We start—as most things seem to now—with the partisan polarization in the U.S., asking a political science professor if people really are seeing everything in red or blue. Then a historian and legal scholar tells how we got to this state of racial injustice, decades after the Civil Rights movement. Finally, the German professor leading Penn’s environmental humanities program describes life in the climate crisis and the vision she gets from her students of going beyond a “new normal.”
Guests
Matthew Levendusky, Professor of Political Science and Penny and Robert A. Fox Director of the Fels Institute of Government
Mary Frances Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of History and Africana Studies
Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities
Host
Alex Schein
Producer
Susan Ahlborn
Editors
Alex Schein and Brooke Sietinsons
Interviewers
Susan Ahlborn, Blake Cole, and Lauren Rebecca Thacker
Illustration
Nick Matej
Music
Theme music by Nicholas Escobar, C’18
Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
More Episodes
The Restorative Power of Art
In this episode, we speak with researchers at the Positive Psychology Center, who examined how art museum visitation and museum program participation impact flourishing-related outcomes.
Music and Meaning
In this episode we speak with a professor of music about the power of song and dance during the apartheid era in South Africa, and a College alum about his process composing music for the screen, and our very own OMNIA podcast.