Challenge. Change‪.‬ Clark University

Turn on the TV or open a podcast app and you’re likely to find true crime. Americans have a morbid fascination with these stories — The Pew Research Center reports that true crime is the most common topic of top-ranked podcasts in the U.S. As a trio of scholars consumed this content, they noticed a pattern: Stories about LGBTQ+ people, as perpetrators or victims of crime, were told less frequently and in a different tone than that of their cisgender and heteronormative peers.
“The (Mis)Representation of Queer Lives in True Crime” is a new book co-edited by Abbie Goldberg, professor of psychology at Clark; Danielle Slakoff, professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento; and Carrie Buist, professor of criminology, criminal justice, and legal studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. The volume analyzes the intersection of LGBTQ+ people and crime, including the treatment of queer people in the criminal legal system, how the mass media delivers such stories, and which details are emphasized or erased in the dominant narrative.

“Although queer and trans people are disproportionately affected by crime, the majority of true crime podcasts, documentaries, and so on focus more on cisgender, heterosexual folks — often young, white folks,” Goldberg says. “A lot of media content creators are heterosexual and so they're often creating content that matches their own identities.”

Slakoff says the media’s depiction of queer people, especially trans women, often paints a picture of hypersexual, deceptive people. “If that is what's portrayed in the media, that is what people begin to believe — or they internalize those ideas,” she adds. It’s one factor that makes the queer community less likely to report a crime, according to Buist.

“LGBT folks are often blamed for not only their own victimization,” Buist says, “but for their existence.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Amid an intense combat scene in the 2019 film “Avengers: Endgame,” a group of female superheroes work together to pass the infinity gauntlet across a chaotic battlefield in a desperate attempt to defeat the villain Thanos and prevent worldwide destruction.
Political science Professor Ora Szekely suspects filmmakers intended that scene to be an empowering visual of women heroes supporting one another. To Szekely, something else stood out: The women heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe could easily fit together on the screen in unison. She says it’s an example of the imbalanced depictions of male and female fighters in the first three phases of the MCU.

“I remember watching this and thinking, there are hundreds of male heroes fighting in the background, and they managed to get all of the female heroes in one power shot,” says Szekely. “I think it doesn't necessarily send the message they were going for.”

This fictional world is under the microscope in “The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” a book in which 25 scholars provide an expansive analysis of messages about government, public policy, and society within the first three phases of the superhero movie franchise. Two Clark professors contributed to the book.

In the chapter “Female Combatants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Szekely explores how women heroes are portrayed differently than their male counterparts. The movies reflect gendered ideas about why women partake in combat — ideas that are often inaccurate, she says.

Political science professor Danielle Hanley examines the Avengers as a departure from the nuclear family unit in her chapter, “Avengers, Assemblage.” Hanley argues that the Avengers are more than just a group of superpowered colleagues.

“I'm arguing that the Avengers is a family and I'm using a lot of queer theory and feminist theory to do that,” she says. “I’m thinking about the objects and the structures and the institutions that exist and are part of informing what a family is. I argue that Thor's hammer and non-human characters are a part of the family assemblage.”

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts. 

The word “utopia” comes from the Greek words for “no” and “place.” So, geography Professor Deborah Martin is intrigued by the frequency with which urban planners use utopian thinking when such a place, by definition, does not exist. In trying to create idyllic cities, planners overlook that urban areas have no singular use. Martin feels the best urban designs are the ones that don’t prescribe how a space should be used.
“What's utopian for one person, what makes the world work well, might not work for everybody else. When we think we know what people need, such as green space, then we prescribe green space in a certain way,” says Martin. “You end up having a lot of potential conflict over what people might think is good for everyone. It gets complicated pretty quickly.”

In this episode, Martin explains how urban designs reflect our values, the challenges of building for the 21st-century, and why one space can have different uses for different people. 

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Grief and rage are at the center of political science Professor Danielle Hanley’s research. She’s working on her first book project, an examination of those two emotions in the context of Greek tragedy and contemporary protest movements. In “Medea,” a play written by Euripides in 5th-century BC Greece, the titular character seeks vengeance on her husband Jason as he leaves her for a Greek princess. A chorus of women initially rally in support of Medea.
Hanley describes this as a form of “affective solidarity,” which grows out of the circulation of emotions that magnetically pull other people in — specifically emotions calling out an injustice. This also happens in 21st-century social justice movements, she notes.
“The circulation of grief and rage is a kind of commentary on the state of affairs in the world. It’s what we express when we don't have the right words,” says Hanley. “One of the things I'm thinking about is how to balance the different obligations we have to one another with our own liberation.”
Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Political Science Professor Robert Boatright has watched the Speaker of the House role become a career-ending position. This was the case for Paul Ryan and John Boehner, former Republican speakers who became disenfranchised and then left Congress. The pattern repeated itself this month as Rep. Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California, was ousted. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, is the new House speaker as of Wednesday, Oct. 25.
“It's unclear why an ambitious Republican would want to be Speaker of the House anymore given what you can anticipate,” says Boatright. The process of becoming speaker has become unprecedentedly public. When Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican of Ohio, was vying for the position earlier this month, he campaigned to the public. Social media figures like Steve Bannon used their platforms to mobilize voters to pressure moderate Republicans. “The idea that the public would play a role in figuring out who they thought was a good candidate and go after people who didn't agree with them is really pretty remarkable,” says Boatright.
Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

When English Professor Justin Shaw teaches Shakespeare, he encourages his students to use the playwright and poet’s works as a vehicle to analyze relationships and power structures. As Shaw prepares these lessons for his Clark classes, he’s watched teachers in the Southern United States drop texts like “Romeo and Juliet” from their curriculums because of legislation restricting the use of literature with content that could be deemed sexual. Libraries and classrooms have also been subject to book bans targeting titles that address topics of race, gender identity, and sexuality. 
“The powers that be in these political entities want us to stop talking about Shakespeare as anything other than the white, straight cultural power,” Shaw said in an interview recorded during Banned Books Week, which highlights the value of free and open access to information.

“Being open to the changing nature of language, identities, and the ways that we interact with the world is something I bring into our discussions of Shakespeare,” he adds. “These discussions happen today, but guess what? They're wrestling with the same issues in Shakespeare's time, too. They're wrestling with how to talk about race. They're wrestling with how to talk about sexuality. They're wrestling with how to talk about class and religion.”

Shaw is among the editors of the forthcoming “Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance,” which responds to a growing movement to make Shakespeare studies inclusive to audiences historically marginalized in relation to Shakespeare’s poetry and plays.

Challenge. Change. is produced by Andrew Hart and Melissa Hanson for Clark University. Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Find other episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.