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The Record Nepal
The underlying threat of social distancing
“In South Asia, where [social distancing] has unfurled into a spider’s web of practices, it also directs violence, exclusion and bigotry upon marginalized people whose only ‘sin’ is caste, occupation or descent,” said Wake Forest associate professor of cultural anthropology Steve Folmar in his recent article for The Record Nepal. “Through a complex and pervasive set of exclusive, degrading and threatening practices known once as untouchability and now as social distancing, privileged castes have marginalized others and deprived them of basic human dignity,” he said. “Despite a legal embargo against the practice of untouchability, social distancing has direct ties to the normalization of untouchability, human exploitation and the violation of human rights.”
May 8, 2020
Bloomberg Law
Short-staffed EPA leans on older adjunct workers, with no raises
The EPA’s Senior Environmental Employment program was created nearly forty years ago to let older workers use their skills at the EPA while keeping active and earning some extra money. Without a full complement of older workers in the program, the EPA’s capabilities “would suffer significantly” because the agency would have to shift full-time staffers into jobs now being done by the retiree corps, said Stan Meiburg, who served as the EPA’s acting deputy administrator in the Obama administration. “EPA has been short-staffed for many years,” said Meiburg, now director of the graduate program in sustainability at Wake Forest. “Many of the high-profile things the agency does—like issuing permits, doing enforcement actions, doing Superfund—depend upon back-office functions that you don’t see, but are nevertheless essential.”
May 7, 2020
Elemental
It’s time to learn how to microdose anticipation
“Anticipation is very important — it underlies things like optimism and hope,” said Christian Waugh, Wake Forest associate professor of psychology. “And positive anticipation is something that goes away when people are depressed.” Unfortunately, it can also go away when people feel uncertain about the future. And these days, uncertainty is rampant. One helpful remedy during COVID-19 is to inject life with small, short-term sources of happy anticipation. “You can still anticipate positive events, but you may have to scale it back — microdose it, if you will,” said Waugh. “Instead of thinking big or way in the future, think smaller and closer in time.”
May 7, 2020
Tech Announcer
The interaction of poetry and physics was the pursuit of poet and Wake Forest assistant professor of English Amy Catanzano when she created “World Lines: A Quantum Supercomputer Poem.” which translates the quantum theory behind a topological quantum computer in both its word choices and its visual structure, a practice Catanzano calls quantum poetics. “My aim was to write a poem that served as an imaginative and rigorous site of interaction between poetry and physics.”
May 7, 2020
Vox
Why time feels so weird right now
“What we call internal time, or subjective time, is very complex. There’s no such thing as one internal clock that we then compare to an external clock. Our brains are these really complex ad hoc systems that are doing a lot of functions at the same time. They’re constantly integrating information and coordinating action,” said Adrian Bardon, professor of philosophy at Wake Forest. “What we call our internal clock is actually a whole bunch of internal clocks…There’s a lot of stuff going on all at the same time that all have to do with our internal sense of the passage of time. And with all that complexity, it’s no wonder that sometimes our sense of the passage of time can get weird, under weird circumstances, when we’re in a weird mood.”
May 7, 2020
WGHP
Heidi Robinson, assistant vice president for career education & coaching at Wake Forest, says even during these uncertain times, students can still get important experience to improve their resumes for college or job applications. Formal internships probably aren’t available, so Robinson encourages students to be open to helping with short-term projects. “All of the job functions that would happen in a corporation, happen in a nonprofit too. They need help with social media, they need help with organization – all sorts of things.”
May 7, 2020
Yes! Weekly
When dance goes digital at Wake Forest University
Dance professor Kara Wilkes said she saw the move to remote learning as an opportunity for students to engage dance as a tool for processing change. One remote assignment was to film a 45-second self-choreographed work with only the upper body. Another was to choose an inanimate prop and incorporate it into a one-minute dance. “I adjusted the syllabus to be sensitive to physical space and technology limitations that our students might face. Giving the students agency to choreograph allowed many to express what they have been experiencing during this pandemic.”
May 7, 2020
Science News
A simple exercise on belonging helps black college students years later
Results from a recent study show that social-belonging interventions can help black students feel like they belong in college. The study reports that even a decade later, students who took the training reported higher levels of personal and professional satisfaction than their peers. Black students entering college, who are aware of negative racial stereotypes and are underrepresented in higher education, can experience uncertainty about belonging, said study co-author Shannon Brady, a social psychologist at Wake Forest. That uncertainty can cause some black students to see commonplace challenges — a bad grade or a spat with a friend — as a confirmation of those negative feelings. Consequently, such students become less likely to seek help when needed, which can hurt their academic performance and overall well-being. Social-belonging interventions aim to break that negative loop.
May 5, 2020
Winston-Salem Journal
Here’s how Winston-Salem’s colleges and universities will honor the Class of 2020
Wake Forest will confer about 2,300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees virtually at 7 p.m. May 18. The University will livestream the event on its website, YouTube channel and Facebook page. An in-person ceremony is scheduled for 1 p.m. Oct 31 on campus, with May 22, 2021, set as an alternate date.
May 5, 2020
Winston-Salem Journal
“Based on what you can do physically in your circumstances, try to go out to walk, to bike,” said Nathaniel Ivers, chair of the Department of Counseling at Wake Forest. “As long as you keep your distance from folks, getting outside is extremely important, partially for vitamin D, but also psychologically, especially as the days get warmer.” Find time to not only share concerns about COVID-19 but to talk about lighter, unrelated topics too.
May 4, 2020
Winston-Salem Journal
The Wake Forest Pitching Lab, opened in 2018, is one of only a few facilities like it in the entire country. Actually, there is no other facility exactly like it. It’s the only pitching lab fully integrated with a major teaching hospital, and it has an on-site location at the college team’s stadium. “It’s also the only one being used on a daily basis by a college pitching staff,” said John Hendricks, the Deacons’ pitching coach. While other labs study rehab and injury prevention, Hendricks explained Wake Forest University is “the first to use it to win more games and improve our ERA.”
May 4, 2020
Winston-Salem Journal
We’re five weeks into being homebound; it’s not normal
“If I told you that you will have a new set of social norms forced upon you, that the ways you showed people you care is seen as a threat, that you’ll have to change the way you get food and the way you eat – and this doesn’t even take into account the threat of illness – it would be incredibly overwhelming and stressful,” said Heath Greene, a clinical psychologist who teaches psychology at Wake Forest. “We’ve had a lot of loss and whenever there is loss, there is increased chance for depression. Not knowing what the next two weeks, the next six months are going to be like? All of those are losses, and when added up together, they become quite large.”
May 2, 2020