Social Sciences

Last week was a busy week at Colgate University. While this is a mini-highlight of what was making news, you can skip this post and go right to comments to tell us your news from the past week. Here are just some of the things we were talking about:

In the past week, Colgate University faculty answered the call to journalists who sought out qualified experts. As 2012 approaches, journalists are calling on Professor Anthony Aveni for his insights into the Mayan calendar. Bookshelves and movie theaters are full of prophecies, theories, and predictions that this date marks the end of the world, or […]

(Editor’s Note: This article was written by Paula Meltser ’13) I was one of the 16 Colgate students on the London Economics Study Group who found themselves in the midst of the relentless debt crisis that has engulfed Europe. Not only did we study the evolving economic problem, we lived it first-hand.

Jessica Graybill, assistant professor of geography, needed to look no farther than Utica, N.Y., for students in her Urban Transformations seminar to experience the cultural, spatial, and environmental changes brought about by refugee migration. The city’s leaders openly welcome international newcomers — most recently from Bosnia, Belarus, and Vietnam — as a strategy for economic […]

On a rainy October night in 1961, Soviet and American tanks sat muzzle to muzzle at Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous boundary between East and West Berlin. Fifty years later, Frederick Kempe, chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council and author of Berlin: 1961, stood before an audience in Persson Auditorium to discuss the issues that […]

Patricia Hill Collins, a social theorist who studies race, gender, social class, work, and family, came to Colgate recently to deliver the annual W.E.B. and Shirley Graham DuBois Lecture, hosted by the Africana/Latin American Studies Department.

As an economist, Takao Kato studies unintended consequences of public policy decisions. As a professor at Colgate with many international students in his classes, he considers their prospects for gainful employment in the United States. That connection inspired a research project he conducted with Chad Sparber, assistant professor of economics.

It’s hard to imagine the common earthworm as an “alien invader,” but those near Colgate are not native to North America, and it’s been found that they could be harmful to the environment.

When Bharadwaj Reddy ’12 chose to attend Colgate from India, he thought he would spend four years without ever hearing or speaking Telugu, his native tongue, to anyone on campus. But during his sophomore year he found Srikar Gullapali ’13, a friend and colleague who not only speaks his language, but has similar goals in […]

One’s hand starts to cramp just imagining the hours dedicated to the intricate beadwork decorating the 200-plus pieces in Birds and Beasts in Beads: 150 Years of Iroquois Beadwork. The Longyear Museum of Anthropology exhibition, which runs until Oct. 30, includes box purses with beaded loops dripping off the bottom, embellished pincushions, and colorful three-dimensional […]