's a whole bunch of commotion around it because it has gotten larger in the almost 20 years. Police have started to attend in higher numbers and the community begins to respond adversely. And so in '76, there's a riot at the Notting Hill Carnival because police arrest some young black men they say were pickpocketing, because crime is an issue at the carnival. But the community members who saw some of these boys being arrested say that it was unnecessarily harsh, and also that some of them weren't even pickpocketing, they were just targeted. Nicole Jackson: And that leads to a lot of protesting, primarily around policing, until 1981, which is the really significant moment, which there are riots in really every region of the UK. The most famous is the Brixton riot, but there are riots in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool. I think there's one in Scotland that I don't know as much about. Name a British city with a large Afro Caribbean population and in 1981, they riot. They also then riot again in 1983, but those are slightly different. Jolie Sheffer: What is it that you think the concept of diaspora makes visible that more nation based approaches obscure? Nicole Jackson: That's a lovely question. So when I was a grad student, we read this book by Penny Von Eschen, I think it's probably Race Against Empire. But she covers this in a couple of different books where she essentially is pushing back with the idea that African Americans are provincial, that they don't understand what's happening in the rest of the world. And she says they're not provincial. They actually care deeply about what's happening in spaces where there are other people of African descent. And so that particular book is looking at, I think, Africa. So she's thinking about apartheid South Africa. That's a lot of her work. But there are other scholars who argue that insight. People know what's happening in East Africa, they care deeply about what's happening there because of their own religious connections. Nicole Jackson: So there are a whole bunch of scholars who essentially say that African Americans care, and particularly this is where it starts, that they care about what's happening in the world. And that was really revolutionary for me, if only because I come from a working class background where people don't get to travel, they cannot afford to travel. My grandfather used to drive from California to the South every summer and that felt luxurious. But leaving the country was not something I could imagine. And then when I did, what I was surprised to find is how much people in the UK knew about what was happening in the US, and that changed my mind. Nicole Jackson: So what I asked for in particular is, one, thinking about how much people of African descent know about one another and want to know about one another. But then my own work and why I study migrants is because it's not just that they want to know and that they read newspapers, stuff like that, but they also travel to see one another. Whether it is leisurely travel, so like the 1930s, Elsanda Robeson and Paul Robeson actually end up living in the UK for a while, and Eslanda travels all over Europe. She spends a lot of time in the Soviet union, which is actually, I think, where she passes. But she travels to Africa as well. That is her greatest hope, she wants to get to Africa. Hell, that was terrifying. I'll start. Nicole Jackson: But yeah, Eslanda Robeson wants to get to Africa and she does, and she actually writes about it as well. And while she's in Africa, she's meeting future African statesmen who are students at the time. She's meeting Caribbean people who are also students. She spends a lot of time in France where she meets a whole bunch of people from the French Caribbean who were there. So they are moving and their ideas are moving. And even though these are not rich people, almost none of the people I study, they're all pretty much working class people. But they were able to move, whether that's back and forth between the Caribbean and England or to the US, which they really want. Many of them, because of the time period, want to end up in the Soviet Union. Some of them ended up in Asia. A lot of them want to end up in North Africa. So it is literally that people are moving. Nicole Jackson: I think for me, the diaspora, I'm always shocked at who is moving at the same time and who is in conversation with one another. Sometimes in their work, literally. But also marriages. I mean, Stokely Carmichael was married to Miriam Makeba for a while and it's like, how did that happen? But it's like, he's moving and she's moving. She's exiled for a while. Literally, they're moving. So for me, it's those two things, that of knowledge of one another, and information is moving, but also people are moving as well. Jolie Sheffer: Another aspect of this research is around the idea of canons and challenging the conventional British canon with these black British authors. So can you talk about what you see as distinctive about the writers you're looking at and how they challenge the dominant narratives of British literature in this period? Nicole Jackson: Yeah. I think one, and probably the most significant, is language. It is not accidental that I want to look at popular literature, if for no other reason than I think when we read British literature, even if we're not reading a white author, it's almost always literature that is challenging to understand. That's part of what makes it great, is that you have to read it three and four times and you have to look up a million words. Jolie Sheffer: It's difficult. Nicole Jackson: It's difficult, right. So that's what makes it good literature. And that's, in my opinion, elitist. But it essentially means that the vast majority of people will never be able to engage with good literature. Nicole Jackson: My grandfather was illiterate and that mattered to me as a kid. He used to have me read things to him. He used to have my brother and I do math for him or check his math, because he was better with numbers than anything. And I remember never having any judgment, it was just a reality. He grew up in a rural lifestyle. But I love to read and he loved to buy me books that he would never read. And so that idea that something has to be difficult to be good literature never made sense to me. And that people who can't access it bereft of culture. That didn't make sense to me. Nicole Jackson: But what I found in black women's literature is that there is this interplay of wanting to write about really significant and deep things in ways that are intensely accessible. So Andrea Levy writes intensely accessible books that are, many of her books are in first person. It is very intimate. She's very often writing about families, and so that everyday reality of whatever, Dad woke up later than everyone or something. She's writing about the everyday realities of life that are accessible and understandable. Or someone like Louise Bennett-Coverley, who's literally writing in Jamaican Patois. She wants people who speak Patois to be able to read in their own everyday language. And then in that everyday language, she's writing these really intensely critical and anti-imperial things because that's the language people are talking about anti-imperial things in. So for me, language and accessibility is one of those things that I think stands out in black British literature in particular, but especially this. Nicole Jackson: And then I think the other thing is an actual focus on black women. I would be hard pressed to think of much British literature that has a focus on black women, and that includes even black authors who are writing in that canon. I think they have been written out in very particular ways. Black men have not in the same way, not that they are overly represented, but they have not been written out in the same way. Whether they're there as the kind of specter of [inaudible 00:18:31] or some other way, they're there. Black women don't tend to be there. And I think it is not incidental that the black women are writing themselves into this canon. Jolie Sheffer: Great. Let's talk about some of the people that you're researching. So how do people specifically, like Beryl Gilroy or Andrea Levy or Vanessa Walter, fit into... So you've talked about some of them. Talk to us a little bit about who Beryl Gilroy was and how she contributes to this alternative canon. Nicole Jackson: So Beryl Gilroy, she was a black female teacher in the UK in the 1950s, and I think early 1960s before she stepped away. She was an activist, she was an anti-imperialist, but also a proponent of multicultural education in England because of her work as a teacher. And she later has a life where she writes... Near the end of her life, she's writing a lot of fiction, which doesn't actually play into my research because it is almost entirely set in the Caribbean, which I don't think is accidental by any means. But it is just not quite the conversation I want to have. Nicole Jackson: So mostly it's her memoir, Black Teacher, which she's featuring in. It is really significant in that it is the only one written by a black woman who was a teacher in the UK in the 50s, where most black teachers were actually barred from doing so. I don't like this phrasing, but she was one of the lucky ones who was able to use her credentials. It's kind of a boring book. It's really strange. I should have told someone, you can tell that she understand that most people will ignore that she even existed. Nicole Jackson: So she gets into the minutia of her life, which makes some chapters really interesting and some chapters super dry. But I think as a historian, that's great. She knows that someone is going to want to know about her life at some point. And so she makes sure that it's all there, not just herself in the classroom or trying to find a job, but how she feels about it, how people react to her, what her names, literally names, all of that. She's being meticulous in that documentation. I think she matters so much, not just because of her life, but because of the ways in which she's been effectively erased, which is a shame. Jolie Sheffer: Do you want me to ask the followup question? Nicole Jackson: Sure. Jolie Sheffer: Yes. So how is it that she has been erased and who has she been eclipsed by? Nicole Jackson: So she's eclipsed by her son, which I think on some level, she probably wouldn't be mad about. But her son is Paul Gilroy, who is a preeminent scholar of race and racism in contemporary England. I don't know why this has happened, but I think she's kind of inconvenient in a number of ways. I like a lot of Paul Gilroy's work, but I think that in particular in the black Atlantic, he is erasing of the Caribbean and the significance of the Caribbean. His mother's Guyanese, and as I said, a lot of her fiction is set in the Caribbean. And I think she becomes, if people even understand that they're related, which it's easy to not even think, Gilroy's not an uncommon name. But it's super easy to erase how significant and the Caribbean had to have been in his life, at least maybe as a child. So it is a shame that we have forgotten that. Nicole Jackson: It's not just that. He writes intensely about black British people needing to be a part of British society and he writes about the ways in which they are excluded. But he is doing so from the standpoint of a mixed race person, which is significant. And a lot of my work is arguing that it is easier for mixed race people to be assimilated in ways that Caribbean migrants are not. And so the fact that we aren't thinking about his mother's impact on England, because we don't know her or because we only connect her to the Caribbean, I think is maybe emblematic of that, the problem of that. Jolie Sheffer: Great. We're going to take a quick break. Thank you for listening to the Big Ideas Podcast. Speaker 1: If you are passionate about Big Ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Hello and welcome back to the Big Ideas Podcast. Today I'm talking to Dr. Nikole Jackson about her research into contemporary black British women writers. You previously talked about how black British history is an emerging field of historical inquiry. Can you tell us a little bit about why the domestic study of black British citizens has been overlooked and how you're trying to put them back into the story? Nicole Jackson: Racism. It's just racism. So it's weird. British history is an odd one. I'm just going to stop and think about that. Jolie Sheffer: Okay, yeah. Nicole Jackson: It's a rough one. So I think part of what a lot of scholars have talked about after World War II is the impending end of empire, and that really changes the way that British people or English people think about themselves. And part of what that means, there are some scholars that argue it's a constriction. So they begin to jettison the importance of the empire in politics. Which before, that was how England, a small country on a fairly small, in Britain in a small island, the ability to dominate other places was considered a birthright. And it was, for a small country, the justification for the impact they had on the world. But World War II smashes that. Nicole Jackson: And then after that, the US becomes a preeminent world power. They whine about that too. You can keep that whine part in. And so rather than try and fight with the Soviet union or the US, they say, "You know, it's not about that anymore. The empire doesn't really matter." Not that they don't fight some colonies leaving, but the empire for some people matters less after World War II. Part of that, though, then, is that the impact of countries with large not white populations becomes... Or people think it doesn't matter anymore. Because it doesn't have to matter because it's no longer about England, it's just these places. Nicole Jackson: There's also a heavy focus on white dominion spaces too. So if any foreign spaces matter, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Rhodesia before. So when the world matters, it's only the white spaces. And so English history, English popular culture too, becomes intensely white. Not that it was multicultural before, but there's an understanding that the empire is part of the English story. But after, all of that gets written out. Nicole Jackson: There are also some changes happening in education, which are super boring. But essentially, global history, for instance, doesn't matter as much anymore, if it ever mattered a lot. They stopped teaching it and they teach it in an intensely racist way, because then there's justification for why you don't have to teach more of it, because nothing interesting has ever come out of Africa. Anything interesting that ever happened in Africa is coming from British hands. So there's almost no understanding in English culture, until very recently, about the significance of the empire that can understand these places and these people as just as significant, if not more so, than English people. Nicole Jackson: There are also huge class issues. So most people who go to university in the UK until, again, very recently, were the middle class and wealthy, and they were almost entirely white. And so there's at the same time... The US is actually a really perfect example as a comparison. So after the civil rights movement in the US, African American history becomes part of not just higher education but also K through 12. That does not happen in the same time period in the UK. In fact, every push from about the 1950s on to teach South Asian history or Caribbean history or African history is met with... The essential response is, but why does it matter here? And some of the justification is, well, we're here now. But another justification could have been, you were in those spaces. But that doesn't quite happen. Nicole Jackson: And so if there is any black history education happening, it's happening in black spaces. So those bookstores or churches or things like that. And they further allow the Department of Education and Science, and also some of these other educational research bodies, to say, "Well, that can happen over there because those black kids need it. But those white English kids, they don't need it." So there hasn't been a institutionalizing of black history to the point where we are just now starting to see black British MAs in history and culture. Some of this happened earlier in cultural studies and social criticism, but not a lot. Jolie Sheffer: So one of the things you and I talked about is that there's a whole secret part of academic work and the calculations you make as a scholar in what your projects are, how to tackle them, and the idea of feasibility. And we talk about with our students about, oh, that project doesn't seem feasible. And often what we mean is in the time span of your degree with the resources you have, this methodology will be more difficult than this, that sort of thing. But you and I had a conversation about there are other dimensions of feasibility that need to be part of that calculation. Would you talk a little bit about some of those parts of your decision making process? Nicole Jackson: So I am an intensely pessimistic person, but I study what I study because I love black people and I love social movements and I love people who are going out into their communities and making tangible changes. And so in the back of my 20, 23 year old mind, I thought I was going to write this really powerful and inspiring story about black activists. And what I have written over and over again is that there is a period where so much as possible and people are doing absolutely everything they can to change their lives in England and then they are swiftly cut off. And so I think I have resisted writing the actual final chapter of my book because it is a story about how these really fascinating, amazing people who were smart and dedicated were overwritten, essentially, by Parliament and other British politicians. And so the story we get erases them. But also social and legal realities were shaped in opposition to what they wanted. And that's super sad to write about. Nicole Jackson: There was a moment where I could have done it easily. And then to be honest, the election made everything that was really hard harder. And I think it was hard for me to write a sad story, because it is sad to me. These are people who, some of them died young, some of them died destitute, many of them have been forgotten outside of their own communities. And I hate to think that what they did was in vain, but that was the historical story about their activism. Certainly not a comment on their lives, but this particular movement was a sad story. In terms of my mental health, it was really hard, certainly harder than it had ever been to write a story about a movement failing. But so many movements fail that it shouldn't have been hard, because I know that. But it just was. And that was the feasibility part. Writing a failing social movement didn't seem like something that was good for me. Jolie Sheffer: Yeah. And I think that that's such an important thing. We don't tend to reveal the curtain to what these conversations are that we have with ourselves or with other colleagues about, the work that we do is intensely personal to us. We invest time. It's intellectual, but it is also things we care deeply about. And we are in the work as well as the work being in us. And I think that's really important to recognize, that sometimes the answer is, I want to do this work, but I can't do it right now or I can't do it here. And perhaps you'll return to it in the future, but now you're heading in a different direction. So would you tell us a little bit about some of the things you're thinking about for what might be the next project? Nicole Jackson: I want to say I'm trying to pawn some of my research off onto a friend. Sometimes it's just I'm not the right person, someone else is. So there's that. So I didn't read for about a year after the election, and then when I started reading, I started getting popular fiction, which is another relationship to the current project. A lot of that popular fiction, almost all of it eventually, was romance novels. I started reading black romance novels, one, because a part of my dissertation that all of my advisers hated was about love. There's a whole chapter about the theoretical implications of love is a radical politics. And my advisors were like, "What the hell is this?" Can I cuss? They were like, "This is terrible. I hate it." And so it's not part of the book, but it is the thing that made it possible for me to theorize these relationships between migrants in these two different countries. And I love love, realistically. So the romance novels were a nice way for me to read again and keep my brain active. Nicole Jackson: And then I started sort of thinking about, one, how radical I still think love is, especially in this particular context. So I'm hopefully moving into a project that is thinking, first because it is my wheelhouse, it feels comfortable, historical black romance and how we can pedagogically use them to teach the things that are a little bit harder. And love, for me, is the thing that is hard to teach as a historian, but I know that it is the central thing for me. Like how do black people endure, how do they become socially active? So much or that is literally about various kinds of love. Romantic love, familial love, love of community, love of diaspora. So it is me trying to think through some of these things and how they are accessible to my students. Jolie Sheffer: And it sounds like, thinking about black romance novels, it's also an extension of your interest in popular culture by black British writers. Nicole Jackson: Absolutely. And for the same reasons. I don't come from a family of people who love to read, but I had an older cousin who was my hookup for romance novels and urban contemporary books when I was a kid. She probably will never read any of my academic work. She probably would hate it. It would be a slog. But she reads 30 books a month. This is not because she's not active, but it's what's accessible, what tells a story that she wants to hear, what she can make a connection with. Jolie Sheffer: Thank you so much, Nicole. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Our producers for this podcast are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by ICS intern Renee Hopper with editing by Stevie Scheurich. This conversation was recorded in the Stanton Audio Recording Studio in the Michael & Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the nature of sports narrative, the way that fictional and non-fictional accounts can illuminate the lived experiences of fans, and the role sports blogs have played in reshaping sports narratives beyond the capitalist and competitive frameworks promoted by major leagues such as the NBA and the MLB. In We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Cohan investigates “the behavior of American sports fans to understand (its) cultural relevance beyond mere consumerism.” He argues that sports contain all the elements of traditional stories: beginnings, middles, ends, plots, characters, rising action, declension, and a causal trajectory. These narrative pieces allow fans to enact “consumptive, receptive, and appropriative” activities that are “fundamentally acts of narrative interpretation and (re-) creation.” Creative fans transform sporting activities into spaces for self-reflection and authorship and in doing so fundamentally remake sports to suit their individual agendas. Cohan investigates five different types of sports narratives: fictions, fictional memoirs, memoirs, film, and blogs. These narratives include classics in the field, such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, but he mostly engages with relatively novel accounts such as Matthew Quick’s narrative metafiction Silver Linings Playbook, Scott Raab’s memoir of the early 2000s Cleveland Cavaliers, The Whore of Akron and the feminist sports blog Power Forward. These diverse genres of athletic storytelling allow Cohan to comment on how fans have used fictional and non-fictional accounts to build their own identities, address questions of social inequity, work through mental illness, and appreciate sports in new ways. His work also suggests that a more flexible understanding of fandom might allow us to rethink sports in meaningful ways, improving the way we play games, as well as open up new pathways to fandom, making it more inclusive for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. Cohan’s work will appeal to a broad range of scholars, but especially to those with an interest in the intersections between sports, literature, and narrative. Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It's part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis's Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways. Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.  Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies