Chatham Faculty & Staff News Roundup
Chatham faculty & staff experts are weighing in on recent COVID-19-related phenomenons—and more—all over national and local news syndicates. In case you missed it, we’ve curated some of their recent media appearances below.
Alice is Associate Professor and Director of Food Studies at Chatham, as well as the Director of the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation
“Alice Julier, a sociologist and the author of Eating Together, says being forced to dine at home has been good in some ways: it’s made people more aware of their dependence on restaurants and more conscious of the labor involved in putting food on the table. But depriving people of the ability to eat communally goes against our nature, she says. ‘We don’t feel good in isolation, most of us,’ she says. ‘We’ve organized our whole world around social contact.’”
excerpted from Eating Alone Together: Virtual Dinner Parties are Helping People Fight Isolation by Emily Heil
“Jennie Sweet-Cushman cited climate change as one of her top three voting issues and said she supported Joe Biden because he is a pragmatist, and her years studying government have shown her that major structural changes require bipartisanship.
‘If you want any sort of change, you have to have people pushing it that are willing to listen to the other side, and I don’t see that out of the Sanders campaign,’ she said.
But Ms. Cushman has had a hard time convincing students like Taylor Pelow, 20, a chemistry and political science major from Buffalo who said her dream was to one day run the Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. Pelow said she believes in banning fracking and wants to see a transition away from fossil fuels earlier than Mr. Biden does.”
excerpted from Climate Voters Still Want More From Biden by Lisa Friedman
Jennie serves as an Associate Professor of Political Science
One of the Chatham Zoom Backgrounds, circa 1980, c/o Chatham University Archives & Special Collections
“For Molly Tighe, virtual backgrounds offer a new way to do her job: disseminating knowledge of the school’s 150-year history. New to Zoom, which Chatham now encourages for classes and meetings, she made her background a black-and-white image of an 1880s dorm room, complete with ‘beautiful wallpaper’ and a decorative Chinese scroll. Quickly, she realized she couldn’t keep this just to herself and put together a package of archival background images to distribute to students and faculty. She’s adding images every day.
Tighe’s colleague Becky Borello sees even more potential in teaching professors to integrate virtual backgrounds into their classes. ‘I think it would be cool to put in backgrounds as some sort of gamification feature for their courses,’ she says, imagining a professor saying, ‘Okay, so what do you see in the background? Here’s a chemical equation; if I put my head here, what would happen?’”
excerpted from Your Zoom Background Can Do More Than Just Entertain by Matt Gross
“Why do thousands of people use social media platforms as a way to collectively joke about very serious global events? Monica Riordan, cognitive psychologist at Chatham University said the answer is simple — it’s science.
’GIFs, memes, posts, and tweets that delight us or make us smile, releasing feelings of pleasure, cause our brains to release dopamine,’ Ms. Riordan told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Friday. ‘Dopamine release is an evolutionary signal to keep seeking more of that thing — and we get lost in pages upon pages of GIFs, memes, tweets (whatever your social media pleasure) — looking for that dopamine release.’
Ms. Riordan, who studies computer-mediated communication, said humans crave releases of dopamine — a neurotransmitter that plays a role in how people feel pleasure — when times are dark and they’re feeling sad or depressed. That directly causes social media users to actively seek content that helps create a happier feeling through the universal language of humor. ”
Monica is Associate Professor of Experimental Psychology
excerpted from The coronavirus pandemic is a crisis. So why don’t we take it seriously on social media? by Alexis Johnson
Have news to share? Let us know.
