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Eight decades later, Marine (and distinguished professor) to revisit Iwo Jima

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Eight decades later, Marine (and distinguished professor) to revisit Iwo Jima Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/01/2023 - 00:00

Clint Talbott

Richard Jessor, CU Boulder distinguished professor of behavioral science and co-founder of IBS, records an oral history with the National World War II Museum and will return to the island in March, on the 79^th anniversary of the battle

Because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Richard Jessor joined the U.S. Marines and went to war. But when he came face to face with the enemy—a dead Japanese soldier on the island of Iwo Jima—he again recharted his life, turning away from war and toward education.

Jessor will return to Iwo Jima in March to observe the 79^th anniversary of the battle, one of the fiercest and most famous of World War II. He will join the Reunion of Honor ceremony, held annually for veterans from the United States and Japan, “honoring their service and sacrifice and fostering peace” as former adversaries meet near the landing beaches.

“I don’t know how it will feel to be standing once again on the black sand of the landing beach almost 80 years later, but I know there will be tears,” Jessor said recently.

After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled from the front line and allowed to write one letter. Jessor wrote to his parents. He thanked them for everything. And he said goodbye, writing: “I don’t think I’ll get off the island alive.”

As Veterans Day approached, Jessor spoke with this magazine about the indelible marks of war, his oral history interview with the National World War II Museum, his coming reunion with soldiers on both sides of the Iwo Jima battle and his disgust at leaders who blithely discuss war as an instrument of policy rather than a gruesome choice of last resort.

Jessor, who will turn 99 this month, is a distinguished professor emeritus of behavioral science at the �鶹��Ƶ. He served on the CU Boulder faculty for 70 years before retiring in 2021. He co-founded and later directed the university’s Institute of Behavioral Science, and he wrote an influential 1970 report on the lack of ethnic diversity on campus.

But in February 1945, he was a 20-year-old Marine. Before then, Jessor had little conception of who the Japanese people were. “It was only really after we got overseas on our training base and on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands” that he realized how many servicemen viewed the Japanese as the “Yellow Peril,” a prejudice Jessor recalls with “a great deal of dismay.”

That prejudice, he suggests, was a way to dehumanize America’s foes.

For weeks before invading, U.S. forces shelled and bombed Iwo Jima, hoping to weaken the Japanese fighters, many of whom were holed up in miles of tunnels underneath the island’s only promontory, Mount Suribachi.

At the top of the page: Richard Jessor in his Boulder home in 2021. CU Boulder photo by Glenn Asakawa. Above: Marines landing on the beach of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945.

On the evening of Feb. 18, 1945, Jessor was with the Fourth Marine Division on a tank-landing ship when the crew was summoned to the deck. There, a Marine commander said, “Tomorrow night at this time, a lot of you are going to be dead.”

The shocking message might have been tempered by a belief that the fight would be easier or quicker than it actually would be. Iwo Jima comprised only 8 square miles, and the plan was for U.S. forces to conquer the island in three to five days, then sail off to invade Japan.

Things did not go according to plan. Fighting lasted 36 days.

Chaos and death

Jessor was in the fourth wave of Marines to land on Iwo Jima.

“Our tractor hit the beach and got stuck in the loose sand. We were sitting there, artillery shells exploding all around, and we were immobilized. And so, we began to just jump out of the rear of the tractor into the water, run around the vehicle and hit the beach.”

His first sight was a fellow Marine lying on his back, blood bubbling from his mouth, dying.

“That was my introduction to war,” he said.

Jessor was hit in the back by shrapnel during the first day ashore, but he was able to continue fighting. After four days of fighting, he and his company were pulled from the front line and allowed to write one letter. Jessor wrote to his parents. He thanked them for everything. And he said goodbye, writing:

“I don’t think I’ll get off the island alive.”

Back in battle, Marines were taking souvenirs from dead Japanese soldiers, and the Marines were particularly interested in Japanese “good luck flags,” which bore well wishes from friends and family and which were often tied around the soldiers’ waists.

Jessor remembers emerging from a foxhole one morning and seeing the body of a Japanese soldier. Jessor bent over to see if the man had a flag under his shirt.

“And as I’m bending over, I see that he has letters in a pocket on his shirt,” presumably from the man’s family. “I suddenly have this epiphany: I have letters in my pocket in my shirt.”

Richard Jessor (holding the Japanese "good luck flag") and 4th Marine Division buddies during the battle of Iwo Jima. Photo courtesy of Richard Jessor.

Like the soldier in Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed,” Jessor felt their shared humanity.

“I was like, what are we doing here? What is this about? What difference could it make?”

At that time, Jessor notes, he had already said goodbye to his parents. He vowed never to go to war again, whatever the reason. “I made a personal resolve that I wanted to do something that made a difference. And that has really animated me from that time on.”

For the moment, though, Jessor was still in battle. He recalls that enemy fighters were always hidden. “You fired your weapon when you saw that something was being fired at you, but you didn’t see the enemy. You didn’t see Japanese soldiers. You went to an opening of a cave, and the guy with the (flamethrower) would point his weapon into the cave opening and just fire away, hoping to incinerate any occupants of the cave,” Jessor said.

“But the enemy was not personified in actual persons.”

A live Japanese soldier, a hopeful flag-raising

That changed for Jessor about 10 days after landing, when a Japanese prisoner was caught alive by Marines in the front line. No one on the front line spoke Japanese, and Jessor was ordered to take the prisoner, at gunpoint, back to the beach, more than a mile away, to headquarters and a translator.

As Jessor and his prisoner walked through the rear lines of Marines, who had never seen a live Japanese soldier, a Marine leapt up and exclaimed, “I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.”

"I had to point my rifle at that Marine and say, ‘I have orders to shoot anybody who touches my prisoner.’” The Marine relented. Another Marine made the same threat, and Jessor responded the same way.

“I think back on it now, and I don't really know whether I would have been able to do what I was ordered to do. And I'm afraid that I might have been able to do it, because that's what you were trained to do.”

Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press captured this iconic image of the flag-raising on Suribachi. Richard Jessor saw the flag from below and yelled to his colleagues, who were buoyed by the apparent milestone. The battle raged on for weeks longer, however.

Earlier, five days after the Marines landed, Jessor’s division was striving to reach higher ground on Iwo Jima. As he faced enemy forces with his rifle, “I happened to turn around and looked over my shoulder, and I saw the American flag on top of Suribachi.”

This is the flag-raising captured in an iconic image of World War II, by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press. That picture won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1945 and inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia.

In that moment, Jessor was stunned and started screaming, “The flag’s up! The flag’s up!”

The flag-raising was significant, because it meant that Jessor and his fellow Marines had their flank covered. “And it animated me to begin to feel that maybe we could make it,” he said. Jessor did survive, but the battle wasn’t done. Weeks of fighting lay ahead.

When the Marines finally did secure the island, “we knew that the battle was essentially over,” he recalled. The Marines were ordered to return to the landing beach.

“I remember coming to the beach and seeing this long array of crosses where the temporary burials of Marines were, and I still have that vision of seeing and knowing. It just filled your vision, the rows of crosses on from Blue Beach, all the way down the beach, and in that one vision, you encapsulated the cost of the war.”

Back to Maui

With Iwo Jima secured, the Marines sailed back to Maui to train for their next mission—the planned invasion of Japan. After training during the day, Jessor recalled, he and five other men in a tent would drink beer in the evening and “relive every inch of the battle of Iwo Jima.”

“Somebody would say, ‘You remember we were in this bomb crater, and it hit so-and-so, and his intestines hit so-and-so?’ And we went through every aspect of our experience on Iwo, reliving it night after night. And as a psychologist, I think of that as sort of being cathartic and getting things out of your subconscious.”

But one man in the tent, a young recruit who had not yet seen battle, had heard enough. “Finally, he exploded at us and said, ‘I’m sick of listening to the same s—t night after night. I’ve just had it!’”

I find myself so offended when I hear representatives in Congress or in government speak so casually about war … about using war as an instrument of policy.”

Jessor rose and gave the recruit a lecture. “I said, ‘You know, we're fighting for free speech, and nobody's going to tell me that they've had enough of our talking.’”

Jessor added, “I've been a professor for 70 years, but I guess I was a pedant even before I became a professor.” As it happens, Jessor soon forgot this episode but was reminded of it decades later, when a fellow Marine, Red Kelly, contacted Jessor.

Kelly, now deceased, had become an American history teacher in a Boston high school. “He said to me, ‘Every one of the students I’ve had over these years knows about Dick Jessor.’” Kelly had used Jessor’s lecture to illustrate “good wars and reasonable wars.”

Jessor also recalls being on Maui when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We were thrilled. We thought it was a great thing,” he said. “This meant we wouldn’t have to go back into battle.”

The costs of war

However, “It wasn’t long after I got discharged before I realized that it was a horrendous event, the dropping of the bomb. I have come to the conclusion that it was unnecessary—even though most arguments are that it saved us further killing of Americans, in Japan this time. There were other ways of dealing with the emergence of a nuclear bomb.”

Interments of the 4th Marine Division on Iwo Jima. Suribachi is in the background. "It just filled your vision, the rows of crosses on from Blue Beach, all the way down the beach, and in that one vision, you encapsulated the cost of the war.”

He added: “I haven’t been able to resolve this. I can’t think of any war that I would support any more. And yet I supported the invasion of Europe and the attack on and the defeat of Nazi Germany—as a Jew, particularly, given the horrors of the Holocaust.”

There are times, Jessor said, when a nation must resort to making war on an enemy. “But the way I’ve resolved this in my own mind is there must always be some alternatives that would forestall what emerged.”

Jessor wishes more people, particularly those in power, shared his deep hesitation about war. “I find myself so offended when I hear representatives in Congress or in government speak so casually about war … about using war as an instrument of policy.”

“There is no real sense among so many who are in power about the absolute inhumanity of resorting to war and what it means, not just in the time of the events but in how it just continues its consequences,” shaping the lives of those who endured it, Jessor said.

His dismay about this is one reason he chose to do an oral history with the National World War II Museum, to further document the true face of war.

Meanwhile, he looks forward to traveling to Iwo Jima in March to commemorate the 79^th anniversary of the battle. He will travel with Jane Menken, a distinguished professor of sociology who succeeded Jessor as the director of the Institute of Behavioral Science. The two also happen to be married.

�鶹��Ƶ meeting Japanese veterans of Iwo Jima, Jessor said, “I see myself embracing them. We are, as I think of it now, comrades.”

A vial of black sand from the beaches of Iwo Jima sits next to a disarmed Japanese hand grenade on Richard Jessor's desk. CU Boulder photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Learn more about Jessor’s time at and effect on CU Boulder in this short biography and at this link. Read his 1970 report on the lack of ethnic diversity at CU Boulder at this link. See the National World War II Museum’s news release about next year’s visit to Iwo Jima here.

Richard Jessor, CU Boulder distinguished professor of behavioral science and co-founder of IBS, records an oral history with the National World War II Museum and will return to the island in March, on the 79th anniversary of the battle.

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‘Classroom in the sky’ inspires generations of researchers, students

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:34:46 +0000

‘Classroom in the sky’ inspires generations of researchers, students Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/02/2023 - 14:34

Cay Leytham-Powell

As the Mountain Research Station celebrates turning 100, a look back on its history—and toward its future

The sky was a perfect crystal blue as 50 undergraduate students from the �鶹��Ƶ spent their Saturday atop a mountain clustered around grasshoppers.

Plastic cages scarcely taller than the swaying golden grasses lay scattered about—some excluding the insects, others preventing their escape—all to see how the creatures responded to the vegetation within.

Rather than assist with the research, which was being conducted by a postdoctoral student from the University of Oregon, these general biology students hiked up a narrow, rugged path amid dense pine and yellowing aspens to this break in the trees, called Elk Meadow, to learn about research—both its legacy and its future almost 10,000 feet above sea level.

Top of the page: Bill Bowman works with a student up on the tundra. Photo by Patrick Campbell/�鶹��Ƶ. Above: The Mountain Research Station is run by a dedicated set of staff, students and faculty who maintain equipment, gather data and work on one of the most beautiful parts of CU Boulder's campus. (Credit: CU Boulder)

Just north of Nederland, about 26 miles from Boulder, is CU Boulder’s “classroom in the sky”—the Mountain Research Station. It is the university’s highest research facility and is home to some of the world’s longest-running alpine research, from how trees respond to increasing wildfires, to the charismatic little pikas and chickadees that call these slopes home, to the changing composition of the soil itself.

Graduate students and some undergraduates in the natural sciences find their way here. And yet general biology students have rarely had the opportunity to visit and learn about the facility—until now.

“You usually see graduate students or faculty or staff up there, but undergrads are rarer,” explains Warren Sconiers, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EBIO) at CU Boulder and the trip’s organizer.

“We (EBIO professors) want them to know what opportunities there are in research, and as soon as they realize it, and as soon as they want to (participate), get them out here as a part of the research at Boulder.”

The Mountain Research Station’s legacy

The Mountain Research Station has long been a pilar of support for alpine research and education. And that legacy is clear in the make-up of the place itself—from classrooms and offices to a dining hall and living spaces to bird-nest boxes used to study hybridization hanging on pine trees.

The Mountain Research Station, originally known as Science Lodge and Science Camp, was built in 1920 on what once was federal land. It is one of the oldest alpine field research facilities in the world, and one of the best, argues Bill Bowman, the station’s former director and a professor emeritus in EBIO. Bowman says that is in large part because of the staff that make this this place run and the expert leadership of John Marr, who became the station’s director in 1950.

Marr founded many of the programs the station is now known for, like the Mountain Climate Program, and provided the scientific groundwork for the current Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and researches how mountain ecosystems are transforming in response to climate change. It is the only LTER spot focusing on alpine environments in North America and is one of the original LTERs, continuously funded since 1980.

Additionally, through the Mountain Climate Program—created to evaluate the relationship between climate and the major ecosystem types of the Front Range—the station is home to the longest continuous record of greenhouse gas measurements in the continental United States, found above timberline at around 11,500 feet, and the second-longest in the world, behind only the station on Mauna Loa in Hawaii.

The long-term data that’s been collected here is really priceless, and I think being at a place that’s contributed so much to our understanding of long-term change in climate and ecosystems is really special.”

“It’s really been one of the main places on the planet where we’ve learned about long-term changes in climate and mountain ecosystems,” says Scott Taylor, the station’s director and an associate professor in EBIO. “The long-term data that’s been collected here is really priceless, and I think being at a place that’s contributed so much to our understanding of long-term change in climate and ecosystems is really special.”

In addition to the LTER program and Mountain Climate Program, the Boulder Creek Critical Zone Program and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) also conduct research near the station.

“We wouldn’t be able to do half of what we’ve done at the Mountain Research Station if it weren’t for (Marr’s) efforts,” Bowman says.

Taylor agrees, adding that the Mountain Research Station is “really unique. . . . Lots of places have research stations, but not a lot have this kind of history.”

That history, though, extends past just data to the people who have found their way here through the decades.

Generations of care

Bowman became involved with the station in the 1970s as an undergraduate in environmental, population and organismic biology (now EBIO and integrative physiology). At the time, Bowman worked with a graduate student in the lab of Professor Emeritus Jeff Mitton, who was studying forest genetics and needed help getting pine needle samples to run genetic analyses on them. Bowman, who loved to hike and snowshoe, volunteered.

Fast-forwarding through multiple graduate degrees, Bowman found himself back in Boulder, but this time as a professor. He was invited to participate in the LTER program, which at that time was more concerned with physical-environment conditions than with biology. Through his participation, Bowman began researching plant ecology and what factors determined which plants occurred where, how communities came together to alter the diversity, and how that influences ecosystem functioning.

It was through Bowman’s lab that Katharine Suding, now the principal investigator for the LTER program and a Distinguished Professor in EBIO, became involved in the program, then as a postdoctoral researcher.

In 1990, a few years after Bowman began his alpine research, he became the station’s director and stayed there for 30 years, until his retirement in 2021.

During his tenure, many repairs were completed on the station, including upgrading infrastructure and building the Moores-Collins Family Lodge and Kiowa classroom, which is across the parking lot from the Marr Lab, where the main offices are housed. He also helped start or expand several large research programs, which provided data for something that Bowman saw firsthand for decades: the effects of climate change on the station.

“I’ve clearly seen climate change come and establish itself as being something that we recognize and we can see symptoms of,” Bowman says. “Climate change is a factor that’s going to become more and more important in how the station operates.”

Additionally, under Bowman’s leadership, the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, funded by the National Science Foundation, was established at the station. For more than 20 years, that program has brought undergraduates, including Sconiers, from across the United States and the globe to Colorado during the summers.

“It’s gratifying for the faculty who set those (REU) programs up to be able to see the investment come to fruition and see it passed on,” Bowman says. “That’s one of the most satisfying things that I’ve gotten while being director of the Mountain Research Station.”

Inspiring those to come

Sconiers was a student at the University of California, Irvine when he learned about the station. At the time, he was interested in research and graduate school but knew he needed to join a lab to do that. He began contacting faculty around campus, and one of them, Suding, then at UC Irvine, said yes—and recommended he pursue an REU.

Scott Taylor's research applies genomics and field experiments to natural hybrid zones and closely related taxa in order to investigate the architecture of reproductive isolation—the hallmark of speciation—and the genetic bases of traits relevant to speciation.

He applied and was accepted by the program at the Mountain Research Station. While there, he helped collect data detailing how the alpine landscape had been altered in response to climate change.

“The REU was critical for my career,” Sconiers says. “It was my first opportunity to devise a project from scratch, so come up with my own ideas and have it fit into a research interest, and then I got to collect all of the data, so I got to carry it through. In class, you’re just learning how this works or doing small versions of things, but this was the first chance I had to do everything.”

After graduating, Sconiers was a lab tech for Suding for a year before going on to graduate school for entomology. He eventually became a professor at the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas and stayed there for a few years.

It was about that time that he ran into Suding, who told him about an opening at CU Boulder.

That brought him back to the university, this time as a teaching professor and a researcher with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research—which runs the Mountain Research Station—where he studies how plant species composition affects insect diversity at high elevations.

By bringing his general biology students to the station, he hopes to introduce the next generation of scholars to its possibilities.

“The idea of the trip was so the students can talk with the faculty who do research there and potentially just be up there for research and other things, so really just to take this resource that’s unique to CU Boulder and introduce it to students,” Sconiers says. “Let them know that you can have an interest, and that’s enough to get involved.”

Taylor, who hopes to use his tenure as director to make the station more visible and inclusive for everyone, is thrilled.

“There’s the scientific legacy of the station, but then also there’s one of inspiring generations to care about alpine ecosystems and mountain ecosystems,” Taylor says.

“That’s partially why I love field stations. They have such a big impact—a disproportional impact.”

As the Mountain Research Station celebrates turning 100, a look back on its history—and toward its future.

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Large or small, nuclear war would wreak havoc on the ocean

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:54:11 +0000

Large or small, nuclear war would wreak havoc on the ocean Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/31/2023 - 18:54

Sarah Kuta

Study finds that the ocean could never fully recover if a nuclear war were to break out

Scientists have a good idea of what would happen after a nuclear war on land: Soot would fill the atmosphere and block the sun, leading to worldwide crop failures and famine. But, until recently, they’ve understood less about how nuclear weapon detonation would affect the oceans, which cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface.

A recent study in the journal AGU Advances helps fill in the gaps: Nuclear war would wreak havoc on the world’s oceans, causing them to cool rapidly and become choked with sea ice. Ocean marine life would die out, and marine ecosystems would take decades—possibly even longer—to recover.

“This research suggests that the consequences of nuclear conflict can be quite dire,” says Nicole Lovenduski, one of the paper’s authors and a �鶹��Ƶ associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC) and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR).

Top of page: A mushroom-shaped cloud and water column rise above Bikini Atoll from the underwater Baker nuclear explosion of July 25, 1946. Radioactive sea spray caused extensive contamination. Photo by Bill Gustafson. Above: Nicole Lovenduski's research focusses on marine carbon cycle, ocean climate variability and change and ocean modeling.

“Because the ocean moves slowly, when you change or perturb the ocean, it takes a long time to recover back to its initial state. The ocean would be affected for decades to hundreds or thousands of years, depending on the process. And in our experiments, it really never recovered,” she says.

There are about 13,000 total nuclear weapons around the world under the control of nine nations. While a few thousand weapons are waiting to be dismantled, the United States and Russia each have roughly 4,000 deployed or spare weapons—90 percent of all active nuclear weapons—while other countries have much smaller arsenals.

India and Pakistan each have 150; China, Britain and France have roughly 200 each; Israel has 100; and North Korea has an unknown number, according to Brian Toon, one of the paper’s authors and a professor at ATOC and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).

To understand what might happen to the oceans after nuclear detonation, scientists ran a series of simulations that modeled major nuclear conflicts, such as what could occur between the United States and Russia, as well as smaller wars, such as those between nations like India and Pakistan.

No matter the location or magnitude of the war, the researchers found that soot would quickly clog the stratosphere, preventing sunlight from reaching the oceans’ surface for roughly a decade.

“Once soot gets up there, there are very few natural processes by which it can leave, so it hangs out there for a while,” Lovenduski says. “It gets mixed all around and forms a cloud of soot around the Earth, which leads to a cooling of the climate system.”

After a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, they project that global average surface temperatures at sea and on land would decline by 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) in the three years after the conflict, triggering what researchers have called a nuclear winter.

Ocean temperatures would also drop dramatically, creating a new “ocean state for the lifetime of many organisms, including humans” long after the conflict ends, the researchers write. The colder temperatures would allow sea ice to proliferate, which would block shipping routes and major ports.

We find an extension of sea ice even in a simulation of what you might consider a regional or smaller nuclear conflict. Even a small conflict can have large consequences for the climate system.”

“We find an extension of sea ice even in a simulation of what you might consider a regional or smaller nuclear conflict,” Lovenduski says. “Even a small conflict can have large consequences for the climate system.”

The sunlight-blocking soot cloud would also make it difficult, if not impossible, for phytoplankton to photosynthesize and stay alive. Since phytoplankton, also known as microalgae, form the basis of the marine food chain; their demise would set in motion a chain reaction that would likely devastate fish and other marine wildlife populations.

On land, scientists predict that nuclear conflict would lead to disastrous crop failures. And if the world’s population had hoped to replace those crops by turning to the oceans for food, they likely wouldn’t find much to eat there, either.

“If the algae go, everything else goes, too,” Lovenduski says. “The ocean essentially starves as a result of these nuclear conflicts.”

Other takeaways

Scientists from a dozen institutions around the world collaborated on this project. And although they began their work long before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the timing of the paper’s publication amid the heightened threat of nuclear war has generated increased interest in their work.

“Certainly, our study came out at a time when a lot of people are thinking more about the threat of nuclear conflict than they have in the recent past, so it’s very timely, unfortunately,” Lovenduski says. “The fact that our project is becoming more relevant is depressing and terrifying.”

The scientists hope their nuclear war projections never become reality, but, in the meantime, they’re using this line of research as an opportunity to learn more about the ripple effects of other potentially damaging events. For instance, what would happen after a massive volcanic eruption, which would also send sunlight-blocking materials and chemicals into the stratosphere?

The findings are also helpful for considering one proposed solution to climate change: Artificial cooling of the planet.

There’s a lot of talk about geoengineering the climate because we made it warmer, so why don’t we fix it by making it cooler? Some of those geoengineering solutions are in line with this kind of simulation, where you loft aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet. This gives us an understanding of how the Earth system might respond to these types of manmade cooling events.”

“There’s a lot of talk about geoengineering the climate because we made it warmer, so why don’t we fix it by making it cooler?” she says. “Some of those geoengineering solutions are in line with this kind of simulation, where you loft aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet. This gives us an understanding of how the Earth system might respond to these types of manmade cooling events.”

They also hope their paper raises awareness among the general population that any nuclear conflict, even a relatively small one, could have calamitous worldwide consequences.

“Even if there is a small, regional nuclear conflict far away from you, you can also be affected,” she says. “People are coming to realize how interconnected our global society is, especially after the pandemic, and even a small conflict that occurs on one day can have huge implications for the entire Earth system for centuries to come.”

Study finds that the ocean could never fully recover if a nuclear war were to break out.

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Eyeing environmental issues through a camera lens

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 18:56:13 +0000

Eyeing environmental issues through a camera lens Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/06/2023 - 12:56

Bradley Worrell

In her latest research, contemporary art history professor examines where art and environmental activism connect

For Brianne Cohen, assistant professor of contemporary art history at the �鶹��Ƶ, art is much more than an aesthetic: It can offer powerful commentary on the issues of the day and galvanize public opinion.

One such issue, ecological devastation, is the focus of Cohen’s latest research into photography and video from Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore that highlights the need for renewed attention on the kinship between humans and nature.

“These artists are having their works shown around the world in major art shows, but there’s still not being much written about their wonderful work,” Cohen says. “The kinds of things they are doing right now is particularly pressing and timely in terms of environmental destruction in the region and thinking about larger questions of ecological sustainability.”

The intersection of art and the environment is not a new topic for Cohen, who teaches art, climate justice and ecology courses at CU Boulder. Now more than ever, she says, art offers an invaluable window to the world.

At the top of the page: Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga (2015), video still. Above: Brianne Cohen's recent research addresses questions of ecological devastation and the formation of critical publics in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore.

“This is how we think about the world today—through a flood of imagery. And to be able to think critically about the main issues of the day through art, it’s just so fascinating, and it really draws students in,” she says. “I think it’s a great kind of language to think about how we live in today’s world.”

Art also has the power to be transformative at the personal level. In Cohen’s case, she grew up modestly in Dallas, Texas, but was able to take a two-week trip in high school to visit major art museums in London, Paris and Italy that inspired her to make art history her life’s work.

Another transformative moment came while taking an art class as an undergraduate student.

“The first time that I realized that art history could tackle contemporary issues was in college, when I took a class with an art critic from L.A.—and she exposed us to all this vibrant art-making in the city and in the region,” Cohen says. “Whereas, in the past, when I was a younger scholar, it seemed art history pretty much ended in 1960 or 1970. So, to be exposed to that world was really exciting, and that made me want to study contemporary issues through art and through a visual lens.”

That belief was only deepened when Cohen attended the Courtauld Institute of Art in London to obtain her MA degree and then spent three years researching and teaching in Belgium while on a postdoctoral fellowship.

The time she spent in Europe was formative in the development of her forthcoming book, Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe, set to publish in spring 2023, which examines contemporary European art as it grapples with thorny topics such as immigration, xenophobia and Islamaphobia.

It was also during that period that Cohen first began taking periodic trips to Southeast Asia, where she discovered the vibrant, compelling art created there.

“I’d say in the past 10 years I became much more interested in environmental issues as artists there were tackling them,” she says.

“I was thinking about how, especially artists in the U.S. and Europe, get so much more publicity within art history and visual culture in terms of the environment, whereas we’re not even thinking about . . . artwork from around the world where they are most affected by climate change—and where devastation is even larger and more unequal in terms of who suffers these effects and who is least responsible for them.”

There is a question of compassion fatigue. If we’re barraged with all these images of atrocity and war and so forth, can we actually move as a public to effect change? So, that’s the big question for me. Can they do that? I think that (the images) can.”

She adds, “The work coming out of Southeast Asia grapples with these questions and deserves to have more of a voice in that discussion.”

Many people are familiar with issues like deforestation, habitat loss and global warming, but Cohen believes art can nonetheless make a difference on those important topics.

“There is a question of compassion fatigue. If we’re barraged with all these images of atrocity and war and so forth, can we actually move as a public to effect change? So, that’s the big question for me. Can they do that?” she says. “I think that (the images) can.”

Still, Cohen says the efforts from artists in the region will take time to bear fruit.

“These artists are looking to longer-term, Indigenous philosophies from their local regions—philosophies that have a more sustainable way of living with the environment, of being in relation with the environment through notions of kinship or familial relations,” she says.

“This is really important in the work that they do—and not thinking about the environment as objects to be exploited, but as family, as persons in some sense to live with and to care for.”

Cohen’s research is supported by fellowships from the American Association of University Women and CU Boulder’s Center for Humanities and the Arts.

In her latest research, contemporary art history professor examines where art and environmental activism connect.

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Beleaguered forests are losing ground

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 20:41:31 +0000

Beleaguered forests are losing ground Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/22/2023 - 14:41

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder scientist’s 40-year census research finds that climate change has tripled tree mortality and forestalled regeneration

Criticizing the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, a U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia singled out funding to plant and protect trees.

“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out. But they’re not. Because a lot of money, it’s going to trees,” GOP candidate Herschel Walker said while stumping at a fundraiser. “We got enough trees—don’t we have enough trees around here?”

A 2015 study in Nature estimated there are 3 trillion trees on the planet. Whether or not that’s “enough,” the survey also found that “the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.”

Top of page: 1875 City of Boulder Reservoir, photographer J.B. Sturtevant (“Rocky Mountain Joe”), courtesy of the Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder Public Library. Above: Tom Veblen, distinguished professor emeritus of geography, in approximately the same spot as the 1875 photo. Photo By Glenn Asakawa.

And according to a �鶹��Ƶ scientist who has been monitoring the health and number of trees in the Colorado high country for more than four decades, climate-driven changes in temperature and drought have not only tripled tree mortality rates in the past two decades, but also significantly undermined tree regeneration rates.

And that matters.

“If we are losing forest cover, we are going to lose a variety of ecosystem services,” says Tom Veblen, Distinguished Professor emeritus of geography, who has been tracking changes in thousands of trees on Niwot Ridge west of Boulder since 1982.

Declining tree cover results in damage to watersheds as debris flow and flooding increase, and in the loss of habitat for certain species. Perhaps most destructive, the loss of “above-ground biomass” removes a vital source of carbon storage, which further fuels climate change.

“In most simulation models of ecosystem impacts of climate change . . . the trees grow back after fire. But we’re not seeing that as documented for montane forests in Colorado,” Veblen says. That results in “one of those nasty, somewhat unexpected positive-feedback loops that speeds up climate change because there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even a politician in Georgia will potentially be affected by that.”

Veblen came to CU Boulder in 1981 after six years of research in Chile and New Zealand, which taught him the value of establishing plots where trees could be observed long-term.

“I knew from my research experience in the Southern Hemisphere that I wanted to put in permanent forest plots, which are essential for understanding long-term changes in tree populations,” he says. “There is no substitute for that.”

With money from a short-lived program funded by the state of Colorado, he and his students established 40 “long-term monitoring plots,” marked 8,000 trees on Niwot Ridge and have been monitoring them ever since.

“The proposal . . . was to assess the influence of climate variability on tree demography and population changes, mortality, and the establishment of new seedling recruitment (new trees),” Veblen says. A second goal was to study the effects of 19th-century fires on lower elevation ponderosa pine and Douglas fir forests.

One of the key findings from Veblen’s research: While tree mortality rates remained low and stable until 1994, they have tripled since then, even in higher elevation Englemann spruce and lodgepole pine forests.

“That’s not at all surprising . . . given increasing temperatures and increasing drought,” Veblen says, noting that researchers have reached the same conclusions at locations across the western United States.

Meanwhile, new trees are not filling in the gaps.

Former CU Boulder graduate student Robert Andrus, now a postdoctoral researcher at Washington State University, harvested about 1,000 juvenile trees to determine their establishment dates and found that new trees grew in “pulses of single years, cooler, moister years, based on late spring and summer weather conditions,” Veblen says.

But the occurrence of such years has plummeted by two-thirds in the latter half of the seven-decade record Andrus examined.

“Without cool, moist years, we’re not getting establishment” of new seedlings, including after fires, Veblen says. “That’s an indicator of what is likely to continue with warming temperatures.”

Even lodgepole pines, famous for colonizing burned areas—the tree’s cones open after exposure to fire—are failing to regenerate in some places. In areas torched by severe fires in 2002 in the Routt and White River national forests that have been repeatedly sampled over a 15-year period, there are only sparse and patchy seedlings of this fire-adapted species, which usually take root within a year or two.

If we want to have forests after fires, we need to not rely on natural regeneration. We need to invest heavily in artificial regeneration."

Those trends have convinced Veblen and other researchers and forest managers that Western forests need a helping hand from humanity, particularly after destructive wildfires.

“If we want to have forests after fires, we need to not rely on natural regeneration. We need to invest heavily in artificial regeneration,” the cultivation and planting of seedlings in strategic areas, Veblen says.

Andrus agrees. “We have bark beetle outbreaks and wildfires that cause very obvious mortality of trees in Colorado. But we’re showing that even in the areas that people go hiking in and where the forest looks healthy, mortality is increasing due to heat and dry conditions alone,” adding:

“It’s an early warning sign of climate change.”

Veblen and the fire management community broadly agree that “living with fire” is increasingly challenging, as shown by modeling projections that say, “Exceptional fire seasons like 2020 will become more likely, and wildfire activity under future extremes is predicted to exceed anything yet witnessed.”

In Wildland Urban Interface areas, so-called “red zones” that are abundant throughout the West, Veblen has recommendations: Property owners must still establish “defensible spaces.” Building codes should be used to require less-flammable building materials. “Fuels reduction” through a combination of tree cutting and prescribed fires should be prioritized near settled areas to give firefighters a foothold.

However, Veblen says, in more remote areas, mechanical thinning alone is not effective and not practical. Instead, he says, managers are increasingly emphasizing the value of letting wildfires do the work of reducing fuels and buffering against future fire potential.

“Agencies previously tended to strongly emphasize mechanical thinning to reduce fuels, but under the kind of extreme weather conditions that promoted the 2020 East Troublesome fire, no practical amount of fuel management can fully protect homes and communities,” he says.

Instead, he’d like to see resources currently dedicated to remote-area fuels reduction be redirected into seedling cultivation and planting in selected, suitable areas.

“We are not going to be able to prevent large, severe fires, so we need to be much more strategic in investing our resources to avoid or delay some of the worst outcomes of climate change,” he says.

CU Boulder scientist’s 40-year census research finds that climate change has tripled tree mortality and forestalled regeneration.

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Why does climate policy lag science?

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 17:06:48 +0000

Why does climate policy lag science? Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 01/12/2023 - 10:06

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Despite the Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. progress on climate change remains stuck in a climate conundrum, experts say, hampered by politics, complexity and the scope of the problem

The climate is changing quickly—that much is clear. And yet, despite recent gains, climate policy seems to move at a glacial pace.

In 2021, the average temperature of the surface of the Earth, both land and water, was 1.51 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average for the 20th century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It was also the 45th consecutive year that global surface temperature rose above the average for the last century. And the nine years since 2013 are all in the top 10 warmest years ever recorded, with 2020 and 2016 tied for the warmest ever.

Congressman Joe Neguse, left, and US House of Representatives Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi address members of the media after their roundtable meeting at the National Center for Atmospheric Research on Aug. 31, 2022 in Boulder, Colorado. Photo by Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images.

Meanwhile, the number and length of heat waves has grown every decade since the 1960s, snowpack seasons have decreased by an average of 18 days in 86% of sites measured, and the rate of flooding on the East and Gulf coasts has increased since the 1950s and continues to accelerate, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The August passage of the $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, laden with funding for climate solutions, is widely seen as an important step in addressing the acceleration of harmful impacts, even if some, like the environmental group Earthjustice, bemoan that its “troubling giveaways to fossil-fuel interests will cause undue harm.”

Even so, the United States’ pace in taking mitigating climate action remains well behind the rest of the Western world. According to two academics from the �鶹��Ƶ, the reasons for the lag are varied and complex, from an outdated political system to money in politics, lobbying by industry, a fractured media landscape, the global nature and vast time scale of climate change, and even the COVID-19 pandemic

For Srinivas C. Parinandi, assistant professor of political science at CU Boulder, the problems start at the very founding of the nation, decades before the invention of the internal-combustion engine, much less the problem of global climate change.

“One of the biggest obstacles is the nature of the American political system, specifically that the Senate gives small, rural states outsized political power and the ability to derail legislation they don’t like,” he says.

“As it turns out, an act of God or whatever you want to call it, most fossil fuel deposits happen to be in smaller, predominately rural states.”

Parinandi notes that fossil fuel companies have had more than a century to build political relationships in small-population states such as Wyoming, West Virginia or Alaska, “and those don’t deteriorate overnight.”

Srivinas Parinandi

Max Boykoff, CU Boulder professor of environmental studies and author of Creative Climate Communications: Productive Pathways for Science, Policy and Society, agrees that “intensive lobbying by carbon-based industry” has contributed to a political culture “that has not been conducive to coordinated action.”

Industry groups have for years funded shadow groups, think tanks and even advertising campaigns to promote their interests and “slow down, distract and delay” action, Boykoff says. Which isn’t all that surprising, he notes, quoting muckraking writer Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Boykoff cites lobbying, the influence of money in politics, gerrymandering and skewed budgetary priorities as impediments to political reform. But while some argue that real action on climate change won’t be achieved in the absence of major political reform, he believes both can—and should—be tackled at the same time.

“We need to be working on democracy and the way we have civil discourse in Congress,” he says. “But I don’t think we have to fix democracy before we alleviate the negative impacts (of climate change). We need to be doing both in tandem, and a whole lot more.”

For Boykoff, the scale and complexity of a problem whose effects literally span the globe and won’t be fully realized for centuries—he calls it “possibly the most complex environmental policy negotiation ever undertaken”—makes it difficult for a political system oriented toward short-term election cycles to address. Politicians must cater to voters, who often do not even consider the dangers of climate change unless they have been directly affected, he says.

Parinandi agrees, noting the vexing fact that the human brain is notoriously limited in its ability to react to long-term threats.

When I teach a bunch of 20-year-olds, I use the analogy that you should eat a salad rather than a cheeseburger, so you won’t have a heart attack in 30 years. You can’t wait until cholesterol is clogging your arteries. It’s the same logic with climate change.

“Many voters tend toward obstinacy because they don’t see how it is going to affect them,” he says, adding that many in the public also struggle to grasp the time scale involved in climate change.

“When I teach a bunch of 20-year-olds, I use the analogy that you should eat a salad rather than a cheeseburger, so you won’t have a heart attack in 30 years. You can’t wait until cholesterol is clogging your arteries,” he says. “It’s the same logic with climate change.”

Parinandi believes that two-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated problems of partisanship: “The pandemic isolated people, encouraging them to go home, close the door and not interact with other people. And when you are not used to hanging out with people different from you, or people, period, you lose the ability to connect and compromise.”

He sees a shift from “evidence-based arguments to group affiliations” and notes that many Americans who appear to be doing objectively well are “successful and angry, swayed by (partisan) media.” He faults partisan media, especially media that advance “nativism,” for turning away from science and becoming openly disdainful of education, which renders some voters skeptical toward data about the dangers at hand.

Boykoff concurs, citing a “fractured media environment, which means many aren’t hearing the data and reality” about climate change.

Max Boykoff

Still, Boykoff and Parinandi are encouraged by the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains scores of provisions, from electrifying the U.S. Postal Service fleet to investing in clean-energy technology, designed to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030 and improve the economy.

“The Inflation Reduction Act was smartly designed to also address jobs and produce well-paying green jobs,” Boykoff notes.

Passage of the bill fell along party lines, requiring the approval of U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, despite heavy pressure from coal and petroleum industries.

“Manchin’s willingness to collaborate was a great sign. I think (members of Congress) are starting to recognize that the status quo is not sustainable forever,” Parinandi says.

He is also encouraged that major energy companies are beginning to pursue their own, more climate-friendly, policies independent of Washington politics.

“Green energy is taking off,” Parinandi says, citing the example of Xcel Energy, which provides electricity to millions of customers in Colorado, Texas and New Mexico. “They are one of the largest, and they weren’t always behind green energy. But they are behind it now, and they are able to finance their preferred candidates.”

Despite the obstacles, Boykoff says he’s buoyed by shifts in public discussion over climate change in recent years.

“Discussing climate change in the here and now is proving very effective, rather than talking about distant time or distant places, and I really think that has changed dramatically over the last two years,” he says.

“This isn’t a single issue; it’s a set of intersected challenges that influence how we live, work, play and relax every day. It’s not just a thing to debate on the stage of the Democratic National Committee.”

Despite the Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. progress on climate change remains stuck in a climate conundrum, experts say, hampered by politics, complexity and the scope of the problem.

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Collaborators preserve voices from the fire

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:50:38 +0000

Collaborators preserve voices from the fire Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/22/2022 - 15:50

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder anthropology professor, students collaborate with local museum to preserve narratives from the devastating Marshall Fire

Around 11 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2021, a wildfire ignited in dry grass near Marshall Road and Colo. 93 in Boulder County—and several months later, inspired a novel collaboration between the �鶹��Ƶ and a local history museum.

Driven by winds gusting up to 115 mph—more than 150% faster than “hurricane force” winds, according to the National Weather Service—the fire blew up almost immediately, sending choking clouds of smoke in a vast, eastward plume.

Forty minutes after firefighters first arrived, thousands of residents in Superior, Louisville, Broomfield and nearby areas were ordered to evacuate. By the time a snowstorm had doused the blaze some 36 hours later, it had roared through more than 6,000 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 structures, mostly homes, killed two and cost more than a half a billion dollars to fight, making it the most destructive fire in Colorado history.

At the top of the page: A view of a burned neighborhood in Superior. A grass fire fueled by 100 mph winds destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in Superior and Louisville (Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder). Above: A map of the extent of the Marshall Fire (Inciweb).

In the wake of the disaster, devastated staff at the Louisville Historical Muse um, some of whom had been forced to evacuate, wondered how they might help a shocked and reeling community understand and recover from the trauma.

“We are museum people, we have an oral-history program, and the answer was, one way we can help the community is with stories,” says Jason Hogstad, volunteer services museum associate.

Honoring the museum’s mission to share and preserve the stories and lives that “make up the heart and character of Louisville,” the staff created the Marshall Fire Story Project to facilitate ways for people affected by the fire in any way to share their experiences for the historical record. In February, the museum held the first on-site workshop and launched an online platform to gather residents’ stories.

Not long after, something unexpected happened: students at the �鶹��Ƶ stumbled upon the Marshall Fire project while seeking information about air quality in the wake of the fire for Assistant Professor Kate Goldfarb’s advanced practicing anthropology course.

“I’m developing a research project about community experiences of air quality, ‘Knowing Air,’” says Goldfarb, a Boulder native who returned to her hometown to teach at CU Boulder in 2015. “With the Marshall Fire, air quality and potential health impacts of dust and burned materials were an immediate concern.”

The students contacted Hogstad and the museum and asked if they could collaborate in some way. The museum shared some data, but the students were eager for a more hands-on experience, particularly speaking with those affected by the fire, which also impacted the CU Boulder community, with one former regent losing their home of four decades.

“It was the students who really piloted this effort,” Goldfarb says. “I trusted them and was impressed by their high regard for Jason and the Story Project.”

Goldfarb contacted Hogstad (whom she’d never met) to ask if he’d be interested in putting together a proposal for a $5,000 CU Boulder Community Outreach and Engagement Grant to support the project with student help.

Even though the request for proposals had an eight-day turn-around, the museum enthusiastically jumped in. The grant was awarded in June. One of Goldfarb’s practicing anthropology students, anthropology and linguistics major Emily Reynolds, will continue work on the project, along with incoming anthropology master’s student Lucas Rozell. The students will assist in “whatever needs to be done, transcription, video processing, mobile story-collecting” or anything else, Goldfarb says.

“The project’s purpose is threefold,” according to the grant application: “To create a community archive useable by community and academic researchers, provide a space for affected individuals to share their story (a critical part of processing trauma), and offer the entire community a place to have their voice heard and added to the historical record. By the end of the project, we hope to have all audio and video stories processed and ready for use by researchers.

We are museum people, we have an oral-history program, and the answer was, one way we can help the community is with stories.

The project will also capture hundreds of GoFundMe campaigns created in response to the fire.

These campaigns are a critical community-created source—most include a narrative of affected individuals and needs, updates documenting ongoing financial hardship and experiences in the first few months after the fire and provide insight into the role of community crowdsourced funding in the ongoing recovery.”

Goldfarb began focusing on trauma and storytelling as an undergraduate anthropology and English major at Rice University, where she wrote a thesis on the subject.

“I’ve had a long interest in narrative and storytelling, making meaning out of disruptive situations,” she says.

During graduate school at the University of Chicago, Goldfarb conducted ethnographic research in Japan, where she worked with children and alumni of the country’s child-welfare system to understand how people make sense of disruption and interpersonal trauma in their lives. After graduate school, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University and conducted research with mental health professionals focused on attachment and child welfare.

“People really do make sense of traumatic experiences through talking, narrativizing the past and present and what they think can be their futures,” Goldfarb says. “But it’s not just a cognitive and narrative focus. Creativity is a way of tapping into some things they wouldn’t be able to articulate and express themselves through art and other mediums.”

Hogstad, Goldfarb and the students hope that the grant will help spread the word to encourage anyone affected by the fire—in any way, even as a witness from thousands of miles away—to contribute their story.

Kate Goldfarb (left) and Jason Hogstad (right) are two of the leads for the Marshall Fire Story Project.

So far, the team has observed that people may have a hard time “claiming” their own experience of the fire. It’s easy to feel that others have had a harder time or could share a more noteworthy account, Goldfarb says. But she and Hogstad emphasize that the fire was a community experience, with all stories welcome.

“There’s no bounds on what your story is,” Hogstad says. “People can tell a story about the 24 hours after the fire hit, or two months later, working with FEMA, trying to navigate being underinsured, or four months on, living in a new place.”

As of mid-June, the project had collected 35 stories, with on-site sessions scheduled throughout the summer. Mobile sessions are planned for the fall, where the team will travel to affected communities to ease burdens of participation. The project will continue at least through the anniversary of the fire, Hogstad and Goldfarb say.

While the project is more open-ended than research pursuing a set of specific questions, Hogstad believes it will be no less valuable than quantitative work in the wake of the disaster.

“It creates an archive that can be used across disciplines, across fields in the future. Almost all of the great research into the fire is on the science side, so to have something coming from social science and the humanities is pretty unusual at this stage,” he says.

“I’m blown away by all the support for the project from Kate, the students, from CU. … I’ve worked in a history-related field for 15 years and never been part of something that feels as worthwhile.”

Anyone interested in learning more about the Marshall Fire Story Project is encouraged to reach out to Jason Hogstad, Kate Goldfarb, or the Louisville Historical Museum.

CU Boulder anthropology professor, students collaborate with local museum to preserve narratives from the devastating Marshall Fire.

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Students opening doors

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 22:15:56 +0000

Students opening doors Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/22/2022 - 16:15

Tim Grassley

Meet three CU Boulder students who are creating supportive, stronger communities by improving understanding, accessibility

The COVID-19 pandemic demanded that �鶹��Ƶ students change the way they interact. They took classes at home and had limited student group contact. On-campus students followed tight schedules to reduce the virus’ spread.

While the pandemic’s restrictions were isolating, students sought stronger, inclusive communities and, in many cases, used creative means to generate understanding and connection with others in need.

What follows are three profiles of CU Boulder students who strive to make their communities stronger: an anthropology PhD student who researches the experiences of people with blindness, a philosophy major who uses a website and social media to connect with fellow cancer survivors, and a graduate student in religious studies who encourages students to expand what they believe they can accomplish.

When people give you grace, in the end it motivates you.”

Blind grad student works to improve CU Boulder’s vision

Kevin Darcy grew up in blue collar, manufacturing communities in Massachusetts and Florida that valued independence and masculinity. In his junior year of high school, he lost his vision.

“For a long time, like 15 years, I had a lot of perceived and actual stigma that I internalized, and I refused to accept the idea that I was blind,” says Darcy, now a PhD student in anthropology at CU Boulder. “The way I think about it now is that, when I lost my vision, I was afraid that the image I have about myself wouldn't align with the image that other people create about me when they see me.”

At age 27, Darcy, a first-generation student, began attending Metropolitan State University in Denver and studied biological anthropology. While on a research trip to Peru his senior year, he faced the fact that his blindness would limit his ability to study historical health and disease. But that moment also opened another career path.

“I realized two things: If I stayed in biological anthropology, someone is always going to have to look over my shoulder and confirm my analysis,” Darcy says. “But I also realized that living people had a lot more to say, and they’re more fun to hang out with.”

He enrolled in a medical anthropology program at CU Denver, where he earned his master’s in anthropology. His research focused on health and the environment, as well as immigration and food systems. In 2015, Darcy enrolled in CU Boulder’s PhD program in anthropology, intending to continue studying immigration, food and the environment.

Early in his studies, he felt frustrated by implicit bias.

Kevin Darcy is a PhD student in anthropology.

“I think I was feeling the discriminatory experiences more because, as a first-generation student, I was already feeling like an outsider,” Darcy says. “Everyone seemed to know what to do as a graduate student except me.”

In 2017, Darcy nearly left the university because he had experienced several acts of overt discrimination. He was shocked to be publicly singled out for his disability. However, when he expressed his intent to leave, a faculty member and his Digital Accessibility Office supervisor offered him an opportunity to make CU Boulder more inclusive.

In his research for the Digital Accessibility Office, Darcy discovered an outsized reliance by faculty and staff on students with disabilities, whom they expected to function as experts in particular technologies.

“The assumption behind this is that people have been blind for a long enough period to learn how to use the technology, and that they have the socio-economic resources to purchase it and get trained on it,” Darcy says. “There is a push for people with disabilities to advocate for themselves, which is great, but oftentimes that advocacy shifts to individual responsibility.”

In anthropology, a faculty member offered to become his dissertation advisor, and Darcy began to focus his thesis on market-oriented incentives in universities, like academic tenure and intellectual property, which solidify a hierarchy in which certain groups are given preference at the expense of people with disabilities, he says.

Darcy is still gathering data, but his early findings suggest a need to improve communication about disability and strengthen training for faculty, students and staff to support students with disabilities so they finish their degrees. While there are clusters of disability experts across campus, these groups have not effectively shared their information or found ways to deliver training, Darcy contends.

“I just don't want the knowledge that I produce to sit up in the ivory tower,” Darcy says. “I want to make a positive impact for the people I do research with. Hopefully, I can make some changes.”

Student leverages website and social media to support fellow cancer survivors

In 2020, Aspen Heidekrueger launched a blog documenting her experience surviving leukemia at age 12 and the challenging aftermath. Now, she seeks to bring people with chronic illness together through social media and her website.

Heidekrueger’s blog, called Complicated Cancer, focuses on continuing health issues related to her chemotherapy, which lasted two-and-a-half years. By blending pop culture, memes, philosophy and her reflections to give insight into the experience of surviving cancer, Heidekrueger offers advice and encouragement to readers.

“When I was struggling with debilitating, chronic health problems, I felt so alone and so misunderstood,” says Heidekrueger, who is pursuing a bachelor’s in philosophy. “It was so difficult to connect to people, and I had no one telling me that what I was feeling was normal. I never want anyone else to feel that way, if I can help it.”

In 2021, Heidekrueger began creating content for TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram, which she hoped would reach more people undergoing cancer treatment and clarify the experience for a larger audience. She did not anticipate the commonality of her experience and those of people with other chronic health issues, already gaining more than 210,000 followers on TikTok alone.

“I have been able to connect with so many people struggling with cancer or chronic illness,” Heidekrueger says. “Because all those people are experiencing similar things—lots of days of feeling sick, countless doctors, hospitals and physical limitations—it all manifests the same way emotionally and mentally.”

The growing audience is an exciting opportunity for Heidekrueger to offer support for people who might struggle finding understanding communities. While her mother has helped her overcome barriers, she knows that during hard times people on whom survivors relied in the past might be less dependable.

Aspen Heidekrueger, a philosophy undergraduate student, discusses her experience with cancer in her blog, Complicated Cancer.

“When I got cancer, my dad left because it was too much for him,” Heidekrueger says. “That, unfortunately, happens a lot with chronic illness issues like cancer—one parent will leave if they can't handle it. It’s awful.”

Because of that fragile support system, even one faculty or staff member who expresses concern offers students an advocate who helps them persist in their studies and recognizes their humanity. For Heidekrueger, that person was Dom Bailey, an associate professor of philosophy.

“At office hours, I told him the bare bones minimum about some of the stuff that was happening with my health and cancer at the time,” Heidekrueger says. “He immediately said, ‘That is so much. Do you have a good support system? What can I do for you?’ And that was from just telling him the smallest details.”

From Heidekrueger’s point of view, Bailey’s expression of concern and follow-up helped her feel that someone at CU Boulder was available and understood the challenges of trying to complete a college degree while dealing with chronic illness. That readiness to help and be empathetic reflect what she seeks to accomplish on her website and social media.

“To have someone I knew who was there, who really cared about me, was invested in my well-being, could help me through any hard course material and connect me with other professors—it was a lifesaver,” Heidekrueger says. “If I can do small things that help make people feel infinitely better, I want to do that, too.”

To foster a supportive community like the one she had, Heidekrueger plans to expand Complicated Cancer by creating chatrooms where cancer survivors can share their experiences and give support and advice.

“I want them to have someone who can say, ‘This is what it's like. You might feel this way, and that's normal. Here's how you can get through it,’” Heidekrueger says.

“Everyone deserves to have some hope, some encouragement, someone to connect to their pain and give them reasons to move forward.”

Faculty approachability strengthens students’ work

Graduate school appeared impossible for first-generation student Blake Trujillo.

Only certain types of people went on to continue their education—and he, the first person in his family to complete a bachelor’s degree at a university, did not see himself as one of them. At least at first.

“That's something that is often neglected,” says Trujillo, a master’s student in religious studies. “If you don't have someone with you who's been (through the application process), then it becomes a much more difficult experience, especially at the graduate level.”

Born in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, Trujillo moved to Silverdale, Washington, at a young age. He attended Central Washington University (CWU) in Ellensburg, where he was a middle-distance runner and studied political science.

After completing his bachelor’s degree in three years, he wanted to stay at CWU and continue to run track. On a whim, he decided to take a few religious studies classes and fell in love with the subject.

“It opened my eyes,” Trujillo says. “I realized that maybe the world isn't exactly how I picture it and there are new aspects to religion that we can explore and discover.”

Blake Trujillo is a master’s student in religious studies.

Of particular importance was his undergraduate advisor, Lily Vuong, whose dynamic lectures and mentorship encouraged Trujillo to reframe what he believed possible in religious studies. Vuong, who is an associate professor of religious studies at CWU, also encouraged Trujillo to consider pursuing a graduate degree.

Vuong helped Trujillo put together a compelling application with which he gained admission to CU Boulder and, just as important, earned a strong financial aid package.

With high expectations for his first year, Trujillo hoped to enjoy the best of Boulder’s residential experience, spend time digging through the library’s vast access to primary texts and explore his research interest in Gnosticism, or a set of religious beliefs in some early Christian and Jewish sects that emphasizes personal spiritual knowledge over orthodox teachings and traditions. He also wanted to replicate the mentorship he received at CWU.

Trujillo is excited to practice being an approachable scholar, replicating the mentorship he received. He hopes the informal manner with which he interacts with students encourages them to seek him out. In conversations with students, he wants to help them see themselves at their best and create an environment that gives them opportunities to become that person.

“Professors are brilliant, and at the same time, this is an avenue that anyone can pursue and should believe that they can pursue. If I can do it, anyone can,” Trujillo says.

Trujillo believes leveling his position of influence and power as much as possible makes him appear more human. That effort creates familiarity with students, which he hopes leads to more students seeking out mentorship.

“Some faculty seem like mythical figures who went to mythical universities, and it can be tough to want to approach someone like that,” Trujillo says. “I want students and professors to know they can approach me and talk.”

Trujillo argues that if faculty maintain distance to give the appearance of expertise, they might inadvertently encourage their students to submit work that is not their best. Instead, he believes intimidated students try to simply meet the established requirements. In his experience, when you give students the benefit of the doubt and make yourself available, they meet even higher expectations.

“After I built a connection with Dr. Vuong, my advisor for undergrad, I felt much worse turning in something that I thought was bad,” Trujillo says. “I knew she had given me a certain amount of grace and kindness, so I felt like I needed to step up to the plate.”

“When people give you grace, in the end it motivates you.”

(Header image illustration by Alex Steele)

Meet three CU Boulder students who are creating supportive, stronger communities by improving understanding, accessibility.

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The Bangladesh miracle

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 21:46:45 +0000

The Bangladesh miracle Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/09/2022 - 14:46

Lisa Marshall

Decades-long CU Boulder-led study shows access to family planning shapes lives for generations

On a sweltering July day in 1984, Jane Menken stepped off a plane in the teeming capital city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, boarded a van for a dusty, four-hour journey to the remote villages to the south and embarked on a decades-long quest to answer a question of global importance:

What happens when women gain the ability to control their reproductive destiny?

Just 13 years earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had written off the newly born nation of Bangladesh as a famine-stricken and insolvent “basket case.” With 64 million people in a region about the size of Wisconsin, it was the most densely populated non-island country on the planet. And with a fertility rate of seven children per woman, about 14% dying before their first birthday, it was considered the poster child for those warning of an impending “population bomb.”

At the top of the page: Jane Menken during her time in Bangladesh. Photo provided by Jane Menken/Glenn Asakawa. Above: Jane Menken, now a Distinguished Professor at CU Boulder, is considered a pioneer in her field and one of the first researchers to prioritize women and their desires about childbearing. Photo by Glenn Asakawa.

But by the time Menken arrived, a transformation was quietly brewing—one woman at a time.

In the conservative Muslim district of Matlab, where she was headed, a nongovernmental organization had begun to provide free, in-home contraceptive access to tens of thousands of women, otherwise secluded due to religious customs that require women to segregate themselves from men.

Menken, a mathematician-turned-social-demographer with a focus on public health, had been crunching numbers about the initiative from afar since its inception. With her own children now grown and her classes dismissed for summer, she had the chance to see things for herself now.

“I didn’t want to just be a tourist,” recalls Menken, a Distinguished Professor of sociology at the �鶹��Ƶ, in her home adorned with hand-stitched pillows, silver jewelry molds and decorative bowls collected during her time in what became a second home.

“I wanted to see how the people behind the numbers lived, and I wanted to use those numbers to benefit society.”

She would return for months every year for more than three decades, bringing along protégés from Boulder and beyond to spearhead one of the longest and largest studies of family planning ever conducted.

Today, Menken, who served as director of the Institute of Behavioral Science from 2001 to 2015, is considered a pioneer in her field—one of the first to prioritize women and their desires about childbearing as a central focus of research.

And Bangladesh, which turned 50 this year, is now viewed as a model of progress, with a booming economy and a fertility rate of just two children per woman—most of those kids far better off than their predecessors.

“We cannot say that family planning alone caused Bangladesh’s positive development story,” Menken stresses, noting that the country was also remarkably supportive of girls’ education and vaccination. “But the Matlab study shows that a family planning program, even in a region that is desperately poor, illiterate and isolated, can lead to early adoption of contraception and smaller family size. It can change a mindset, and that can have sweeping, lasting effects.”

Bringing contraception to women where they are

Launched in October 1977 by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, now known as icddr,b, the program hinged on the idea of empowering women to help women. Trained local women went door-to-door each month, discretely providing access to a variety of birth control measures, including injections (which were immensely popular due to their lack of evidence). �鶹��Ƶ half of the 150 villages, constituting about 100,000 households, were included, providing a natural experiment with a built-in control group.

In 1982, the program added other family health services, including vaccinations.

By 1989 it was scaled up to include other parts of Bangladesh.

Jane Menken worked with local Bangladeshi women to spearhead one of the longest and largest studies of family planning ever conducted. Photo provided by Jane Menken/Glenn Asakawa.

All the while, icddr,b conducted painstakingly detailed household surveys, tracking births, deaths, migrations and marriages monthly. When Menken and her team arrived, they added to the massive dataset with follow-up surveys, working with residents to ask women questions about everything from their children’s health and cognition to what they did for a living when they grew up.

Menken, with her blazing red hair and boundless energy, became a fixture in Matlab, pitching in to help when historic floods in 1988 shredded tin-roofed homes and buried rice fields in feet of sand. When she returned nine months later, villages that had been wiped out were rebuilt.

“The resilience of the people there still just amazes me,” she says.

Tracking long-term effects

How, if at all, did the lives of early participants in the family planning project turn out differently? A series of studies now beginning to be published offers insight.

It (a family planning program) can change a mindset, and that can have sweeping, lasting effects."

The women had fewer children, spread farther apart, more of whom survived.

And in having fewer children, mothers seemed to be able to invest more time and resources in those they did have.

“We found that by the time these children reached 8 to 14 they had significantly higher cognitive functioning, were about a centimeter taller and were better educated” than those in the comparison group, says Tania Barham, an associate professor of economics who came to Boulder in 2005 to work with Menken and has written several papers on the Matlab project.

As families got smaller, public investments in education and public health went further.

And as local resources improved, the inclination for those adult children to leave declined. Barham’s research shows that sons of women in the family planning group were less likely to move away, and daughters were more entrepreneurial.

“Instead of moving away and taking a not-so-nice or dangerous job, they are staying closer to home and starting their own businesses,” Barham says.

A lesson for the world?

Surprisingly, according to a study published this summer in the journal PNAS, the women in the family planning group were no healthier or richer 35 years after their participation. In fact, because they were slightly heavier, their metabolic health was slightly worse.

“I would have loved to have found that there was a long-term positive effect on their health, but I am a scientist,” Menken says. “I accept.”

Jane Menken holds a statue she brought back from Bangladesh, which she traveled to frequently during the course of her research. Photo by Glenn Asakawa.

Today, she notes, Bangladesh as a whole is undoubtedly healthier: Life expectancy is 72 years, up from 47. Infant mortality has declined to 2.6%. And nearly 100% of children complete primary school.

Family planning, while not a silver bullet, played no small role, she says.

At 81, she has no plans to retire anytime soon.

She intends to return to Bangladesh for more research when possible.

But she also believes other regions around the world, including places in sub-Saharan Africa, and even here in the United States, can benefit from the “basket-case-turned-economic-powerhouse.”

“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once wrote that a woman’s ability to realize her full potential is intimately connected to her ability to control her reproductive life,” Menken says. “This study provides solid evidence to back up that statement.”

Decades-long CU Boulder-led study shows access to family planning shapes lives for generations.

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Say hello to our Collective Nightmares in horror films

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 00:33:15 +0000

Say hello to our Collective Nightmares in horror films Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/27/2021 - 18:33

Clint Talbott

CU Boulder sociologists who teach courses on the sociology of horror talk about their podcast, why horror films are popular and their favorite scary movies

For many people, Halloween is a good time to get scared, and a great way to feel the fear is by watching horror films.

Laura Patterson

Marshall Smith and Laura Patterson, who are instructors of sociology at the �鶹��Ƶ and experts on the horror genre, teach courses on the sociology of horror. Since 2017, they’ve also produced a podcast called Collective Nightmares.

The experts recently answered questions about the sociology of horror films, Squid Game and their top-10 horror picks. The questions and answers follow:

Question: How do you apply the discipline of sociology to the study of horror movies?

Answer: Sociologically, we consider how societal norms, ideologies and power dynamics are reinforced or challenged by the stories told in horror films. We discuss who and what these films call “good” and “bad.” This includes how different groups of people are represented in horror films and how ideologies (e.g., heteropatriarchy, consumerism) pervade these types of media and the moral lessons they deliver, intentional or not.

Marshall Smith

Horror is a genre built on transgression, so these films are designed to violate norms, test boundaries, question values, and complicate established truths. We watch to see which of these are challenged, by whom, and if the normalcy established at the beginning of the film is restored or replaced by the end of the film.

Q: Are horror movies more popular or less popular in different cultures, and, if so, what factors could be driving this?

A: The popularity of horror films varies across cultures, but all cultures have some version of scary stories. Various cultures have different fears, anxieties and tensions. Scary stories, of which horror films are one popular modern version, help us as a culture process these feelings.

One of the foundational essays on horror films by the film scholar Robin Wood argues that horror films may be interpreted as the "collective nightmares" of a culture. The fears, anxieties and tensions present in different cultures will therefore impact the popularity of horror films generally and certain horror sub-genres specifically and will play out in the representation and narrative content of individual films.

In other words, horror films can be seen as mirrors, reflecting back to us the fears, anxieties and tensions prevalent in a given society at a given historical moment. We consider all of these factors in our podcast, particularly focusing on the waxing and waning of the popularity of different horror films and sub-genres in the U.S.

Q: In real life, people don’t generally like being scared, so why do they flock to horror movies?

A: Audience studies aren't really our specialty, but there are some prominent ideas. Horror films are a relatively safe space to be scared. The horror is constrained to the film experience. These films serve as an escape and a reassurance from the open risks and uncertainly of just living life. This is especially true for horror films where the threat is avoided, the ghosts banished or the killer is locked up. For others, horror films may be cathartic, intellectually interesting, a testament to their endurance, or exciting for being taboo. Still others intensely dislike horror films and avoid them altogether.

Interestingly, much of the horror experience is tailored around quelling our fears, rather than accentuating them. When the killer is locked up, the threat is avoided, or the ghosts are banished, the audience is reassured that normalcy has triumphed over the transgressor. In other words, horror stories can be seen as an affirmation of societal norms, a type of love story for the culture of the film’s makers.

Our podcast digs deeply into these norms, parsing out exactly what version of “normalcy” the films are promoting—and particularly whether the films help or hurt the plight of social justice efforts. For more discussion on this, we suggest our episodes on Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (Sholder 1978) or Black Christmas (Takal 2019) as good starting points.

Interestingly, much of the horror experience is tailored around quelling our fears, rather than accentuating them. When the killer is locked up, the threat is avoided, or the ghosts are banished, the audience is reassured that normalcy has triumphed over the transgressor. In other words, horror stories can be seen as an affirmation of societal norms, a type of love story for the culture of the film’s makers."

Horror films that reinforce problematic social hierarchies (see, for example, our episode on Wan’s 2013 The Conjuring, which details how the film serves to reinforce gender, racial, religious and socioeconomic inequality) can quell the fears of the privileged. By reinforcing current (and problematic) societal power dynamics, horror stories can teach the powerful that their power is deserved and justified—essentially that they are one of the “good” ones. While these viewers may experience jump-scares in the theater, their deeper-seated fears of being undeserving of their privilege can sometimes, counterintuitively, be assuaged by the horror experience.

We’ve also had discussion on our podcast of the privilege associated with seeking out fear in the form of horror films. See, for example, our upcoming episode on His House (Weekes, 2020), a film about the horrors—real life and otherwise—faced by South Sudanese immigrants in England. Is the desire to be scared a reflection of the relative ease privileged groups in America experience?

Q: Would you classify Squid Game as horror? Regardless, what is your perspective on the series and the controversy about it?

We define horror broadly, and Squid Game (Dong-hyuk 2021) definitely has enough components of horror for us to count it! We’re recording an episode covering season one next week, so be on the lookout for that episode for a deep dive into the questions you’ve just posed.

It’s through our dialogue on the podcast that we learn not only what each other’s viewpoints are, but often what our own are, and frequently we both come out the other side feeling differently than we went into the conversation! So, for now, those answers remain to be determined. This will be our first ever episode covering a full TV series, and we’re really looking forward to recording it.

Q: What was the first horror movie you saw, and how did it affect you?

Marshall: Two early memories stand out. I remember my dad having rented The Terminator for himself and my older brother. I was deemed too young and so I snuck down to the TV room to watch it from behind the couch. I should not have done this. I was so scared I had to go tell my mom what I had done so she could help me get to sleep. Now it is one of my absolute favorite films.

Second, at a sleepover party we all watch The Goonies (Donner 1985). Everyone else had a wonderful time. I was traumatized and had nightmares about that film for weeks.

Laura: That’s a hard question to answer because I have so many early memories of terror associated with films that only vaguely qualify as horror—for example, Clue (Lynn 1985), Teen Wolf (Daniel 1985) and a particularly disturbing episode of Scooby Doo.

The first time I remember watching a “real” horror movie was Friday the 13th (Miner 1980), alone, on cable TV in my parents’ bedroom, and I remember feeling so grown up. I think that’s one of the draws of horror for me, feeling strong enough to handle the experience.

After an admittedly rocky start with Scooby Doo, I’ve spent much of my horror life searching for more, more, more in terms of fear and brutality. For a discussion of the ethics associated with this kind of horror viewing (I haven’t yet decided if I’m ethical or not!), listeners may want to check out our series on all three of the Human Centipede films (Six, 2009, 2011 and 2015) and our episode on the notorious Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato 1980). Whether you want to view the films themselves or just listen to our discussion … that’s up to you.

Q: What are your top 10 favorite horror movies?

Martyrs (Laugier 2008)—The single best modern horror film without question. It is a masterpiece in terms of the emotional experience, the ideological exploration, the filmmaking execution, and the contributions to the genre. We caution that this is not "fun" horror. This is a hard, brutal, unflinching, emotionally exhausting watch. We’ve seen this film three times, and each time, the depth of our emotional experience is startling. After watching, if you choose to watch—please don’t spoil this remarkable film for yourself—listen to our full podcast episode to hear why we consider it a modern masterpiece.
Get Out (Peele 2017)—A film that deserved all the laurels and fanfare it received. A film that balances important social commentary with tension and dread. It rightly challenged the erasure of race within the genre of horror and used that as a platform for addressing broader cultural issues of race as well. This was one of our earliest podcast episodes, and we’ve evolved quite a bit since then—but if you dig back into the archives, you can find a 2017 episode on Get Out, and we also have an upcoming episode on Candyman (DaCosta 2021) that was co-written and co-produced by Peele.
Black Christmas (Takal 2019)—An intersectional feminist, horror film that offers important commentary on the rape-culture pervasive on college campuses. It also manages to symbolically address how the history and culture of heteropatriarchy (a socio-political system where cisgender, heterosexual males have authority over everyone else) serves as a divisive impact on the relationships of women. What Get Out did in recent years for issues of race, this film did for issues of gender, sexuality and, to a lesser extent, intersectionality with race. Listen to our podcast episode on this film to hear how it systematically delivers its feminist commentary, which may not be apparent at first take.
Funny Games—Haneke's (1997) original version is a study in tension, dread and the terror of sadism. This is impressively intellectual, Brechtian, horror. Like Black Christmas, this, too, is a film where some of the commentary may be lost if you’re not aware of its underpinnings. We recommend a listen to our podcast episode after viewing to dig deeply into these ideas. Also, this film has one of Laura’s favorite openings in the history of horror. No spoilers—you’ll see.
Monster (Jenkins 2003)—Serial killer films are a popular sub-genre, and this first film from Patty Jenkins is at the top. Just watching the film is a masterclass in filmmaking. The horror here is the sexist cruelty of American culture writ large mapped onto the life of one woman. Monster is the final film we covered in a recent podcast series on serial killers (including the phenomenal Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (McNaughton 1986)). We recommend listening to this episode after viewing Monster, and, if you’re inclined to dig more deeply into the serial killer viewing experience, watch and listen to our episode on Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, as well, for some useful background to our conversation on Monster.
Scream (Craven, 1996)—Scream both brought slasher films back to the forefront of the genre and pushed them forward into postmodern commentary. Craven is Marshall's favorite horror director and this, along with Nightmare on Elm Street, are modern classics. Both are also notable for featuring strong, savvy, capable women characters. Unfortunately, our podcast episode on Scream, which was recorded with a live student audience in Farrand Hall, was lost due to audio problems—but the film is discussed intermittently in our series on slasher films, and it absolutely deserves a place on this list, podcast episode or not.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974)—Hooper's film is a demonstration of sheer raw talent and commitment to a project by a small group of folks. A terrifying viewing experience that holds up almost 50(!) years later. Why haven’t we recorded a podcast episode on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre yet? That is a very good question. Be on the lookout for that episode soon.
The First Purge (McMurray 2018)—Horror is a genre that has been rightly criticized for erasure of people of color. While Get Out deserves all the credit given to it for bringing race into horror (other notable films were Rose's Candyman in 1992 and Craven's The People Under the Stairs in 1991), this is an under-appreciated film that progressively deconstructs many of the most prominent weaponized racist stereotypes of American culture. A poignant allegory of the recent political moment that is scary as a film, but even more scary because of its plausibility and prescience. Check out our podcast episodes on The First Purge (2018) as well as an upcoming episode on the most recent installment in the Purge franchise, The Forever Purge (Gout, 2021), which turns its lens on racism and immigration in America.
I Spit on Your Grave (Zarchi 1978)—The rape-revenge sub-genre in horror has been important and intensely contested since at least this film. It has been foisted back into the mainstream with the deserved recognition afforded Fennell's Promising Young Woman for winning best screenplay. (Horror remains a marginalized genre within the academic and film criticism communities). This landmark film in the genre is impressively feminist and progressive. Unfortunately, every single sequel, reboot and remake has failed—often remarkably so—to live up to the promise of the original. Listen to our podcast episode on I Spit on Your Grave(1978) for a deep dive into the feminist messaging in the original film—and to our episodes on the subsequent installments, too, if you’d like to hear us lambast their shortcomings.
Psycho (Hitchcock 1960)—The grandparent of all modern killer horror films. Hitchcock was apparently toxic and abusive to his stars. This is clearly problematic, and yet, the film remains a significant precursor of much of modern horror. If you'd rather not support Hitchcock's content, try Peeping Tom (Powell 1960) as a contemporary alternative. We haven’t recorded a podcast episode on Psycho—and our nascent episode on Peeping Tom was recorded so long ago that it’s not included in our archives. But if you become a diehard Collective Nightmares fan, you’ll eventually hear discussion of Marshall’s dad’s lack of buy-in to Marshall’s brilliant commentary on Peeping Tom. For what it’s worth, he convinced Laura.

Honorable mentions:

Proxy (Parker 2013) —Check out our series of podcast episodes on Zack Parker’s full catalog of films, culminating with an episode-length interview with Zack Parker. The two most notable Parker films are Proxy(2013) and Scalene (2011), both of which deserve your attention. A true independent filmmaker with exceptional vision.
Hard Candy (Slade 2005)—An excellent film, this was also our inaugural podcast episode in the archives. Recorded while driving home from the theater in Laura’s grandpa’s Buick LeSabre, which used to be our recording studio.
The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones 1982)—Written and made by feminists as a response to the sexism and misogyny of the first wave of slasher films. This was one of the first horror films Marshall taught in a college class. It went so well that it created a monster (as it were). Now he is regularly teaching a class on the Sociology of Horror and Laura will soon be teaching her own section as well.
Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato 1980)—Marshall and Laura still don’t see eye-to-eye on the merits (or lack thereof) of Cannibal Holocaust. Listen to our podcast episode on this film to dig more deeply into the ethics and ideology of this controversial film!
It Comes at Night (Shults 2017)—Extra frightening as this film deals with a post-apocalyptic world that was shuttered by communicable disease. This film explores the very bounds of the social contract, balancing the need for community and connection with the risk of outsiders. Listen to this podcast episode for fascinating discussion of the fragility of the social contract—and for a snapshot into our lives at the very start of the COVID pandemic.

CU Boulder sociologists who teach courses on the sociology of horror talk about their podcast, why horror films are popular and their favorite scary movies.

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