June 2008 Archives

CLA alumnus and photographer Wing Young Huie captures America's cultural complexities through his camera's lens.

CLA faculty make their marks on CLA, Minnesota, and the world.

Beverley and Richard Fink never thought twice about sharing their good fortune with the U.

Michael Sieben honors a friendship that started in Middlebrook Hall by making a gift.

Alumna Betsy Hiel's report from an Israeli city under attack.

Alumnus Paul Brainerd founded the Brainerd Foundation to protect the natural environment of the Northwest.

CLA students reflect on what's great and not so great about democracy.

CLA faculty weigh in on citizenship in the 21st century.

Rebecca Mitchell is honored by Glamour magazine as one of its top 10 college women for 2006.

CLA's role in the University's quest to be among the best.

What does it take to prepare students for today's globalized world?

The masterminds of the U's Undergraduate Writing Initiative are bringing a new kind of relevance to writing instruction - even in our fast-paced text-message world.

The "face" of CLA is changing, thanks to initiatives such as the McGuire Academic Program, which supports high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds.

Scientists are fond of fundamental theories, the sets of principles that purport to explain everything that they observe in their respective fields. Theories, we've been led to believe, drive the production of scientific knowledge: they provide crucial frameworks for designing experiments and interpreting results.

While scholars like Karen-Sue Taussig and Rachel Schurman are examining how culture affects the way we relate to science, Steven Manson and C. Kenneth Waters are studying another part of the equation—how our relationship to science affects actual scientific results.

Karen-Sue Taussig's research has taken her into an uneasy realm of scientific smoke and mirrors. It is only when cultural influences on science are exposed, she says—when the great and powerful Oz is revealed to be, in the end, a man behind a curtain—that we can begin to understand the American love affair with genetic research.

“Pesky environmental crazies?" For fifteen years, Rachel Schurman says, that was how many in the biotechnology industry referred behind closed doors to activists who opposed the use of emerging technologies to modify the genes of organisms like plants and fish.

What do scientists think about while they're hunched over microscopes for hours on end? Hear from four scholars examining the growing field of “science studies":

• Part 1: The Cultural Lives of Scientists
• Part 2: The Politics of DNA
• Part 3: Science-It's Only Human
• Part 4: The Theory Trap

No one knows better than Kathleen Collins that research isn't all about poring over books, Web sites, and microfiche. Sometimes it means traversing dangerous terrain and putting everything on the line.

Like most scholars, Colin Kahl is something of a bookworm, often content to be buried in academic journals, history books, and the latest edition of The State of the World. But when it comes to researching current affairs, Kahl believes there's no substitute for gathering subject matter firsthand. That's why he went to Iraq last June.

As endless wars go, the “war on terror? would appear to be Exhibit A. As the war in Iraq continues unabated, how do we talk about it and react? And how does democracy fare as war rhetoric heats up and restrictions on civil liberties are imposed in the name of national security? These are questions that Ron Krebs is exploring in his study of 21st century war.

As a student in the mid-1980s, Ann Hironaka was like a lot of her peers. A nuclear showdown between superpowers still seemed possible, and there were ongoing conflicts in Angola, El Salvador, Lebanon ... seemingly too many places to count. Hironaka and her fellow activists took aim at these wars, trying to stop them. But, says Hironaka, "The solutions that people were proposing were not very convincing to me. My dissatisfaction with the activism was that the answers were just too simple."

Four CLA scholars are searching for answers for the reasons why we wage war. They're studying the causes, consequences, and lessons of wars in Central Asia, Iraq, and beyond.

• Neverending Wars: Ann Hironaka contemplates the root causes of neverending wars.
• A Question of Rhetoric: Ron Krebs considers the trade-offs that are made during war-time and what impact these have when the war is over.


• Closeup on Intervention:Colin Kahl spent time in Iraq and in the Department of Defense to get a measure of how the U.S. is meeting its wartime obligations.


• Research on the Front Lines: Kathleen Collins persists in her Central Asian clan politics research--despite some personal risk.