2.19
Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences
Pint-size philosophers
By engaging with Philadelphia elementary students and high school teachers, Penn professor Karen Detlefsen is opening young minds to a new kind of philosophical thinking.
PennDesign partners with Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
The Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the School of Design has entered into a collaborative research agreement with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to assist in activities leading to the study and preservation of Taliesin and Taliesin West.
Celebrating Chinese culture
The Penn Lions student dance troupe aims to spread good luck and good fortune around the Lunar New Year.
Risk and healthy behavior in the American adaptation of a telenovela
Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center compare the CW Network show “Jane the Virgin” and the original Spanish-language telenovela “Juana la Virgen” and find an increase in risky adolescent behavior in the adaptation.
And the Oscar goes to…a Penn sophomore?
Claire Sliney is a co-executive producer of one of five films nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Short Subject category. “Period. End of Sentence.” explores the stigma of menstruation for girls in India and Sliney’s work to address the issue.
The Knight Commission calls to rebuild trust in democracy with transparency, responsibility
Penn President Amy Gutmann joined 26 other national leaders to consider why the age of Facebook and “fake news” has pushed faith in government and the media to historic low, and how to mend the rift.
The language of climate change—and the Anthropocene
Hanna E. Morris, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication who researches environmental communication, explains the sudden rise of ‘Anthropocene’ as the latest buzzword in the climate dialogue.
25 years later, a legacy presses forward
It separates fiction from facts and sets standards for journalists. Since its formation in 1993, the Annenberg Public Policy Center has surely made its mark.
Supreme Court decision a boon for truck drivers and, potentially, the gig economy
Three Penn experts discuss the ruling, which gives transportation workers the ability to sue their employers in class-action lawsuits, sidestepping forced arbitration.
Iconic preservation: A plan for the O’Keeffe home and studio
A balance of science and critical thinking, plus reverence for the artist’s work and devotion to her space, makes the conservation assessment by a PennDesign team especially meaningful.
In the News
NextCity.org
Philly applies a ‘light touch’ to get dollars flowing for middle-income homes
Vincent Reina of the School of Design discussed Philadelphia’s new Workforce Housing Credit Enhancement program, which guarantees loans to small and mid-size developers building income-restricted projects. The enhancement “is a nice way of releasing pressure on the housing market,” says Reina.
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Miami Herald
Sex and violence were pumped up to “Americanize” Jane the Virgin, study finds
A new study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that “Jane the Virgin,” like many other English-language adaptations of telenovelas, was augmented to feature more sex and violence than the original version in order to appeal to American audiences. These changes “could in turn adversely affect its adolescent Hispanic audiences,” wrote the report’s co-authors, Darien Perez Ryan and Patrick E. Jamieson.
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Forbes
What the Middle Ages can teach us about Star Wars’ ancient Jedi texts
The Schoenberg Institute was highlighted for its series of weekly videos in which the Libraries’ Dot Porter discusses parallels between fictional texts in the Star Wars universe and medieval manuscripts.
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The New Yorker
Does democracy need truth?: A conversation with the historian Sophia Rosenfeld
The School of Arts and Sciences’ Sophia Rosenfeld was interviewed about her new book, “Democracy and Truth: A Short History.” Addressing the rise of social media, Rosenfeld said, “we don’t have many tools, most of us, for distinguishing between legitimate stories and illegitimate ones, or we don’t care that much. The end result is a world of truth and falsehood all circulating, undifferentiated, globally.”
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The New York Times
Overlooked no more: Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian poet who broke barriers of sex and society
The School of Arts and Sciences’ Fatemeh Shams memorialized the late Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad. “She always had one eye back on tradition, and one eye toward the future,” said Shams.
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