Season 1, Episode 3

Crisis Upon Crisis

The coronavirus pandemic does not exist in a vacuum. We look at other urgent issues of our time, and examine how they affect and are affected by COVID-19.

Crisis Upon Crisis • Season 1, Episode 3

Listen on these platforms

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

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

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.