Take Note

Daniella Zalcman is an award-winning documentary photographer whose work focuses on the legacies of western colonization. We talked with her about her work sharing stories of indigenous peoples in North America, about the legacy of coercive assimilation, and about why we need to spend more time thinking about who is responsible for telling our collective stories

Watch Daniella’s Penn State Fall Journalism talk here.

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Dr. Tara Pixley and award-winning photojournalist and professor. Her work focuses on rethinking visual representations of gender, race and sexuality. We talked with  her about her work covering the Black Lives Matter movement, about the lack of diverse representation in the news media , and about the line between documentation and exploitation. 

To view some of Tara's work, click here. 

For more from this interview: 

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Cristina Chipriano, LLCSW-S, is the director of Spanish Programs and Outreach at Bo’s Place, a bereavement center in Houston. She’s developed trainings and workshops for peer bereavement centers across the country that are seeking to provide culturally competent, bilingual grief support for bereaved families. Cristina is a board member for the National Alliance for Grieving Children, a leading non-profit in the space of children’s grief.

Hansi Lo Wang is a national correspondent for NPR and an award-winning journalist. He has been reporting on the 2020 census for NPR since 2017. He discussed the issues surrounding the 2020 census, and, now that counting is over, the next steps in the process.

This interview is from the Democracy Works podcast, a collaboration between WPSU and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. The Institute’s Jenna Spinelle interviewed Hansi Lo Wang.

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A year-long investigation by The Caucus and Spotlight PA found lawmakers across Pennsylvania are obscuring campaign spending by not reporting the details to the public -- which is legal in the state. 

Tierra Williams is a mother, artist, performer and activist who joined the social justice movements in Central Pennsylvania after moving here from Mississippi. She talks with us about why she uses her voice to speak up against injustices and what she wants her son to know about the importance of fighting for equality.  

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George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police led people all over the world, including here in Central Pennsylvania, to take to the streets in protest. Kyra Gines, a Penn State sophomore, joined a diverse group of high school students to organize a 12-hour protest in downtown State College. Kyra’s activism began at State College Area High School, spurred by the 2016 election. She participated in protests around issues including gun control and led the school’s Diversity and Activism Club.

Jenn Hepton spent a decade struggling with infertility.

She endured multiple miscarriages, had to terminate her twins for medical reasons, and suffered the stillbirth of her daughter, Loey. 

She now uses her experience to help others as a certified life + parenting coach and grief awareness educator. 

We talked with her about her motherhood journey, about the trauma she didn’t know she was carrying, and about how she found purpose in her pain. 

The Presidential election is about a month away. Mail-in ballots, whether people will trust the election results, and the role of local politics are a few of the issues factoring into the race. WPSU's Anne Danahy spoke about those topics and more with Michael Berkman and Candis Watts Smith from The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. 

Kelly Holder is the Director of the Office of Professional Mental Health at the Penn State College of Medicine and Hershey Medical Center. She talked about mental health challenges and what people can do to to keep their minds active and positive during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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Nancy Thomas is the Director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. She discussed the challenges student voters could face in the upcoming presidential election, and what colleges and universities can do to eliminate barriers and motivate students to get out and vote. 

This interview is from the Democracy Works podcast, a collaboration between WPSU and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. The Institute’s Jenna Spinelle interviewed Nancy Thomas.

Janet Williams is the Director of Community Outreach for the mid and South Atlantic regions at Autism Speaks. In her latest article, "Making Progress Toward the Dream: Autism in the Black Community," Williams shares her thoughts about the barriers to autism diagnosis in the Black community. She recently started Autism Speaks' newest interfaith initiative called "Blue Blessings" to help faith-based communities create more inclusive spaces for people with autism.  

Kim Ruocco is the Vice President of Suicide Prevention and Postvention for the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, better known as TAPS, an organization that provides comfort, care, and resources to those grieving the death of a military loved one. She is the surviving widow of Marine Corps Major John Ruocco, who died by suicide in 2005.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, many students are returning to colleges and universities across the U.S. 

In central Pennsylvania, that includes Penn State, Pitt Bradford, and Juniata College. 

Kevin Kinser is a Penn State professor and head of the Department of Education Policy Studies. He’s a senior scientist at Penn State’s Center for the Study of Higher Education and has written several books about higher ed. 

Divine Lipscomb is a formerly incarcerated student studying rehabilitation and human services at Penn State. He also works as a special projects coordinator for the Restorative Justice Initiative in the College of Education, where he creates dialogue around the intersection of race, institutional barriers and trauma associated with incarceration. He’s the recipient of this year’s Outstanding Adult Student Award and Stand Up Award from the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State.

School districts across Pennsylvania are finalizing plans for reopening classrooms and teaching students remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. WPSU's Anne Danahy spoke with State College Area School District Superintendent Bob O’Donnell and school board President Amber Concepcion about how that district is preparing for the fall.

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Mack Brady was two weeks shy of his ninth birthday when he died unexpectedly from a blood infection on New Year’s Eve in 2012. In the time since, his parents, Elizabeth and Christian Brady, have both used writing as an outlet for their own grief and as a way to help others who are grieving. 

Click here to read some of Elizabeth’s essays. 

Read an excerpt from Christian’s new book, Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Christian Struggle with Suffering, Grief, and Hope:

In 2007, Terry Engelder, then a professor of geosciences at Penn State, estimated how much natural gas could be accessed in the Marcellus Shale formation using hydrofracking. That calculation led to a drilling boom across the Marcellus region in Pennsylvania.

Widely recognized for his work, Engelder has advised state agencies and received funding from companies in the industry. Now retired and a professor emeritus, Engelder is working on a book called “A Frackademic from Appalachia.” 

On May 25th, a police officer killed George Floyd while arresting him by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Videos of Floyd’s killing have led to weeks of protests across the country and calls for police reform.

Penn State professors Eleanor Brown and Ben Jones recently wrote an OpEd that ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer about barriers to police reform and State College’s own police killing of a Black man with schizophrenia, Osaze Osagie. 

Dr. Tashel Bordere is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research focuses on grief and loss among African American youth. She’s authored numerous publications focused on black youth affected by homicide, gun violence, and race-based trauma and has identified the term suffocated grief to describe when normal grief reactions among marginalized populations are not only dismissed, but punished.

This interview originally aired Dec. 6, 2019. 

Veteran law enforcement officers Damon K. Jones and Cariol Horne are speaking out against police brutality and calling for reform.

They talked with WPSU about the challenges they have faced as minorities in the police force, their thoughts about the Black Lives Matter movement and why change is necessary.

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Sandra Charles is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief of Health Services for the Library of Congress, a position that combines her medical expertise with her passion for educating others. She talks with WPSU's Cheraine Stanford about her life and why she thinks we need to talk about mental health as openly as we do about cancer or diabetes.

Pre-K-12 schools in Pennsylvania were closed for the last three months of the school year that just ended, due to coronavirus concerns. Gov. Tom Wolf told schools to move to a digital learning model.

We talked about the effects of the shutdown on students with Ed Fuller, an associate professor in the College of Education at Penn State.   

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Emily Reddy:

We’re bringing you an interview to give some context to the discussions about racism and inequality that are happening in the U.S. right now.

We’ll talk with Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith, coauthors of a book called “Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making all Black Lives Matter,” which looks at the history of structural racism in the U.S. and gives people information and tools to become antiracists.

Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University. He uses experimental evolution, mathematical modeling, and computational biology to better understand diseases. He is interested in the interactions of epidemics, evolution, and society.

He talked with WPSU's Cheraine Stanford about his latest novel coronavirus research and the interactions between race, social justice, and COVID-19.

Increasingly, our daily lives are online, especially during the coronavirus shutdown. But access to the internet is not always equal, which was exacerbated by the shutdown. And the privacy implications of our online lives are sometimes an afterthought.

Daryl Cameron is an assistant professor of psychology and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. His work focuses on the psychological processes involved in empathy and moral decision-making. He looks at the reasons behind people’s empathic emotions and behaviors toward others, including their responses to significant crises like the coronavirus pandemic.   

The COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. intensified just as the 2020 Census was getting underway in earnest. As Americans fill their days with news about the new coronavirus, the Census Bureau is doing everything it can to spread the word about completing the Census online while grappling with how to do critical in-person follow up during a time of social distancing. As our guest this week explains, the consequences of an undercount directly impact public health in significant ways.

Megan Devine is a psychotherapist, grief advocate and author of It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand. She's the founder of Refuge in Grief, an online community that helps people understand grief and navigate loss.

Interviewer Lindsey Whissel Fenton worked with Devine on WPSU's multiplatform project Speaking Grief.  

The coronavirus pandemic has brought sharp awareness to physical wellbeing, shelter-in-place orders and social distancing practices aim to keep our bodies safe and healthy.

But what about our minds? What effects might longterm shelter orders and social distancing have on our mental health?

We talked about this with Erika Saunders, the chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at the Penn State College of Medicine and Penn State Health.

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Andy Grant: