Social Issues
Literature can help us make sense of life’s biggest questions. And no one did that better than the great Russian novelists, says professor Gary Saul Morson.
In May 2022 Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History renovated its outdated Native North America exhibit hall and opened Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories, a permanent exhibition. Doug Kiel, assistant professor of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a citizen of the Oneida Nation, served on the Native American advisory committee that spent 4 ½ years setting the agenda for the renovation and bringing it to life.
Looking for a place to pitch a story about Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters in December 2020, journalism student Dan Hu discovered The Yappie, a digital news publication focused on activism and policies affecting the AAPI community. Soon after that initial pitch, Hu joined The Yappie as a writer and is now its executive director.
We’re all generating an exponential amount of data all the time, and the ability to connect the dots between those bits of data is cause for concern. Northwestern alumni who work in privacy protection agree that comprehensive federal legislation is needed to set reasonable expectations for individual data protection rights and to harmonize the growing patchwork of state rules that protect only a subset of the population.
Humanity has made a mess of our precious planet. These researchers are developing amazing new ways to help restore it.
Margaret Glenn Sales Semmes, who studied music at Northwestern in the 1940s, was one of 856 women who served in the Women’s Army Corps’ 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, also known as the Six Triple Eight, the only American Army unit comprising all women of color during World War II. They faced a mammoth task: sorting through a multiyear backlog of mail that had yet to be delivered to American soldiers, government personnel and Red Cross workers serving abroad.
Cody Keenan ’02 spent eight years as a White House speechwriter for President Barack Obama ’06 H. Now a visiting professor at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Keenan talked with Northwestern Magazine about his start in politics, what he learned from the former president and what gives him hope.
Isabella Twocrow interned for 10 weeks with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, working alongside some of the most important decision-makers when it comes to Native American life, including Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. “They’re the people protecting tribal sovereignty through policymaking,” says Twocrow, who is Oglala Lakota and a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and co-chair of Northwestern’s Native American and Indigenous Student Alliance.
Classroom trips brought Northwestern students around the globe to conduct research on the history of midwivery in England, investigate reports of a power plant sickening residents in Panama, study how Israel is becoming a worldwide leader in water management, and more.
For her first feature-length film, ‘Being BeBe,’ documentary filmmaker Emily Branham ’02 spent 15 years chronicling the unconventional story of drag performer Marshall Ngwa, aka BeBe Zahara Benet, an immigrant from Cameroon and the first winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
