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New criminal justice chair brings experience and energy to role

Melanie-Angela Neuilly
Neuilly

An expert in comparative criminal justice and criminological theory, Melanie-Angela Neuilly began on Aug. 1 a three-year term as chair of the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University.

“My goal as chair is to coordinate, facilitate and catalyze faculty’s work and to build bridges between our unit and others for furthering the department and university’s land-grant mission,” Neuilly said. “Meeting the needs of our students and our communities through our research, teaching and service is all the more pressing in the midst of a pandemic and demands for social justice.”.

Neuilly brings a broad range of strengths, experience and energy to her new role, said Matthew Jockers, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Her leadership will help propel the department’s growth and interdisciplinary success.”

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WSU Insider

How where you’re born influences the person you become

By Masha Gartstein, WSU professor of psychology

Masha Maria Gartstein.
Gartstein

Italians wildly gesticulate when they talk. Dutch children are notably easygoing and less fussy. Russians rarely smile in public.

As developmental psychologists, we’re fascinated by these differences, how they take shape and how they get passed along from one generation to the next.

Our new book, “Toddlers, Parents and Culture,” explores the way a society’s values influences the choices parents make – and how this, in turn, influences who their kids become.

To conduct the research for our book, we worked with colleagues from 14 different countries. Our goal was to explore the way broad societal values influenced how parents raise their children. We then studied how these different parenting styles shaped the behavior and personality of kids.

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The Sector

LDS scholars mourn the death of a ‘generous’ groundbreaking sociologist who guided generations of Mormon academics

Armand Mauss.
Armand Mauss

Armand Mauss was one of the most prominent scholars of Mormonism — even though very few members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would recognize his name.

The large man in his signature Hawaiian shirt and neatly trimmed beard was heralded as a preeminent social scientist for his groundbreaking research on the LDS Church’s cycles of accommodation and retreat and on race and lineage. He was praised for helping to found the Mormon Social Science Association, for his visionary leadership on the board of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, his long career as a sociologist, his teaching on Mormon studies at Claremont Graduate University, and his support for rigorous, independent research on the faith — and for mentoring generations of academics.

Mauss accepted a position as a professor of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University in Pullman, where he spent the next 30 years cranking out scholarly articles, many in the field of sociology of religion.

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The Salt Lake Tribu

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In ‘Labyrinth of Ice,’ the grim fate of the Greely Polar Expedition gets a compassionate telling

Buddy Levy.
Levy

In “Labyrinth of Ice,” a recent account of Greely’s northward trek, Washington State University associate professor of English Buddy Levy, noted for bringing a fine novelist’s sense of storytelling to his narrative histories, tells this difficult but fascinating story with a compassion and vividness often lacking in works of this nature. In the doing, he adds another essential volume to what has become an onslaught of recent literature concerning the far north.

It’s here, a little more than a hundred pages into this book, that Levy’s remarkable skills as a writer, already evident earlier in the book, fully bloom. In page after agonizing page, he details the daily lives of the men as darkness and hunger overtook them. Up until digging in for the winter, they had beaten the odds of 19th century polar exploration; they were all still alive. This would not last.

Levy demonstrates deep compassion for all the men throughout, even those who did bad things under horrible circumstances. He could have been perhaps more critical of some, but he makes up for it with his genuine empathy.

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Anchorage Daily News

Riots. Radicalism. Corruption. Trump and Biden supporters turn to apocalyptic themes in campaign ad wars.

Cities on fire. Rioters clashing with baton-wielding cops. Bodies stacking up in makeshift graves…. A trailer for the latest apocalyptic blockbuster? No, just some of the latest volleys on social media and television as the ad wars boil over between President Donald Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden and their often deep-pocketed allies.

Travis Ridout.
Ridout

So far, Trump has been the aggressor, reflecting his take-no-prisoners personality at a time when polls show him trailing Biden badly, experts say.
“Usually, we have an incumbent who’s in the lead, an incumbent who’s risk averse. Let’s just run out the shot clock,” said Travis Ridout, a public policy professor at Washington State University who studies political messaging.

“This time around, we’ve got an incumbent who’s way behind,” he said. “The incumbent has to shake up the race, and perhaps the best opportunity to do that is try to disqualify the challenger, try to throw some mud, hope that it lands, hope that the media will pick up on that.”

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USA Today