2.19
Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences
A walk through history
Jenny Holzer’s landscape installation “125 Years” celebrates its 15th anniversary as an interactive text-based tribute to women’s legacies at Penn.
From devastation, stories of hope and resilience
On a summer field trip, students assisted in the filming of virtual reality videos of artists in Puerto Rico reacting to Hurricane Maria.
Award-winning project sparks dialogue around trans literacy
A new working group funded by the Alice Paul Center serves as glue for cross-disciplinary dialogue surrounding trans literacy in classrooms and elsewhere.
Unpacking Philadelphia’s response to shifting immigration policies
At Perry World House, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney sat down with former City Solicitor Sozi Tulante, a PWH Visiting Fellow, to discuss the administration’s role in significant immigration-policy decisions.
Veteran homelessness down 5 percent, to continue declining each year
The U.S. departments of Housing and Urban Development and Veteran Affairs announced that veteran homelessness has decreased 5.4 percent in 2018—bringing the total down to nearly half the number of homeless veterans that were reported in 2010.
Social scientists trade academic silos for shared workspace
Faculty and grad students in the new Social and Behavioral Sciences Initiative have access to two state-of-the-art labs, grants, and a collaborative environment aimed at creating a vibrant research community.
‘Near/Miss’
The poetry in Charles Bernstein’s just-published collection, “Near/Miss,” defies convention in language and form. This is his 15th book of poetry.
Monitoring heritage sites with drones and remote sensors
The Center for Architectural Conservation has been observing adobe ruins for three years as a harbinger for climate change. Any damage that the changing climate will do to exposed structures, it will do it to adobe first.
Perspective: 100 years since the armistice that ended WWI
Nov. 11 is the centennial of the end of World War I, “the war to end all wars.” Historians Arthur Waldron and Frederick Dickinson provide perspectives on the conclusion of that horrifically deadly conflict.
Social media use increases depression and loneliness
Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram may not be great for personal well-being. For the first time, an experimental study shows a causal link between time spent on these social media and increased depression and loneliness.
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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