Christine Hallquist became the first transgender candidate to be nominated for a governorship by a major party when she won Vermont’s Democratic primary Aug. 14. The nomination marks a seismic shift in the social culture of our nation, says an expert on transgender adults at Washington University in St. Louis.
For nearly three decades, the Weltin Lecture Fund has enabled the Religious Studies Program and Assembly Series to bring renowned scholars of religion to the university. In spring 2018, Elaine Pagels delivered the lecture, sharing her riveting discoveries on art and politics in the Book of Revelation.
The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court has renewed debate about the future of Roe v. Wade. Mary Ann Dzuback, chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in Arts & Sciences, suspects that conservative justices will continue chipping away at reproductive choice, rather than mount a frontal assault on the decision. But she warns that by undermining Roe’s guarantee of reproductive choice, the court risks its own reputation and authority.
In 2015, Washington University re-established the Department of Sociology in Arts & Sciences. Concentrating on the origins and impacts of inequality, faculty and students are investigating some of the nation’s most critical and urgent social challenges.
Older adults living in public senior housing communities experience a large degree of loneliness, finds a new study from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. Nevertheless, senior housing communities may be ideal locations for reducing that loneliness, the study finds.
President Donald Trump on June 20 directed his administration to detain migrant families together instead of separating parents from their children, but one of the nation’s leading immigration experts argues that jailing migrant families is still “cruel and unnecessary” under U.S. law.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 14 struck down a ban on clothing with political messages being worn inside polling places. Greg Magarian, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on free speech and the law of politics, says the court’s decision in the case was very narrow.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 11 upheld Ohio’s efforts to purge its voter rolls. The move spreads voting discrimination across America, argues a constitutional law expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
Foodborne illness is a serious and preventable public health problem, affecting one in six Americans and costing an estimated $50 billion annually. As local health departments adopt new tools that monitor Twitter for tweets about food poisoning, a study from Washington University in St. Louis is the first to examine practitioner perceptions of this technology.
