Social Sciences | University Categories | CAS in the Media

^{CAS in the Media} _{Arts and Sciences Media Headlines}

2014’s Best and Worst States for Women’s Equality

August 25, 2014

Women’s rights in the United States have made leaps and bounds since the passage of the 19th Amendment. Yet many women today still struggle to crack the proverbial glass ceiling. And it doesn’t take a feminist to convince anyone that the gender gap in 21st-century America remains disgracefully wide. In 2013, the U.S. failed to make the top 10 — or even the top 20 — of the World Economic Forum’s list of the most gender-equal countries.

Participating in a Q&A about workplace inequality, Julie Kmec, professor of sociology and Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts, said women can be proactive by promoting their attributes and successes. When a woman encounters a situation she deems unfair or unequal, she should not hesitate to (professionally and armed with details and facts) inquire why she was overlooked, Kmec said.

Learn more about the gender gap problem and solutions

Anthropologists aid in the Ebola epidemic

August 14, 2014

Barry Hewlett, a medical anthropologist at WSU Vancouver, says that efforts to contain outbreaks such as Ebola must be “culturally sensitive and appropriate…otherwise people are running away from actual care that is intended to help them.”

Hewlett was invited to join a World Health Organization Ebola team during the 2000 outbreak in Uganda. His experiences there prove the vital role that anthropologists play in disease outbreak efforts.

In a report on his experiences in Uganda, Hewlett noted that healthcare workers in the field were having a difficult time convincing the local people to bring their sick family members to clinics and isolation wards.

On Supreme Court, Does 9-0 Add Up to More Than 5-4?

August 13, 2014

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a remarkable number of unanimous decisions last term, and in their public remarks the justices seemed unanimous in saying that unanimity was a good thing. But is it?

Michael F. Salamone, a political scientist at WSU, has designed experiments to test whether the public is more apt to accept unanimous decisions than divided ones.

Related research citing Salamone’s work concluded that “the idea that 5-4 decisions pose a serious problem of credibility or legitimacy [for the court] remains an unproven hypothesis.” How hard, then, should the justices work to achieve unanimity?

Read more about Salamone’s research in the ABA Journal; also in the New York Times (subscription required).

The Ruling on Peyote that Helped Hobby Lobby Win

August 12, 2014

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Hobby Lobby decision, Carolyn Long, associate professor of the School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at WSU Vancouver, explained the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the basis of the court’s ruling.

RFRA was adopted after a 1990 Supreme Court decision denied unemployment benefits to two Native American men who used peyote in a religious ritual.

Hear Professor Long on The Takeaway with John Hockenberry.

Most violent era in America was before Europeans arrived

August 4, 2014

There’s a mythology about the native Americans—that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature. It’s easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions killed in wars and genocides, was not the most violent. On a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, WSU archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

Learn more about this myth-busting research at Science 2.0 and WSU News