Season Four: Timely Topics

Jana Cunningham: Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities and today, in honor of national Hispanic Latino Heritage Month, we're discussing the history of Mexican women with historian, Susie Porter. Professor Porter is the director of the Center for Latin American studies and the author of “From Angel to Office Worker Middle-class Identity, a female consciousness in Mexico, 1890 to 1950.”

Jana Cunningham: Your book examines the changing role of middle-class women in the early 20th century and their impact on the women's labor movement. How and why did the role of middle-class women change at that time?

Susie Porter: Thank you for having me on the podcast. Those are great questions. We can talk about two types of change, changes in women's labor and changes in people's conceptions of middle-class identity. So the context is that due to shifts in the Mexican economy in the late 19th century, middle-class households found themselves in increasingly difficult circumstances. The federal government had favored large-scale agricultural and industrial production to the detriment of both working class and middle class families.

Susie Porter: By the late 19th century, there was a decline in those occupations historically available to the middle class, and there was a decline in the value of the wages that they earned. It became harder to pay for housing, for education, for clothing, which was important at that time for marking one status and even to pay for food. These economic changes then meant that the relative value of women's labor in the household changed. Historically, to identify as middle class meant that women remained in the home. They work at home, but not outside of the home.

Susie Porter: The respectability of both women as individuals and that of her household required her to remain at home engaged in the labor of raising family, preparing food, making clothing, and all of that work. However, it became more profitable for middle-class households, for women to work outside of the home and to earn a wage. So this was a major shift in how the middle-class identified to have women working outside of the home. And I'll just note that these processes are similar to something that played out in the United States between roughly the 1970s and now. Since the 1970s, workers, including middle-class workers have seen a decline in real wages.

Susie Porter: That is what their wages can buy. This decline in earning capacity led middle-class families to make the decision to have women work outside of the home. Not only when they were young and single, but once they were married and even with children at home. Now this shift is something that happened among white Americans, African-Americans in particular. And to a certain extent, Latinos have a much longer history of sending women outside of the house to work in order to maintain their standard of living. But as I said, then as a result of these shifts in the 1970s in the United States, there was an explosion in the workforce participation of married women with young children still at home.

Jana Cunningham: And so what type of work was available to the middle-class women as opposed to working class?

Susie Porter: Well, in the late 19th, early 20th century, not many. And one of the things that shaped this was people's ideas about who worked outside of the home or not, who worked in the public sphere or not. And the racial formations of the era associated working in public with indigenous peoples and with working class peoples. And so those who sought to maintain middle-class status, did everything they could to keep women from working outside of the home. They would even, for example, work inside the home making candies, making prepared food, for example, and then hiring someone to go out and into the streets to sell those items.

Susie Porter: Women also worked as seamstresses. So they sewed the clothing for their own family sometimes, but sewing allowed them to remain at home and maintain that middle-class respectability. But there were so many women who sought this option that it was really poorly paid. Probably one of the watershed moments in terms of middle-class women's employment was in the field of teaching.

Susie Porter: So Mexico has a long history of women teaching within convents, but teaching as a secular occupation, really only open to women in the late 1880s. My book looks at women's entrance into office work. So with the expansion of business and the economy, the expansion of the government to support business with things like the post office, the labor department, federal banking offices, for example, the bureaucracy, both in the private and the public sector exploded. And those entities turned to women to fil the offices with secretaries, typists, filers, all these kinds of occupations.

Jana Cunningham: And as women moved into the workforce, specifically into these offices in the public and private sector, what kind of inequalities and issues did they face that they maybe weren't prepared for?

Susie Porter: Well, so there are several moments in the trajectory of women entering into the workforce or anyone entering into the workforce where inequality begins. So inequality can begin even before ones hired. First, in regard to access to education. Those fortunate enough to come from families that supported women's work outside of the home would have needed to have not only the money to pay for school because the secretarial schools were not free, but those families had to be able to afford having those women not work and contributing to the household economy.

Susie Porter: It's the same kind of challenge that a lot of our students at the university of Utah face today, how do you balance the cost of education to even get your foot in the door, to be able to then find lucrative and fulfilling work? The other kind of inequality that women faced before getting to work was social prejudice. In the late 19th, early 20th century, most people thought that women shouldn't work outside of the home. Maybe they would work if they were daughters contributing to the household, but once they were married, people didn't think that mothers should work outside of the home.

Susie Porter: Inequality also happens at the moment of establishing networks to get jobs, who do you know, how can you leverage those networks to get a position? So the inequality began even before women got to work. And then when they got to work, they were hired into low-level positions, positions that were sometimes not clearly defined, positions where the path to promotion was unclear, positions where their seniority, how the seniority was calculated was not clear. So there were all sorts of different factors that shaped women's inequality at work. And government jobs were interesting because each category had a set wage.

Susie Porter: So if you were a typist, you were a typist. If you were an office apprentice, you were an office apprentice. Regardless of being male or female, you earned the same wage. So inequalities developed, despite the fact that women were paid the same wages in offices, and it was due to these barriers to their promotion. And all of these inequalities made women vulnerable to sexual harassment. So that would be another important inequality in the workplace. I'd add that while this book examines Mexican history, there's really no need to look beyond the state of Utah to understand the urgency to make such issues visible. In Utah, women earn around 70 cents for every dollar a man earns. And despite the lip service to the contrary, we in Utah continue to value workplace productivity over raising children, and really offer very meager support for working parents.

Jana Cunningham: Right. Even as you were kind of talking about these inequalities that these women in Mexico were facing, I was thinking you could very easily be talking about the inequalities that are happening today.

Susie Porter: Absolutely.

Jana Cunningham: How did these women in Mexico organize to enact change? And what were their demands?

Susie Porter: Organizing begins from conversation, from talking with each other, comparing experiences. In drawing on their work experiences, these women wrote beautiful literature and biting feminist critiques that were published in the newspapers. They attended boring organizational meetings and thrilling street protests. And they proclaimed the dignity of working mothers by defending their rights as workers, and by getting their employers to provide childcare. I'll note that they had to overcome the stigma associated with organizing in general and unions in particular. But once they did, once they came to understand their shared condition, they formed one of the most powerful unions in Mexico, the public employees union.

Susie Porter: They were at the heart of the public employee labor movement. So in some sense, if it were not for women, for feminism and the women's movement, the 1930s union movement would have not flourished the way that it did. What were their demands? Equal pay for equal work and end to the glass ceiling, respect for seniority, transparency and promotions and access to childcare. They also demanded a shift in conversation. So in the 1920s, there were all sorts of debates about whether or not women should cut their hair short and whether or not they should wear flopper style dresses with shorter hemlines. And women said, "No, it's not our clothes. It's not about the haircuts. It's about equal rights." And at this moment, women in Mexico did not have the vote. They said, "It's not about what makeup we wear, it's about getting the right to vote."

Jana Cunningham: So in your book, you argue that inequality in the workplace reinforces larger societal inequality. Can you just talk about that a little bit more in depth?

Susie Porter: Yeah. So this generation of women who in the 1920s entered into office work in huge numbers and then began organizing, really critiqued women's social subordination to men, the privileging of the needs of male ego. And most of us spend all day at work and the conditions of that work inform how we relate to each other. Gender inequities in pay, promotion, voice, and power set the conditions for social inequalities. So the structure and organization of the workforce laid the basis for women's subordination to men, both at work and at home. So the way work was organized, reinforced gender hierarchies. Women reported to men. When they took dictation, they wrote down the words that men spoke and then they went and typed up those words and made them look pretty and organized.

Susie Porter: In the workplace, men in the 1920s were addressed by a title that indicated their level of education. So licenciado means that you have a BA, you might be doctor as a doctor. Women were called Senorita. You might be 45 years old, a full grown adult, married and addressed in the workplace as Senorita. And this to some degree persist today in Mexico. And that title of Senorita, that means it identifies you first as a woman, a woman who's dependent upon male authority, because that's what that word historically means. And to some degree, it marks you as sexually available.

Susie Porter: So that kind of workplace relationship, if that's how you relate with each other all day long, it's going to carry over into the larger society. So for example, when women left the office to socialize, they had less money in their pockets than men. So men would pay for lunch or drinks or whatever it is. And what does that imply? What kind of inequality does that set up when men are the ones with money to pay for socializing and women aren't? How does shape our understanding of a woman's worth? A lot of these young women were working so that their brothers could stay in school.

Susie Porter: So that sets up an inequality. And then the money that they contributed to the household was less than that of men. So their value within the household economy was unequal. All of these things set up the... I try to think about the way that this book and this research speaks to our contemporary times. And one of the ways is that what we call mansplaining today is reinforced by spending all day long in workplaces where men are the authority and women’s job is to listen to men, to report to men, to follow their orders, to be subordinate to them.

Susie Porter: Another example is the way childcare responsibilities really limit women's workplace successes. We face a continued lack on the part of society as a whole to care for children. It's one of the things that we've learned with the pandemic is that women enter the workforce from radically different circumstances than men. Women come with a greater responsibility for childcare. And when the pandemic hit, women lost jobs and have remained out of the workforce because someone has to raise children. And I would argue that women in 1930s, Mexico city made that kind of issue more visible than we have here today in Utah.

Jana Cunningham: How did the contributions of the women in Mexico, in the 1930s shape the workforce in society today? How is it different now because of what they demanded and what they contributed?

Susie Porter: They started conversations about the rights of working mothers and the need for childcare for working mothers. They started conversations about the importance of transparency, objective criteria for promotion. Laws against sexual harassment started back in 1920s, Mexico. And they started conversations again about gender inequality and sexual exploitation, both within and outside of the workplace. And I just wanted to say, we started this podcast with a reference to national Hispanic Latino heritage month. And I would say that we could ask of our current times some of the questions that I've asked in this book, which is to say, what are the inequalities that Latinx people face in our society today and in the workforce in particular.

Susie Porter: And some of the most recent studies have found that Latinas are typically paid 55 cents for every dollar paid to white non-Hispanic men nationally. The median annual pay for Latinas in the United States who have a full-time job is around $36,000. While the median annual pay for white non-Hispanic men is around $65,000, which is a difference of $29,000 a year. So if we eliminate that wage gap, the typical Latino woman working in the US would have enough money to pay approximately for three additional years of tuition and fees for a four year public university or the full cost of tuition and fees for a two year college.

Susie Porter: So it's important to remember the way that those inequalities exist across national boundaries and how they persist today and continue to be issues that we need not only to talk about, but to organize around. And in the face of, just a overwhelming number of negative stereotypes that circulate in the media about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, I really hope that this book provides profiles in courage and persistence and creativity set in the context of workaday lives. And I'll just note that next spring semester I'll be teaching a course on Latin American women's history. And if anyone's interested, they should look for it in the Latin American studies class lists during the department of history.

Jana Cunningham: Oh, that sounds wonderful. And where can people purchase your book, Professor Porter?

Susie Porter: It's published with the university of Nebraska Press. And so, if you just do a web search university of Nebraska Press and the title, they can find it there.

Jana Cunningham: That was Susie Porter, professor of history and gender studies and director of the Center for Latin American studies. For more information about the University of Utah college of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu.

Jana Cunningham: Hello. Thank you for joining me on humanities radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the university of Utah, College of Humanities and today we're discussing Dia de los Muertos, The Day of the Dead. A two day Mexican holiday held on November one and two celebrating the lives of loved ones who have passed on. Tanya Flores, assistant professor of world languages and cultures is with me to discuss more. Let's begin with the history of Day of the Dead. The origins come from both Aztec and Catholic traditions. So professor Flores, can you talk a little bit more about how the holiday began?

Tanya Flores: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jana. So I wanted to just clarify that this is not my area of expertise, so I'm not a historian. I'm a person who celebrates this holiday and it's dear to me so I wanted to join you. I think that for your question about the history, like many traditions in Mexico, it's a blend of indigenous and European traditions. I think the rituals are originally Aztec and then it moved to line up with the Catholic calendar to November 1st and 2nd, which are All Saints Day and All Souls Day. And I think that combination works because the point of both of those is to keep the memory of loved ones alive, so it overlaps thematically.

Jana Cunningham: And just so we get this out of the way, Day of the Dead is not the Mexican version of Halloween.

Tanya Flores: Correct.

Jana Cunningham: It is completely different type of holiday that celebrates death in a different way. And I want to make sure we clarify that just from the get-go that some people in the US may think of it as just Mexico's version of Halloween, but it is completely different and that's what we're going to get into today.

Tanya Flores: Yeah, exactly. I think it's just the days, because it's... October 31st is Halloween and November 1st and 2nd are day of the dead that it seems like it should be more related, but they are very different.

Jana Cunningham: So how has the holiday evolved through the centuries?

Tanya Flores: So overall, I think it's expanded over the centuries to more areas that celebrate it, but how it's exactly evolved is a little harder to say, because it's celebrated differently in different places. Some of these places have maintained the same traditions that date back centuries. As an example, I was in Michoacan one year about... It's been almost 20 years now and the island of Janitzio is a really famous place to celebrate Day of the Dead because it's a little island in [foreign language 00:03:04] and they light up the... They light up the island with candles. It's really, really beautiful. And I'm sure they've been doing that for hundreds of years and they might've changed the way they do it a little bit, but it actually is still very traditional. It's very historic. It's a custom that's been observed and I don't think it's changed a whole lot.

Tanya Flores: The basics with the Dia de los Muertos is the altares, the little altars that people make in their home, which they're still doing. Maybe the details of what they put on the altar has changed, but not much. I mean, I can say just from experience with family members who have said how they used to do it. Grandparents saying how they did it when they were children and how we do it today, it's very much the same. So I think it's not changed for a lot of people. Probably the bigger differences are more related to how it's celebrated in the US versus how it's celebrated in Mexico. There are places in Central America that celebrate it as well. I don't have any personal experience on that, I just know that they do. But in Mexico, people who are living in small towns, they still visit the cemeteries. They still light candles from their home to the cemeteries because they're close and they can. So some of the details really, I don't think have changed and that's one of the really special things about this holiday.

Jana Cunningham: So take us through both of the days, November 1st and 2nd. What are the celebrations like? What is done differently on the first and the second and how do you observe both those days?

Tanya Flores: Yeah. Okay. So November 2nd is the main day, I would say. It corresponds to the Catholic All Souls Day. That's the Dia de los Muertos tradition. And then November 1st is All Saints Day and in Mexican tradition, it's the day of celebrating the children who have died. November 2nd is the day that you celebrate adults who have died, which in most families, of course, was like grandma and grandpa and that's where a lot of the traditions get observed. But of course, if you have a child who's passed on in your family, November 1st is then a day that people do something special for that child. I think that as far as how they're celebrated specifically, it might be very similar. So on both days, I mean, similar to how you would celebrate with an adult versus a child, except for the... Okay. So for example, the main thing is to make alters in the home.

Tanya Flores: So there's a flower, it's a marigold in Spanish it's Cempasuchil. That's actually the Aztec word. Cempasuchil is the traditional flower that you buy and you put on your altar. Incense, some people burn incense. And then the pictures, you have pictures of all your loved ones who've passed. Pan de Muertos is a sweet bread that people make and it has a cross shape on the top. And then a very traditional thing that I've actually never seen an altar without this, is favorite food and drink of the deceased person. And so obviously if it's a child, you probably wouldn't have had necessarily a food or drink for that person, but you still have the flowers and the pictures if you had pictures depending. And the Pan de Muertos is just general. That's just something that everybody eats, but the food and drink can be customed to what that person drinks.

Tanya Flores: So on my own with my grandfather, we put something that he really liked, or we make like... My grandmother used to make tamales before she passed. Or people make food, actual dinner type food that they're going to eat. So that's what the altares have. It's pretty traditional. In the US I've seen art exhibits on Day of the Dead or educational events, kids crafts. We've taken our daughter to events where they're making the paper decorations, which look like little flags in their cutout, skeleton theme, sugar skulls, all of that. Oh, the sugar skulls, a really popular thing is sugar skulls that you eat and they're very decorated. That's probably the images that people associate today of the dead in the US are of what a sugar skull looks like that you eat and those are sold everywhere in Mexico.

Tanya Flores: The last time I was in Mexico for Day of the Dead was about 20 years ago. I was in Quertaro and it's a city in the center of Mexico and starting around early October, you can start to buy everything. The sugar skulls, the flowers, they start selling them pretty much everywhere. So it's very prominent. La Catrina is a common image of a woman, a skeleton, she's a skeleton, but she's become the face of this too. Yeah. So that's how these things are celebrated.

Jana Cunningham: And then when do you like the... On both November 1st and 2nd, do they have those... The big celebrations out in the streets and the festivals, do those happen on both days?

Tanya Flores: When I was in Queretaro they had a lot of things starting already in middle of October and going through, and then the main days, the 1st and 2nd were actually more solemn and private because people go to the cemeteries and they eat with their loved ones on their graves. So I know this might sound a little bit morbid, but it's really part of this tradition where it's a way of keeping people alive, like keeping... Keeping at least their memory alive and trying to... It ties into the cultural perspective on death, that it's not something scary, it's just something natural and part of life. So the 1st and 2nd, there are places that would have some celebratory things that are fun and light, but a lot of places traditionally just do the more private cemetery, family oriented things you eat with your family.

Tanya Flores: Another one of, actually we're talking about the traditions, and one of my favorite traditions that I remember growing up is, and this is going to sound morbid as well, but I think it's just part of it. The Calaveras, the word calavera means skull, but the tradition is, it means epitaph. The part that you write on a tombstone, but they're funny. So they're roasts for your living, friends and family. So in our home, we would write these for everyone in our family and celebrities or people, other people usually celebrities. My mom was actually really good at this, so they were really funny. And I remember doing that and I think it just took away the fear of death. So I didn't grow up really feeling like death was something scary because we had fun with it.

Tanya Flores: But I know for some people that seems morbid. We're going to the cemeteries to eat over the graves. And with that, with the cemeteries in Mexico, our relatives would actually light candles, they'd put little candle from the cemetery, from the grave to their homes because it lights the path. So the tradition is that on the 1st and 2nd, the souls of your deceased loved ones can come back and spend the day with you, they're allowed back. So people will light the paths to the home. Here in the US I don't know if people do that. I've never seen it. Ourselves, we didn't grow up doing that because our loved ones who had passed were in Mexico, so it wouldn't... It just wasn't really an option. But the first person to pass in my lifetime was my grandfather and he did live here in the US.

Tanya Flores: And we didn't do that. We just did the altares in our homes and visited the cemetery and took flowers. Just more, maybe the... An American tradition of... Because it's not a common thing here. But in Mexico, yes. It's very common. You eat at the cemetery. It's almost like the party is happening at the cemetery and other people are there too. It fills up. People are gathering with their loved ones and having meals and yeah. So it would be celebrated differently if your loved ones are buried in Mexico and you're celebrating it here. So it has to be different. But if you have loved ones here, buried in the US maybe there are people who go and celebrate there. I don't know, we've never done that, we've just taken flowers.

Jana Cunningham: It sounds like such a wonderful way of taking... Of making something that seems scary... Taking death how, it seems so scary and making it not scary. And from the very beginning if you're growing up this way, it takes away that fear of death.

Tanya Flores: Yeah. I think that, that's the main thing. Is that it's a different perspective. When I have talked to my students about Dia de los Muertos, I used to teach high school and that's when it would come up a little more often, but the students often responded very positively to the Mexican viewpoint on death, because maybe not everybody wants to treat death as something taboo and scary and I feel like in American culture, at least publicly, there is this different treatment. People have told me even that they don't feel comfortable talking about their loved ones after they've passed, like it's taboo or they feel like it's not appropriate. But that's not a... That's definitely opposite of the Mexican viewpoint. We talk about our loved ones. Sometimes, I know this is going to sound again morbid, but sometimes we talk about them like they're still here in a very real way.

Tanya Flores: Sometimes not sometimes it's like, "Oh yeah, well, when they were alive or your grandfather loved this." For me, for example, this is one that's personal, is that the thing I remember the most about my grandfather is his laugh. So if I hear somebody who laughs like him, I usually will comment something like, "That's my grandfather's laugh, or I heard my grandfather laugh." That kind of thing. So I think that it is definitely a very different viewpoint, but like you said, we grew up not thinking of this as something scary. So even the details of when we talk about it, they seem morbid by comparison, but they're not morbid to us.

Tanya Flores: And I think that a lot of people actually find it very comforting. I think once people learn about it, there is something comforting about it. Especially after somebody has lost a loved one. I find myself feeling like the perspective is helpful and it's comforting. My family lost a lot of people in 2020, and we had a lot of relatives who passed, even younger people. And I think that making the altar for them and remembering them in that way is a connection. And it helps, I think it's comforting.

Jana Cunningham: Absolutely. And I think that seems like something that... At least in the US we attribute, or I think a lot of people attribute the Day of the Dead with celebrations and all these fun, exciting things, but it's important for them to understand what the meaning truly is. And it's remembering the loved ones and having, and feeling connected to them in sort of a way. And I think that's important for people to understand.

Tanya Flores: Yeah, it is. It really is. The connection is really important. One of the things I appreciated about the two, there were two recent cartoon films, Coco, and The Book of Life that came out a few years back with... In English, their cartoon, their for American audiences. And one of the things that I appreciated about it is the storylines were interesting, but they also somehow made the feeling of Day of the Dead. They tapped into that... This beautiful connection with the ancestors that I thought that was really important that they do that because that really captured the nuanced meanings or the viewpoint, I guess, is the viewpoint of this holiday.

Jana Cunningham: And do you think those types of pop culture have increased the popularity of Day of the Dead in the US?

Tanya Flores: Yeah, absolutely. I think that at least it made people more curious about it, but yeah. I mean, as somebody who teaches... I'm not teaching Spanish language courses, but I do teach in Spanish and so sometimes these things come up still, even in my linguistics classes. And I think it's definitely increased knowledge and popularity and people will look into it, they'll ask more about it. I think it's definitely made it... Yeah, more known and really, yeah it's popularized it, like you said. And in the right way, I feel like those movies have done it in a very appropriate way. You feel the comfort of it and not the scary horror film approach.

Jana Cunningham: Right. Right. And especially for little kids when it's kind of, some of those things, especially like Coco, it's an introduction to death for many of them. And so for them to see it in this way, maybe like we were already talking about takes the fear out of it.

Tanya Flores: Yeah. I hope so. I hope so.

Jana Cunningham: That was Tanya Flores, assistant professor of world languages and cultures. For more information about the university of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu.

Jana Cunningham: Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. Today, in celebration of Halloween, we'll hear from two of our graduate students as they share their eeriest written works. These students are part of a group called Working Dog, a reading series featuring the most engaging and fresh poems and prose coming out of the Department of English Creative Writing program. These works were composed for a special Halloween series known as Scary Dog.

Nina Feng: Hello. My name is Nina Feng and I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric studies at the University of Utah. Today, I'll be reading a story called, "The Grief Eater," that I wrote. The title is by my friend, Mi Yung McFalls-Schwartz.

Nina Feng: This is a story of the witch in the woods. Every Friday, the villagers gave her an offering. They opened their stomachs and hooked their fingers around the writhing end of a black string, pulled it taut and ripped it with their teeth. With blood flowering on their mouths, they gathered at the opening of a small cave. Shadowed in the dense trees, working their slick strings together, they wound it into a ball, leaving it on the ground. They did not know what the witch did with the strings. If they did not leave an offering, they knew she would come to their doors. But the village was running out of string. Some dug deep into the muscle, desperately feeling for moving twine, and there was none left. They began to look for travelers, lost children, silently filtering into other villages at night. There were times those bodies held string, but some were absent of it, as well.

Nina Feng: One morning, someone woke without a heart, and their family mourned the body, a sunken hole in her chest, open eyes. The witch had come in the night. She needed more string. When there was death in the village, everyone began to create more string. The villagers decided they would not wait for the witch to come to them.

Nina Feng: They contemplated the elderly. And so they burned one of the oldest villagers. Yet strings still did not come forth in abundance. Only the loss of a child made the string spew, slippery spools reeling deep within each villager's body.

Nina Feng: No family wanted to relinquish their children. So everyone marked their children's names on paper and slipped them into a bowl to be chosen. One by one, as the years went by, the children were burned in the cave as they all watched, feeling the string gather wildly within them. They are all so much older now. It has been decades. And on this day, as they watch a burning, the string is still. There's no movement, no snaking black strands twisting into their throats, strangling their bellies. They nod in understanding and wait in their beds for the witch. They watch the dawn creep over the mountains, light pooling beneath the doors. They lie in their beds as a sun sweeps high into the sky, falling again as night drapes over them.

Nina Feng: But she does not come that night, or the nights that follow. The villagers, they wait. They gather in a circle and lie with their chests facing the sky. They offer her anything she wants, but she is gone. They lost everything long ago. Thank you.

Jasmine Khaliq: Hi, I'm Jasmine Khaliq. I am a PhD student in Creative Writing, Poetry, and I'm from northern California where some of these poems take place.

Jasmine Khaliq: Portraits.

Jasmine Khaliq: Once for three minutes straight, I watched that little brown bird throw itself again and again into the side mirror of my car. I did not move.

Jasmine Khaliq: In bluer hours, hills black, green, I could die driving that road. Fast go, possibly crow. I could have died a long time ago. I've seen myself slink and bruise up and down my hall. Long hair, no face. She is the pulp of me. She and I waiting.

Jasmine Khaliq: I had that dream again. Fantasies of other forms. Of big skirts, big sleeves and throats blushed like raw steak, I've seen. In some other time, in some other place, I would shoot ducks. Each of them with my name.

Jasmine Khaliq: Portrait, the Evans.

Jasmine Khaliq: When we were younger and I had only one face, I remember sitting with your very big dog, pulling up grass and pinching slivers through my pierced ears as you tied them into hoops. Your father keeps asking after me, and it makes me dream about stables and you killing sick horses. When you come to lead the next away, air hangs around you differently.

Jasmine Khaliq: I haven't been myself either. I like my meat rarer these days. I wonder about wives, and if I had the guts to be yours. I never wanted to, but I can thread a needle with my eyes pinched shut, sit all night in cotton and felt, stuffing animals and guns. Our daughter's initials on every body and every barrel.

Jasmine Khaliq: What I'm saying is, there are three or more versions of my face out there. In wet knives, in dark storefronts. Have you seen them? I won't ask if you like them. I don't care if you do. My real body in wheat, dragging lust, somewhere horses.

Jasmine Khaliq: [foreign language 00:07:03] or Despair.

Jasmine Khaliq: In February snow, a gash of noise, like Euripides, women translated into vowels, long and low, threatens to open wide my body, feral and forgone. A slow spilling. The tailored glacier. Leaky mouth, poured wine.

Jasmine Khaliq: Last night in Russia, black snow fell, in pieces soft and beautiful. I nearly believed that clouds meant more, and Heaven was, and the crows all there in pieces shed their bodies. Beautiful, unspeakably so.

Jasmine Khaliq: And lastly, [foreign language 00:07:58] Three, or Winter Three.

Jasmine Khaliq: I'm tired of sheeping. How boring to be good. A head gets heavy. I can only feel this ribbon brush against my throat so long, you know? One day, I'll untie it. I know. Let the whole thing roll off.

Jana Cunningham: That was Nina Fang and Jasmine Khaliq sharing their works written for the series, Working Dog. For more information about the College of Humanities, visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham: Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah, College of Humanities and today, in honor of National American Indian Heritage Month, I'm speaking with Chris Ingraham, associate professor of communication, about a man named Chip Thomas. An African-American doctor, photographer and public artist, Thomas lives on the Navajo Reservation and does rural street art to showcase the beauty and challenges of the Dine people.

Jana Cunningham: So Chip Thomas, also known as Jetsonorama, am I saying that correct?

Chris Ingraham: I think so, yes.

Jana Cunningham: As he's known in the art world, moved to the Navajo Nation in 1987. Can you tell us a little bit about why he made that decision at that time?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah. Chip is from Eastern North Carolina, or sorry, Western North Carolina and was going to med school. And had got a scholarship that would fund him for the remainder of his time there, but he needed to spend some time ... One stipulation of the funding was that he needed to spend time in an area with serious health disparities, particularly with access to healthcare.

Chris Ingraham: So he, as a Black American, was interested in going to Africa and doing some work there, but they couldn't make that work out. So he ended up going to the Navajo Nation instead, and ever since he's been working there.

Jana Cunningham: And he has been an artist, so he's not ... Along with being a physician, he's an artist. And was he already involved in his artwork by the time he got to the reservation in 1987?

Chris Ingraham: He was. He had been to an arts school growing up, like an arts and craft school, and been involved in that community. And if you read him self-describe himself, he says he always thought of himself as an honorary member of the street art scene and the hiphop scene in New York City, even though he was far away from that world. He had been doing photography and creative visual arts for a while, but wasn't going to do that professionally.

Jana Cunningham: And so his artwork, so let's just describe his artwork as it is now. He does these black and white photographs and makes them giant. And then paste them on to roadside structures so people who are driving by see them. Can you talk a little bit more about his artwork and why he's using that medium?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah. I guess when he moved to Navajo Nation in 1987, he just was fascinated. I mean, it's a different part of the world relative to where he grew up. And he began taking a lot of photos, including photos of the people. And over time he developed a relationship with them and thought, "Well, you know what? This place feels to outsiders very remote and middle of the nowhere-ish." And he wanted to give people who are passing through a chance to see some of the community members themselves.

Chris Ingraham: He took some of these photographs that he had taken and began enlarging them. So he started this self-funded project called Big, was his name for it, in 2009. Where he was going to make some of the selected photographs that he'd taken really big and wheat paste them onto, as you mentioned, abandoned buildings, roadside stalls, water towers, things like that.

Chris Ingraham: And they were primarily initially pictures of actual Navajo people, smiling or posing for the camera or some candid shots as well. And eventually they evolved to have more social-political statements, environmental statements and so on. But they're really arresting, if you happen to see them in person,

Jana Cunningham: The photos are, when I've been researching and looking at his photos, they are quite intimate and they do represent these major social issues on the reservation. Can you talk a little bit about what issues he's tackling through these images?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah, there are a number. One of the things that he did before he starting this Big project that I mentioned, in 2009, was he did just more traditional aerosol street art, so graffiti basically.

Chris Ingraham: For example, there was a billboard advertising Pepsi, the soda company. And I think their logo was maybe The Choice of a New Generation or something like that at the time. And I think he spray-painted out "new" and said "diabetic," he wrote "diabetic" over something along those lines. As a doctor calling attention to gaps in knowledge about health and nutrition and the way certain companies are marketing deliberately to an area that's impoverished and vulnerable to some of those issues.

Chris Ingraham: So health has been one issue that he's continually returned to. Another major one I'd say is this theme of his work is uranium mining, which has been a problem on Navajo Nation for a long time. And so he's done some cool installations. He did one in collaboration with an art museum in Flagstaff called “Atomic” that was about the detrimental repercussions of uranium mining and transport of uranium over the reservation. Going back to a long time ago, since at least the 1979 big uranium trailing spill in Church Rock, New Mexico.

Chris Ingraham: Another theme he did along that line was photograph a bunch of sheep and put them on an exterior of this cinder block building. And then on the interior of the building have images that were all colored in that green radioactive color, as a meditation room or a calming room, but also a space to reflect on the hidden dangers of uranium. Sheep were particularly salient in this case because a number of sheep just died instantly on account of the uranium trailings.

Jana Cunningham: And as he's a physician, and we talked about how he does a lot of health or talks a lot about health through his art, how is he tackling COVID-19?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah. That's an interesting one. So I haven't seen anything that he's written lately about that, although I may be missing some stuff. But I had the opportunity to be down on the Navajo Nation a couple weeks ago for our fall break and wanted to see what he was up to in terms of the new installations. And there were some new murals that were similar to the type of work he does, and large photographs he pasted on services. But they showed people wearing masks. So there was now an acknowledgement that this is okay within the culture.

Chris Ingraham: One interesting thing about his work is that he's known locally as the doctor. And locally, we're talking about ... His terrain as a doctor is 120 miles, that's the radius that he works within. But Navajo Nation is 27,500 square miles across three states. And he recognized early on that the region that he's located in, it's called the Western Agency of Navajo Nation, is very heavily trafficked by passers through. Because I mean, it's got Monument Valley on one side, it's got the Grand Canyon on another, Lake Powell, Zion, Canyon de Chelly. All these are surrounding this area.

Chris Ingraham: So knowing that people will pass through his work now has an opportunity to benefit the community by getting outsiders to say, "Hey, this isn't just a place in the middle of nowhere. This isn't just a place that's pretty. There are people that live here and these people have some serious disadvantages." Like he says, 20% of his patients don't have water or electricity. Their unemployment on the reservation is over 50%. Teen suicide is two times national average. I think these are some of the issues that he's trying to call attention to, to the outside.

Chris Ingraham: But at the same time, he's been very explicit about this work is important for the community itself, because it helps them see themselves as people that know one another. And, "Oh, I know that. There's a new one over there, that's my friend." And it seems to offer some intrinsic benefit and uplifting and holding the community together.

Jana Cunningham: And so talking about a little bit how he's a member of this community, how did he create such a solid relationship with the community and with the Navajo people? Because he was someone who came in from the outside and has been there now for 30 plus years. And how has he gained their trust and become such a solid member of their community?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah, that's a tough one. I think, from what I've been able to figure out, I think it's a host of factors. One is he's been there a while now. He's been there since 1987 and he hasn't left. I mean, not a lot of people go and make that their home from outside of the Dine community. He's also a Black American who, given American history, has some similar stories of oppression and being marginalized and so on. He can identify with that group and I think it works reciprocally as well.

Chris Ingraham: But also, the origin story that he tells about the street art. So in 2009, he does this Big project where he's going to enlarge these things and put them up. One of his first places he wanted to put up a mural was of some code talkers, Navajo code talkers. And he did that on ... If you've driven through the reservation, you see that there are a number of street-side stalls where people will often sell jewelry or trinkets and so on. And one of them was dilapidated, but it was red and so it had a very nice background.

Chris Ingraham: And so he posted this image of these code talkers there. And over the ensuing weeks, tons of people had apparently stopped to take photographs of it, tourists passing through. And so what happened was, the shelter had been, or the roadside stand had been beat up. And Thomas drove by one day and saw that the workers who usually worked there we're repairing it. And they said, "We need to make this operational now and make this better, because people are stopping all the time now."

Chris Ingraham: And so I think they realized that this is cool. This is actually helping the community in a material way. And also, it wasn't just people from outside, it was also people inside the community, in the Dine, who liked it.

Jana Cunningham: And so we talked about the Big project, which is these huge murals. What about the Painted Desert project? From what I understand, is connecting other artists with communities in the Navajo Nation through these murals. Can you talk a little bit about that project and what its purpose and impact is?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah. That started, I think, in 2009. No, sorry. He started wheat pasting in 2009 and he started the Painted Desert thing in 2012. But Thomas is not just interested in being a doctor and living on the reservation, he also is interested in the broader street art community around the world. He's active on these street art blogs. He's part of that scene, even though he is not in a place that you would think of as the epicenter of that scene.

Chris Ingraham: And so he started this project called the Painted Desert that brought artists from really, from all over the world. I mean, we're talking street artists from Belgium, Puerto Rico, Canada, Iran, Columbia, Brazil, all over, plus all over United States, to come to the Navajo Nation and do installations of a similar sort as the kind he did. Except of course, all these artists have different aesthetics and different ways of doing what they do.

Chris Ingraham: But the fundamental idea was, come engage with this community, recognize their value, find the beauty there and share it with other community members. And then also the people who drive through the Navajo Nation.

Jana Cunningham: And so you mentioned that you were just there and you were able to view some of the art over fall break. If someone's driving through, where ... Can you describe, I know it's a huge area, but can you describe where people might be able to see some of his artwork?

Chris Ingraham: Yeah. There's not a lot of roads. The main road, I can't remember the name of the highway that goes through there, but it takes you right by some, you can't miss some. I mean, there's not a whole lot of buildings. So when you see a building, just be on the lookout. There's a good chance you'll see something. And because Jetsonorama's work is, and I use his artist name because I'm referring to his work I guess, it has a distinct look. It's usually black and white, large images, often portraits. They will be pretty apparent.

Chris Ingraham: But there's also, I think, because of the Painted Desert project, a number of other installations that are pretty cool. So those might be more not graffiti, but aerosol based and colorful. And you can just tell they have a different vibe and different form or set of techniques.

Jana Cunningham: And before we end, is there anything else you would like to add? Is there anything that we should know about Chip Thomas before we close?

Chris Ingraham: Well, I think a couple of things. One is that, for me anyway, I don't know if I can make any broader generalizations, he's taught me that art is always more valuable when it has a local impact. And also that it's a fallacy to separate art as beauty from art as social meaning, or as social meaning making. It helped in some ways establish the community as such. It helped achieve recognition of the Dine people to some degree for people outside of those lands. And so I think that's a really lovely and powerful thing.

Chris Ingraham: I think another thing I would just say in closing is, if you go to his website and you're traveling through the Navajo Nation, he's got a map, a Google map-

Jana Cunningham: Oh, great.

Chris Ingraham: ... of all the different sites where he's put something up. And I don't know how frequently updated it is because these sites change, and of course some of them get pasted over again or some of them fall apart or something.

Chris Ingraham: But that's an interesting way to do it, particularly because it gets you off the main beaten paths. You're often on dirt roads doing ... And I've followed these things around and it's a wild goose chase. And feels really different than when you're walking through, I don't know, downtown New York or something and looking for street art there than when you're looking on the Navajo Nation.

Jana Cunningham: I will say for anyone interested in viewing some of this artwork, you can visit jetsonorama.net. And that is J-E-T-S-O-N-O-R-A-M-A.net. Or of course, you can just Google Chip Thomas and it'll pop right up.

Jana Cunningham: That was Chris Ingraham, associate professor of communication. For more information about the University of Utah, College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu, and don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham: Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities.

Jana Cunningham: Today, in honor of National American Indian Heritage Month, I'm speaking with Greg Smoak, Director of the American West Center and Associate Professor of History, about the Native Places project. This digital humanities project sets out to restore indigenous place names to major landscape features and historical and cultural sites with an interactive map centered on Utah.

Jana Cunningham: So, let's just begin. What led you to begin this project of restoring indigenous place names to the different areas in Utah and the Mountain West as well?

Greg Smoak: Well, there are a couple of factors involved here. Being involved in public history, one of the big themes or one of the big issues in the last decade or so has been memory and reinterpretation. And we see this most clearly in the removal of statues, in obviously the Confederate statues, but also the renaming of particular places. And this is an ongoing process, a cultural and historic process. And a few years back, I was preparing a talk for a professional meeting and I just happened to be talking with Forest Cuch, former Director of Indian Affairs for the State of Utah, who's a member of the youth tribe. And I don't know how it came up, but I started talking about this paper and how I was going to talk about the renaming of Grandstaff Canyon, which is just outside of Moab, Utah, and the implications of the former name of the place, which is quite infamous, quite well known, which included a racial epithet in its name.

Greg Smoak: And Forest said to me, "well, you know, that place had a Ute name before that even". And so I thought, well, he's absolutely right. What was that? What was the Ute name of that canyon? And he did not know offhand and other folks did not. I'm still kind of searching for that one, but that also got me thinking about some other things I had noticed in the past. One was a map that was created by a graduate student in Oklahoma, who was a native graduate student. And in, I think, a very important and well-meaning idea, created a map of North America with tribal names put onto that map.

Greg Smoak: The problem with it though, that immediately jumped out at me, was I looked at the state of Utah and there was only one tribal name on the map, and that was Ute, and it was written across the Eastern margin of Utah into Colorado. And it just struck me that that really could be misleading, that that could lead many people to say, well, there were no native people here, right?

Greg Smoak: And then the final part of this was thinking about a very impressive, very wonderful book by an anthropologist named Keith Basso called Wisdom Sits in Places. And in that book, what Basso did, and he had a different kind of project than what we're doing, but he worked directly with Western Apache people in Arizona on a project to record place names for cultural sites, historically meaningful sites for Apache people. And in that book, he makes very clear how much history, how much culture is bound up in place names, these deeper meanings that come with them.

Greg Smoak: And so all of these ideas go to spinning around. I thought, well, one way we could approach this was to think about Utah, think about the Intermountain West, and the way in which place names that we think of today are these artifacts of colonization. And think about what were those native place names before.

Greg Smoak: Unlike what Basso did with the Apache people, we're not trying to seek out culturally meaningful places per se, but think about those big landscape features: mountain ranges and mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes. All of these types of places that people encounter all the time where the names are kept by the United States Geological Survey's Bureau of Geographic Names. So these are official US government place names. And think about how can we then restore the original place names, the indigenous place names, so that people can learn more about native history and culture and territory.

Jana Cunningham: So let's talk about colonization for a second. When, and why essentially, were the names of these places changed? What was the purpose?

Greg Smoak: Well, mapping is a colonial process. And so to not directly address the question first, let's talk about what maps are.

Jana Cunningham: Okay.

Greg Smoak: Maps are visualizations that convey a set of relationships. That's what a map is. We can think of a mental map and think of a topographic map and so on, but they're visualizations that convey relationships. And in that case there are, in a sense, contests over reality. There's a real world out there, there's a physical world, but we represent it in particular ways, with different scales and different levels of abstractness. That's what maps are. Maps were a tool from the very beginning of colonization to make landscapes, so to speak, legible to colonizers to understand what's out there.

Greg Smoak: When you went then to configure these maps and give them names, there were a number of choices you could make. And in many cases, native place names or versions of native place names actually do still exist. The Wasatch Range is a great example of that. But in many other cases, the ways in which maps are written then erase the native place names and instead insert the names of the colonizers.

Greg Smoak: Whether this is not essentially an intentional process, it still reflects the process of colonization. So people come in, they will attach names to major geographic features that reflect their culture, their history, the people that they look to as heroes. And often this falls to government explorers or the first Euro-Americans in particular areas. And again, often they're government explorers.

Greg Smoak: For instance, if we look at Great Salt Lake, there are early names and colloquial names attached to various places, but it's Howard Stansbury, a government surveyor that names all of the islands in Great Salt Lake. And he names them after people who work for him in some cases, like Carrington and Gunnison.

Greg Smoak: Mormon settlers named the Heber Valley for Heber C Kimball who was very active in missions in England. And most of those early Mormon settlers in the Heber Valley were English. They had fond memories of him. So they're inscribing their history and their culture on the landscape by doing it and making it then understandable to themselves.

Jana Cunningham: So what is the impact? So when the indigenous place names were changed, what was the impact on the native people, the immediate impact and the lasting impact?

Greg Smoak: Well, the immediate impact is that I think it really reflects Indian removal. The idea that these were native lands and take, for instance, the Ute Nation In Utah, the Ute tribe of Utah, which is headquartered in the Uinta Basin at Fort Duchesne, that was definitely Ute land, but so was the Heber Valley. So was especially big portions of the Wasatch Front and the Sanpete Valley. So as people are removed, they are physically removed, but then they are historically and culturally erased as well. This is a process that many historians write about and talk about today, of settler colonialism, of removing, not just physically removing people from the landscape, but also erasing that history and then claiming that land in a much more full way. And so that's sort of the immediate impact as it's related to that removal.

Greg Smoak: The long term impact is...similarly it's the erasure of history. And I think that this also impacts living native peoples as current generations may not retain knowledge of these names. They're not in general use. And so over time, it becomes harder and harder and harder to recover those names and to restore them to the map. And certainly we're going to keep working on this project, but it's a long term project and it's one that will never be complete, nor will we ever get near, in the long run, some kind of complete understanding of native place names in Utah.

Jana Cunningham: So what does it mean for native people to have a map like this that does restore the indigenous place names? And what does it mean for the people in Utah and the Mountain West, in general, to know what the original names were?

Speaker 3: Well, again, I think that restoring history and restoring and understanding of native territory and sovereignty is probably something that the tribes will value greatly. To say that we've gone through a process here at the University of Utah to create a land acknowledgement statement, and land acknowledgements are great, but they really need to be backed up by action by the organizations that create them. And in a way, I think this can be a fuller land acknowledgement, by a visual illustration, to non-native people in Utah of the fact that this is native land, to understand that people lived here, that they had histories here. And to understand that.

Speaker 3: Hopefully, it'll also be useful to native people and to tribal governments in various ways. I think one of the ways that I'm very hopeful that this can be used is in terms of language preservation projects. That one of the ways to teach children and to restore the teaching of native languages would be through the use of place names. That's a pretty common technique. When anyone learns a language, one of the first things they learn is what place names are in that language. And so I think that's going to be pretty effective.

Speaker 3: I think it's also going to be hopefully useful in terms of heritage preservation, as a way to preserve tribal history and culture. In that regard, our map uses a secondary database program called [inaudible 00:12:16], which is developed by Washington State University. And what that will allow tribes to do that work with us is to protect some of that cultural capital, some of that information. So if they only want tribal members to know particular things, and again, here, I'm thinking mostly about more sensitive cultural areas and sites that the general public does not need to know about. It's one thing to put a name on the Uinta Range or King's Peak or Great Salt Lake. It's another thing entirely to identify the location of a sacred site. We don't want to do that. What we want to do is allow the tribes to perhaps preserve that information and control access to that.

Speaker 3: So I think there's a lot of different ways that this could be useful. A number of people have raised the question of renaming again. Can this be used to address some of the issues with offensive place names? And the answer is yes. It wasn't the original intention but it certainly could. For instance, there are over 50 points in Utah that have the word "squa" attached to the name. And this is an issue that the equivalent of the Board of Geographic Names here in Utah is aware of and has been dealing with for years. But I think if this map could be used to illustrate alternate names that were respectful of native history and culture, then all the better. Again, that wasn't the initial purpose of the map. So I think there's a lot of ways that it can be useful.

Jana Cunningham: So tell us a little bit about how to use this map because I was looking at it and it goes into a lot of detail and there are a lot of points that I suspect have taken a lot of research and a lot of work to do. So tell us a little bit how you search through the map and what you can find on this map.

Greg Smoak: Okay. Well, the map has currently 500 or 600 different points on it. That's going to continue to grow as we begin a much more engaged process with tribes to consult with them. But in general, what users can do is to... Let me say it this way, there's a menu on the map that allows you to search via the feature type (mountains, rivers, and streams, canyons, et cetera).

Greg Smoak: You can also search via language groups, right? So there are eight federally and state recognized tribes within the state of Utah. But instead of going down to that detail, what we've done was stick with the five cultures\language groups. So Shoshone, Paiute, Navajo, Goshute and Ute, right? And so you can search by the language group, or you can search by both. If you want to find what are the Goshute names for mountains in Utah, you can toggle on Goshute and mountains and you'll get all of that.

Greg Smoak: You can also see overlap with the map in that way. And I think that's an important factor of this map. Rather than just writing a tribal name across a map in a particular place, what you see is people's use, people's understanding. You see where people ranged, where they lived, where they overlapped, right? And you find a lot of that in Utah and in the Intermountain West.

Greg Smoak: Other parts of the map features... Let me think of what else I should say, I should say that it does move beyond the state of Utah. And that was a important and early decision on my part. And that's because the traditionally associated tribes in Utah weren't defined by modern rigid boundaries that are drawn on a map, right? We think of the American West and there are basically artificial boundaries in the American West between states. They are straight lines that just go in one direction or the other, and they divide the American West into these big squarish states.

Greg Smoak: There's only a few examples where mountain ranges or the Snake River between Idaho and Oregon is an example of a natural boundary, right? But for the most part in the west, we don't see that. And so those are artificial boundaries. For native peoples, they're doubly artificial. Shoshone people moved in and out of what is today, Utah, but it was still their homeland, ditto for the Utes and Goshute people who today... The confederated tribes of the Goshute reservation live right on the border with Nevada. And so it's silly to say, we're just going to do this map within the state of Utah. We want to make sure that if we're going to privilege native place names, we also privilege native understandings of territory.

Jana Cunningham: And one thing I liked that I found really interesting about the map is that when you toggle on places, it pops up with a little box and it tells you the native place name, but it also tells you what that name means.

Greg Smoak: Right. What the translation is.

Jana Cunningham: The translation. I found that really interesting, because you can go through and see what the translation of all these place names are. And I found that to be a really interesting part.

Greg Smoak: Yeah. We're hopeful that in the future, what we're going to do, and in expanding the map, is to add more features to those boxes, including hopefully photographs. But most importantly, I want to include sound files of native speakers pronouncing the names.

Jana Cunningham: Oh, that'd be great.

Greg Smoak: So they're not mispronounced, so they're not misunderstood. I think that would be a real bonus. And again, to privilege native cultures, languages and history, we have to do that.

Jana Cunningham: Yeah. So what are some... Can you just provide a few examples before we end of maybe some of the major landscapes, what the original names were and what the translations were?

Speaker 3: Sure. I think one of the more obvious ones is the Timpanoquint River, which today is called the Provo River. And the Ute people who lived in the Utah Valley, or the Timpanogos Utes. And so Timpanoquint in reference to the river means river with rocky bottom or rocky river. When Mormon pioneers moved in in 1850 and there was a conflict with the Utes, they first named the settlement Fort union, but then they named it...excuse me, Fort Utah, then they named it Provo. And the name Provo comes from Etienne Provost, who was a French Canadian fur trapper who worked out of Taos, New Mexico, and in 1825, arguably became the first Euro-American to see Great Salt Lake. So that's sort of his claim to fame and he started a trading post in the area. But I mean, he has a very brief tie, but again, this shows you that kind of renaming to celebrate colonization, right? So we're going to privilege Provo instead though to name Timpanogos is attached to the mountain, which was again based on the people and the river,

Speaker 3: But that name gets obscured over time and stories and romantic stories about native warriors and princesses and so on. And so today, when people think of the Provo River, they think of the Provo River Canyon and so on, but it again has an important native name. So I think that's a very good example.

Jana Cunningham: Absolutely.

Greg Smoak: There are many others. Pi'a-pa in Western Shoshone is Great Salt Lake, it means big water. A variation on that means bad tasting water, which I think a lot of people probably say, okay, that's a pretty down to earth, literal naming. You see a lot of that. I guess my favorite example in Utah is Shash Jaaʼ, which is Navajo for Bears Ears. And bears ears, though, this is the amazing thing about that landscape feature, is that, literally in Navajo, it means Bears Ears, but so does the name, so does the Ute name, so does the Zuni name. And if you've ever been in that area, if you've driven south of Bears Ears especially, and look north of them, you go, oh, I see that.

Jana Cunningham: Yeah.

Greg Smoak: And all these different native people did and now there are multiple names for it, but all of them translate to Bears Ears. And that's one that stayed with us though. That's one that stayed on the landscape over time.

Jana Cunningham: And that's one of the things I liked about reading the translations, is a lot of them are all very literal.

Greg Smoak: They are, they can be quite literal.

Jana Cunningham: Yeah. So you just like understand the landscape purely by the name. So I found that really interesting.

Greg Smoak: Yeah. We're hopeful... This is maps, it's a work in progress. We continue to work on it today and are starting consulting with the tribes. We're waiting to hear back on a major NEH grant to expand this work. But either way, we will continue to gather place names. We began by doing the secondary research. We partnered with the Northwestern band of Shoshone Nation who already had done their own mapping projects. So a lot of the data you for Shoshone and Western Shoshone place names came from the Northwestern band of the Shoshone Nation. We are looking to build those kinds of partnerships with all the other tribes in Utah and build this map out so it can be used as an educational resource in public schools and tribal schools.

Jana Cunningham: That was Greg Smoak, Associate Professor of History and Director of the American West Center.

Jana Cunningham: For more information about the Native Places project, please visit nativeplacesatlas.org.

Jana Cunningham: And if you would like to learn more about the College of Humanities, visit humanities.utah.edu.

Jana Cunningham: Lastly, don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. And today I'm speaking with Elizabeth Clement, associate professor of history about the Utah AIDS Foundation's holiday program. Started in the late 1980s, the Holiday Fund has been providing meals and support to those struggling with the complexities of HIV. So before we start talking about the Utah AIDS Foundation holiday program, let's talk a little bit about your research and what led to work on the AIDS epidemic in Utah, where your research has started and how it's gotten to this point?

Elizabeth Clement:
Well, that's funny because that's actually a holiday issue as well. I got a phone call over Christmas break. Oh, I don't know, 2014, 2015. I can't quite remember, from Terry Cogan in the law school whose faculty there. And he had been at a holiday party with Dr. Reese and she had said that now that she had retired, she and Maggie Snyder were wondering what they should do with all of the files that they still had, and maybe they should shred them. And thank heavens Terry said no, no, no, no. And so then he brought together me and a couple of other faculty, Liz Rogers from the library and Leslie Francis from philosophy who does medical ethics, and Dr. Reese and Maggie Snyder to create an archival collection for Dr. Reese and Maggie's papers that we would then build on getting materials from other places. So the most obvious now is we're in the process of transferring over the Utah AIDS Foundation papers.

Elizabeth Clement:
And Terry wanted an oral history. And so I think that's how he brought me in. And so we run an oral history collection, we have the archives down at the Marriot Library that have Dr. Reese's papers and Maggie's scrapbooks, and all of those are available for researchers and students to use. And we did a film with the amazing filmmaker, Jenny McKenzie, about the film, sorry, about HIV/AIDS in Utah, and that premiered at Sundance and it won an Emmy, it's called Quiet Heroes.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so it just morphed into a public history project. And at some point Terry said that he wanted somebody to write a monograph, which is to say an academic book about the history of AIDS in Utah. And so I talked to Dr. Reese and Maggie because they weren't really sure what that would mean. And we worked on that for a little bit. And then I put aside a previous project I was working on to do this project, because having interacted as much as I did with Reese and Maggie, I just love them and think they're fantastic. And they were interested in somebody writing a book and they wanted me to be the person who did it, and I was delighted to do that with them. And so that's how I got involved.

Jana Cunningham:
And so just to give a little bit of context, could you talk a little bit about Kristen Reese and her partner Maggie Snyder because I don't... For any of those people who aren't aware, she was the first and only physician in the state of Utah to treat HIV patients during the first decade of the epidemic. But could you maybe just talk a little bit about her story and her history and how she came to start treating HIV patients here in Utah?

Elizabeth Clement:
Yeah. Dr. Reese was raised Quaker in Pennsylvania, and had parents who very much lived the Quaker way, which is that you see the light of God in all people. And so they raised her in the 1950s as a White person, relatively free of most of the prejudices that White-Americans had at the time. And she was always interested in medicine and always interested in science. And luckily had some connections in college through a sorority sister to Medical College of Pennsylvania. So instead of going into science high school teaching, which is where she'd been tracked by her university, she ended up having the opportunity to go to medical school. And she worked in Philadelphia for a long time. And then she actually worked on a reservation providing medical care. And then she eventually ended up in Salt Lake City in a private practice right around when HIV/AIDS was first breaking in the medical community, so in 1981 when we became aware that HIV was a thing, because as we all now know with COVID, you don't know when a disease is breaking, because people can't see it if they don't know it's there.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so it's not that HIV started in 1981, it's that, that's when the CDC suddenly realized, oh, there might be something happening here. And Dr. Reese really was interested in it because she likes puzzles and that's why she was in infectious disease to begin with. And she just found it intellectually very stimulating. Interestingly, she was also closeted lesbian. She maintains that, that didn't have anything to do with her willingness to treat people. Maggie is very clear that she wanted to be involved in HIV because she was a queer person, and saw this as hitting her community.

Elizabeth Clement:
But Dr. Reese was really into it, she said in one point in an oral history that I love detective stories, and infectious disease is a detective story. And I read about HIV/AIDS in the MMWR when it came out and I thought, oh, this sounds like an STD and I'm going to follow it. And within a year she had already seen a patient here in Utah. So by 1982, where she thought that that person might have HIV/AIDS. And she went to the health department and the health department said, we're not going to get into this with, this is not a disease we want to have anything to do with, she tried to alert them. And so, it's not actually really clear how she began to get patients except that everybody else was refusing them. And then they just spread word of mouth that she was willing to treat people, and we are a very conservative state, and we are a state that has a dominant religion that's very hostile to homosexuality. And so no one else was willing to do it.

Elizabeth Clement:
And then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy because when people realized when she would go out and do education with other medical people in the hopes that they would also treat people and instead what happened was they just referred to her, and she was extremely lucky to be an admitting physician at Holy Cross Hospital, which has a mission to help the poor and the, or actually it's to stand with the poor and the powerless. And so the nuns of Holy Cross, or the sisters of Holy Cross were willing to take these patients. And in 1987 things, the number of patients that Reese was seeing and that therefore were being hospitalized at Holy Cross had gotten so large and the problems of managing that population and the fact that lots of staff didn't want to treat them, and janitorial people didn't want to go into their rooms. They created an AIDS ward, which was the first AIDS ward in the Intermountain West. And one of the first AIDS wards in the world, although the very first AIDS ward was in San Francisco.

Jana Cunningham:
And her story truly is incredible. So I would definitely encourage anyone listening to check out the documentary, Quiet Heroes, or the collection, the Kristen Reese HIV/AIDS Collection in the Marriott Library to learn more about her incredible story, her and Maggie Snyder's incredible story.

Elizabeth Clement:
And the documentary is, the library owns a copy of it. So you can stream it through the library website, but also Amazon Prime has it as well. And you can pay a small amount of money and stream it through them as well. It's about 50 minutes.

Jana Cunningham:
Okay. Yeah. I would really just encourage, it really truly is an incredible story. So I definitely encourage anyone listening to go and watch that movie, or look into the collection of the Marriot Library.

Elizabeth Clement:
And shout out to any humanities or social science students, or really anybody, but those oral histories are down there and people can do research papers on them. And if they have questions I'm available, they can reach out to me, I'm on the history department website, but they really are amazing, amazing stories in the oral histories, both with Reese and Maggie, but then with, and I think at this point we've interviewed about 40 people. We have about 350 hours of oral histories and they're all transcribed. So they're quite easy to use.

Jana Cunningham:
Wonderful. So through your work in HIV/AIDS epidemic work, you've had a lot of access to the Utah AIDS Foundation and their programs. And so this is a segue, I guess, to their holiday program. So can you give us a little bit about the history of this program?

Elizabeth Clement:
Well, the history of the program is actually fascinating. And it actually begins before the foundation of the Utah AIDS Foundation itself, or even the foundation of any ASOs that, ASOs are AIDS service organizations in Utah. It actually starts with the Royal Court of the Golden Spike Empire, which is Utah's drag court. And which is to say drag queens who put on shows. The Royal Court system was founded by Jose Sarria in San Francisco in the early sixties. And he founded it as a charitable organization. So it was about community among gay people, and particularly among non-binary gay people, people who like to experiment with gender play, drag queens, but he made it a fundraising organization. And so in 1975, he sent his Princess Royal out to Salt Lake City to meet with the local drag scene, because we had a local drag scene, and he did this in areas all around the West. And now the court system is actually international. So it's spread not just around the country, but internationally.

Elizabeth Clement:
And they handpicked people to, Martin Polleck was one of the people to found the Royal court here. And they began doing fundraising. And one of the things they did was toys for tots. And this is in the seventies. And then by the early 1980s, as AIDS began to hit the gay community here, they began to do, the Royal Court began to do all kinds of fundraising. And they converted their toys for tots program over into basically a sub for Santa program for people with AIDS. And so that's actually where it came from, was it was mutating out of an earlier charitable effort. And the Royal Court raised about $600,000 in the course of about 10 years for AIDS related causes. They were the largest gay organization in the state when the epidemic broke.

Elizabeth Clement:
And they really were the only major fundraising organization that people had, or gay people had in Utah. And so they jumped right in and, of course, they were being affected by HIV/AIDS, and so they wanted to help, but it was interesting because I think Sarria in part founded the court as a volunteer and as a charity organization to raise the respectability of drag as an art form, and to basically say, we're not just running around in dresses, although we are, and there's nothing wrong with that, and that's actually great, but we contribute to the community. And initially they mostly contributed to the straight community. Toys for tots, they're definitely gay people with kids, I'm one of them, but toys for tots is pretty broad. And then when AIDS hit and we needed services for people. And so few people in the community in Utah were willing to help people with AIDS, the Royal Court pivoted and began to do a lot of that AIDS fundraising. And then it morphed again and it became both a choice for taught program, so a gift program over the holidays, but it also was a food program.

Elizabeth Clement:
So by the early nineties, it was meals at Thanksgiving and over the holidays. And then there was the holiday gift program where people could say what they needed and then people would then donate those things. So similar to what we have today, where you can pick a card off a Christmas tree for a kid who needs something, one of those programs, I think the College of Humanities actually runs a program similar to that. And then they actually, at some point, started doing Easter as well. It was originally called a Christmas program and a sub for Santa, but the original director of the Utah AIDS Foundation, Ben Barr, was Jewish. He grew up at Ninth and Ninth in that neighborhood as a working class Jewish kid.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so pretty quickly they turned it into a holiday program and they would make Christmas baskets, but they also started making Hanukkah baskets. And so it became a really extensive program. And by the late 1990s, they were raising $60,000 to cover all of this stuff. And the Utah AIDS Foundation coordinated it, but there was also a particular program that the Royal Court stayed deeply involved with where they gave a hundred dollars to every PWA who needed money at Christmas.

Jana Cunningham:
Oh, wow.

Elizabeth Clement:
Right. And that was an amazing, and a little bit of a radical thing.

Jana Cunningham:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so, from what I understand, when the program first began, it was a little bit controversial. Why was that?

Elizabeth Clement:
Well, people are anxious about giving cash to poor people. They think that poor people will spend money on drugs. And it has a lot to do with how hostile Americans are to the poor, and how much they see poverty as a moral failing rather than as a structural issue, in a capitalist economy, many, many people don't succeed because of the way the economy is structured, but I think a lot of Americans, I think because that's so frightening to them, because that could happen to them, tend to blame the poor for their poverty. And so it was quite radical to give out cash, but the Royal Court insisted that they do that. And there were two reasons for that. One was that people with end stage AIDS who are very, very poor, do not need to take an extra step to cash a check before they go to the grocery store, or use the money.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so part of it was just practical. When you are dying, it is really hard to have the energy, to add yet another errand to your list. And they didn't want to do that. And again, they are very close to a lot of the people that had AIDS, they had AIDS themselves some of them. So we had emperors and empresses who have died of AIDS in Utah are quite a few. And so they knew intimately what that was like, because many of them had AIDS, because they were caring for people who had AIDS, and they had an up close view of what that was like. And they knew that cash was just so much easier to use. The other reason though was that they felt that cash conveyed dignity, that it said to people, we trust you. We believe that you will use this money appropriately.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so even within the gay community, there was some anxiety about, oh, these people are going to use it for drugs and that are going to use it... And the thing is, there's a great quotation from, I believe it's Curtis Jensen, I might be getting that wrong where, or it might have been Scott Stites actually, who's another emperor, who basically, I think it was Scott Stites, who said, "I don't care, if they want to use it for drugs, they are dying of AIDS. Their lives are miserable. If they want to go out and party, they should do that." But more broadly, many more people have told me that they know that the Royal Court was aware that people were using this money to pay their bills and that people were using this money to participate in the holidays and to be able to buy gifts for family.

Elizabeth Clement:
When you can't do that, when you can't participate in major rituals in your community and with your family, that really is an enormous hit to your dignity. And so that giving cash and giving a hundred bucks and not making a social worker show up to make sure that you needed it, and supervise how you spent it, was part of making people with AIDS feel like they had self respect and dignity, and that they could be trusted to use this money to participate in a holiday that was important to them and that was important to their family. And so that's, I think, really at the heart of why to this day the Royal Court still gives a hundred bucks every year to any person with AIDS that needs it, and they still give cash.

Jana Cunningham:
Wow.

Elizabeth Clement:
They don't think that social workers need to decide who deserves this money and supervise how it's spent. And I think that's wonderful because I love social workers, my wife is a social worker, but I also think that insisting in every instance that social workers supervise the poor is disrespectful. And it implies that the poor are poor because they're lazy, and not because there are so many reasons in this economy that somebody might be poor, either in general or at a very specific time in their life. And so it gave people dignity and self-respect, and that is what the court wanted to do.

Jana Cunningham:
And so you mentioned that they still, they continue to today to give out that hundred dollars cash. What other changes has the program gone through? And what is it like today? I know you mentioned how it has evolved. So what's the program like today?

Elizabeth Clement:
I don't actually know a lot about what the program is like today, other than that, it still exists. And they also still do the sub for Santa. And you can go to the AIDS Foundation or call and say, hey, I want to give gifts. It's also a very generous program. So in the early 1990s, they decided that it was not just going to be, the broader set of programs were not just going to be for the person with AIDS, but for anyone in the household that they lived with. And they were very specific about household, because, of course, at that time, if you said family that often meant straight family, gay people couldn't marry. And so, for example, the Utah AIDS Foundation gives toys still because there are kids living in families with people with AIDS and they need presents too.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so, I think what's interesting is that it's such an ongoing program. I also think it's interesting how expansive it is, that it's not just for the individual, that it really is for the household, and we're going to support these households because, of course, those households are supporting people with AIDS. And so giving to them is part thanking them for their support of this person who has a disease that needs to be managed, or that can be fatal. And it's all part of that sense of the AIDS community as being much broader than just individual people with AIDS.

Jana Cunningham:
It really is an incredible program. And I really appreciate you taking the time to discuss this history, because it really is this incredible history and how it has evolved and changed throughout the years. Is there anything else you would like to add that you would like our listeners to understand?

Elizabeth Clement:
Sure. Another thing that I think made it so successful was that it mimics, or is similar to things that both LVS communities and Catholic communities, those are the two largest religious groups in this state, do and felt comfortable doing, not the cash, not the hundred dollars, but the sub for Santa stuff. And if you look at the Utah AIDS Foundation records, you'll see elementary schools putting together little baskets for people, and you'll see LVS wards putting together baskets for people. And I think it was very, very concrete, and it was something that even if you were a little uncomfortable about homosexuality, or AIDS, or IV drug users, that you did understand this thing, that Christmas/ the holidays were the significant time and that you didn't want people in your community to be in need.

Elizabeth Clement:
And so I think it also really helped because it connected so well with the values of the local community even if the people who had AIDS were often rejected by the local community, or by individuals within the local community. And so that I think was really nice too. And I'm sure that programs like this happen around the country, that AIDS service organizations in New York and San Francisco and Chicago ran these kinds of programs as well, but I think they were effective here, because people understood that model of support within the community for other people who were in need.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Elizabeth Clement, associate professor of history. For more information about the College of Humanities, please visit humanities.Utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello. Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities and today I'm speaking with Jay Jordan, associate professor or writing and rhetoric studies about the novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Jana Cunningham:
A few years ago Professor Jordan recorded himself reading the entire book for his son while he was away working at the Utah Asia campus in South Korea. We'll discuss that experience and we'll get to hear a few of his favorite excerpts.

Jana Cunningham:
We're going to use our time today to hear some of your favorite selections from the book, but first tell me why you decided on A Christmas Carol to record for your son.

Jay Jordan:
I don't know that there was a particular just like reason that came to me. I mean I'll say just in general that Christmas definitely carries a lot of nostalgia for me. I grew up with parents, both of whom were church musicians and my mom still is. And so Christmas was just a really big production among other things. They were both involved in just producing special music around the Christmas holidays at both their churches, but also my moms side of the family in particular is really big and we would get together usually around Christmas or the days after in South Carolina where she was originally from and there would be all these cousins I hadn't seen at any other time during the year and aunts and uncles and just a huge extended family on that side. So there were... Christmas was, just like Christmas music and the idea of Christmas caroling was kind of in my blood from the time I was really young, but also just the big family added that much more to Christmas.

Jay Jordan:
So it was just a huge event throughout my childhood and in a lot of ways A Christmas Carol represents that kind of nostalgia because I think it's nostalgic for a lot of people. I mean it's a story that's traveled well, a lot of people know it. But also as I've become more of the like the critically minded professor now I've had a chance to look back at that nostalgia and also realize that there's a lot in A Christmas Carol that actually prefigures that nostalgia, it kind of sets up Christmas expectations in the mid 19th century for a lot of people in Great Britain, that's really fascinating as well. So it's like it sort of cuts both ways, I'm nostalgic about it, but also it gives me an opportunity to be critically nostalgic about it. But it's also something that's just like it's set up in a way, you know just the way the chapters layout or the staves layout. It's set up in a way that you can record it in bits and share it. And so I was like, okay it kind of makes sense I'll record it for my son and we'll see what he thinks about it.

Jana Cunningham:
So what did your son think about? Because you said he was nine?

Jay Jordan:
He was nine at the time, yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
And so what did he think?

Jay Jordan:
I think he thought it was a little cheesy at first. He and my partner were actually coming to visit me while I was in Korea in January between the two semesters, but this was like end of November, beginning of December, it was getting really dark there, really cold, and so I was feeling a little separated from my family and thought okay I need to do this for myself as much as for him. So I started recording it and just started sending it to him in episode as I would record them and I'd share them with him online and I mean he kind of said, "Oh, okay yeah, thanks dad." And so I didn't really think about it for a number of years and literally I mean probably a month or so ago, and he is almost 17 now, he came to me and he said... I don't even remember what prompted this, he said, "You know, I really appreciate that you recorded A Christmas Carol for me. It's something that I still remember."

Jana Cunningham:
Wow.

Jay Jordan:
And yeah, it was one of those moments where you have a teenager, like a late teenager, and a lot of the time he's just going to do things that 16 year olds do and you're going to roll your eyes about it, but every so often he'll say something or do something and you're like wow, you're kind of growing into being a whole person and that was just one of those moments. I was really touched by that, so I thought awe that's sweet.

Jana Cunningham:
And it's also one of those moments where you don't realize the things that you are doing in the now impact your kids in the future.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
You know like you just never know what they're going to remember as they get older.

Jay Jordan:
That's right. Like there are things that you do in the moment that you think are going to have an effect, and maybe they do, but there are, you're right, a lot of other things that you do that seem like okay this might be fun and they're just like wow I really remember when you gave me that tiny little wind up car or something like that. And it was like, I wouldn't tell him this but it's like that was an afterthought, like I was leaving the store on Christmas Eve and I was like that's cute grab it and put it in the stocking and that's the thing he remembers, so.

Jana Cunningham:
Right. Right.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah, that's part of the fun of parenting.

Jana Cunningham:
It's one of the scary parts too.

Jay Jordan:
It is yeah, right right, because you're like hmm is this going to have an... are we going to have to... is this going to have to come up later with a professional in the room or something?

Jay Jordan:
You know, but so far no we've been able to escape a lot of that.

Jana Cunningham:
And how long did it take you? So you did it in episodes kind of?

Jay Jordan:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
So how long did it take you to do the recording and then how long did it end up being total at the very end? Do you remember?

Jay Jordan:
Oh wow I don't remember. I probably did the recording over the course of about a week while I was in Korea. It was toward the end of the semester and that first semester it was the first semester of the campus's operation so there were not a lot of people on that campus at all. I mean it was very big and very empty feeling and so the teaching had pretty much wound down and so I had time, but also just a lot of time to myself going I need to so something because I'm not traveling and what are we going to do. So it took about a week and... Oh, I'd have to look back to see how long it actually ran. I mean yeah, I don't remember. It's a good question.

Jana Cunningham:
Do you still have the recordings?

Jay Jordan:
I think I still have the recordings. I think they are sitting somewhere on Google Drive.

Jana Cunningham:
Okay.

Jay Jordan:
If I remember correctly. I actually started re-recording it the other night.

Jana Cunningham:
Oh, great.

Jay Jordan:
And I don't exactly know why I started doing that. I mean it may have something to do with my own nostalgia, you know actually reading it. I mentioned to you before that both my parents were church musicians which means they were performing in church a lot. I grew up around that. My dad was radio broadcaster and he's in assisted living now and he doesn't really communicate very much so I think that part of rerecording it has to do with remembering and being nostalgic about hearing his voice because I've had people say that my voice carries, his voice would carry like ten times as much as mine would. I mean you could not, not hear dad.

Jana Cunningham:
Wow.

Jay Jordan:
Didn't matter if he was in public or at home. So I miss that and I think maybe that's why I was re-recording it.

Jana Cunningham:
Oh yeah.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
Let's go ahead and read. I'll have you read the first selection that you have chosen to read to our listeners today and then we'll kind of discuss it a little bit.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah, sure.

Jay Jordan:
So this is the very beginning of the story as we are meeting Scrooge for the first time so it's a description of Scrooge and what's all surrounding him.

Jay Jordan:
Once upon a time of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather, foggy withal, and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already it had not been light all day and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

Jay Jordan:
And then I skip a bit to continue that description.

Jay Jordan:
Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Scrooge out of a gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some laborers were repairing the gas-pipes and had lighted a great fire in a brazier round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered, warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice.

Jay Jordan:
The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke, a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty mansion house, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up tomorrows pudding in his garret while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Jana Cunningham:
It creates such a clear picture in your head.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah it really does. Yeah it really does. Yeah. Yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
And so you can sit there and imagine the story as it's going on. So what about this part of the book resonates with you?

Jay Jordan:
A Christmas Carol I think really has been popular over the years because it's sort of a ghost story, in fact that's the billing of it. It's Scrooge being visited by these three spirits and the story's been repurposed so many different ways. So it's popular in a lot of ways as a metaphysical story, but I really found myself being drawn to the parts of the story that are really physical and material descriptions because I think that in some ways gets under sold.

Jana Cunningham:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Jordan:
And I was conscious as I was reading this the first time, as I was recording it for me son years ago, I was thinking he's grown in up in Salt Lake City, we can have bad air quality sometimes. We see something like this, maybe not as extreme as London in the 1840s when everybody was burning coal to keep themselves hot, but something similar in winter air can get pretty bad here. And I remember thinking I don't know if he notices that yet, but it is going to be something that he does notice and I wonder if the fact that he's growing up here will make those scenes hit differently for him than they did when I was growing up. Because I mean I had heard readings of this, I had seen productions of A Christmas Carol when I was growing up in plays or in movies or things like that, but that never really stuck with me because I didn't live in an area that was a subject to inversions as Salt Lake City is.

Jay Jordan:
So you're right, it's a really palpable description. It's like yeah, the brown air, you can't really see down the street.

Jana Cunningham:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Jordan:
It was like it created a scene for Christmas, but at the same time it's kind of gross to think about.

Jana Cunningham:
Yeah.

Jay Jordan:
Like everyone's like beating their chest to try to cough up whatever it is that they're breathing in from the coal. So and then even in recent years I've thought, I've looked back at particularly just nostalgic Christmas decorations or images, even the images that are actually in the original A Christmas Carol from 1843 and seeing candles that have the halo around them and I realize you don't really get that halo unless there's just like something hanging in the air. So it's both, I mean it's nostalgic but also ew.

Jana Cunningham:
Yeah.

Jay Jordan:
You know? So both of those things together I think a really interesting to me.

Jana Cunningham:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). And in growing up in Salt Lake you have that visual in your head of the air.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
I mean if you're growing up somewhere else you don't even know what it looks like. But when you're reading it to me I can clearly see what that air looks like and how that kind of feels, and how it especially feels when it's dark and gloomy kind of.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah. Yeah, and you're like oh wow, sounds familiar.

Jana Cunningham:
Yep.

Jay Jordan:
I mean I grew up Eastern North Carolina, close enough to the coast that the air was always moving around. It was pretty flat and so I never had this experience. Bad air was never a thing that weather forecasters talked about, it was never something that was in the news. It was always something that happened somewhere else.

Jana Cunningham:
Right.

Jay Jordan:
Somewhere else in the world. So yeah, I think you're right, I think it hits different for someone who grows up here.

Jana Cunningham:
And so let's have you read the next excerpt that you prepared today.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah. So this one is also I think really physical, but in a really different way.

Jay Jordan:
This is a little bit later in the story, Scrooge is kind of making the rounds of his own memories with the spirit of Christmas past and one of the memories is of basically the house where he was, or the business where he was himself an apprentice many, many years ago.

Jay Jordan:
In came a fiddler with a music-book and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it and tuned like fifty stomachaches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and every how. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them.

Jay Jordan:
When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, “Well done!” and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a brand new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish. There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of cold roast, and there was a great piece of cold boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler, an artful dog, mind. The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him, struck up “Sir Roger de Coverley.” Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple too, with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and 20 pair of partners, people who were not to be trifled with, people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

Jana Cunningham:
Sounds like a party.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah, that's a party. And this is something that I told you, full disclosures listeners I am not a [Victorianist 00:16:27] or a scholar of Dickens, so I went looking around for a couple of my colleagues in the English department, and I will credit her, I will credit my colleague and friend Jessica [Straley 00:16:37] who's a professor of English and who is a Vicorianist among many other things that she does. And so I talked with her a little bit about this, and one of the things that she pointed out to me was, I mean in once sense it's obvious but it's something that we can tend to forget in being caught up in the holiday, those folks who do celebrate Christmas or at least recognize it that it's not as if it was always like this.

Jana Cunningham:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Jordan:
You know, it came from somewhere. These traditions that we have came from somewhere. So one of the things that I think a lot of folks just assume these days is that Christmas is a children's holiday. It kind of makes sense because the Christian celebration of the holiday focuses on the arrival of a child, and kind of a miraculous child, so of course it's always been about children. No, not really. As recently as it turns out mid 19th century England a lot of the Christmas celebrations were really adults celebrations. That's what this is, there aren't any kids at this party, if they are they're like around the edges trying to sneak and they're being shushed and sent out. There's drinking, there's flirting, there's all this dancing. God knows what goes on in the after party, you know? It's a pretty bawdy scene in a lot of ways. So things have been different over the years about Christmas.

Jay Jordan:
Incidentally another thing that Jessica mentioned to me was that Christmas trees were still kind of a weird thing. There weren't so much Christmas trees in England, even at this period. If you look in the original illustrations of A Christmas Carol, this scene where Scrooge is remembering his old boss Fezziwig and how jolly he was around the holidays there are a couple things that you see. There's a scene of Mr and Mrs. Fezziwig and then there's a bit of greenery that's suspended from the ceiling, it sort of looks like it might be a Christmas tree, but it's probably not at the same time. I guess it's like a proto Christmas tree or something. So that hadn't happened just yet.

Jay Jordan:
It turns out that Queen Victoria who had just descended to the throne only a few years before, her husband was German, that was just one of those marriages that was intended to preserve empires and preserve relations, and he hadn't yet brought over the Christmas tree just yet. There was I think a holiday card that went out to whoever a couple years later that showed Victoria and Albert in front of a Christmas tree and that was really the first time that a Christmas tree had been depicted in England and then it became a tradition after that but it was imported from Germany. And of course it wasn't like a Christian tradition, I mean greenery has been around for a very long time ever since this pagan holiday, yet one more thing that Christians borrowed.

Jana Cunningham:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay Jordan:
I'll put it charitably. As someone who grew up in church I guess I'll say that.

Jana Cunningham:
[inaudible 00:19:21].

Jay Jordan:
But there are just a lot of reminders I think in that scene that Christmas has been celebrated in a lot of different ways.

Jana Cunningham:
Right.

Jay Jordan:
It's evolved a lot over the years. But also I mean just like obviously in a very different way materially and physically from the previous scene I read that is also a really, really physical scene. There's a lot of movement, and particularly the figures of Mr and Mrs. Fezziwig in the illustration, they're big people. They're extremely well fed people. They're well dress people. And so there's a very stark contrast between the way they are depicted and the way for instance the Cratchit family is depicted.

Jana Cunningham:
Right.

Jay Jordan:
So there's lots more to say about that I'm sure.

Jana Cunningham:
Absolutely.

Jay Jordan:
But that's another reason why I think that scene sticks with me.

Jana Cunningham:
Well thank you so much-

Jay Jordan:
Thank you.

Jana Cunningham:
... for chatting with me today and giving me, or reading some of those selections. And good luck on re-recording it.

Jay Jordan:
Yeah, thank you. We'll see how it goes.

Jana Cunningham:
I think that's a wonderful endeavor.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Jay Jordan, associate professor of writing and rhetoric studies. For more information about The College of Humanities please visit humanities.utah.edu and don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities and today we're discussing International Holocaust Remembrance Day, why we observe it and how it is commemorated throughout the world. Julia Ault, Assistant Professor of History is with me to discuss more. On January 27, many countries around the world observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Can you talk a little bit about when this day of remembrance began and why it was established?

Julia Ault:
Yeah. Well, let's step back even for just a second and, even though it might seem obvious, consider what Holocaust remembrance events are, what the Holocaust was.

Julia Ault:
And Holocaust remembrance days have taken different forms over the years in different places, but at their core, they are supposed to commemorate the victims of the Nazi genocidal policies during World War II, which we refer to as the Holocaust. Specifically, Holocaust remembrance days charge us to remember and learn from the intentional and systematic murder of six million Jews, as well as other victims, Roma/Sinti, which we know more commonly as gypsies in Eastern Europe and these were the part of Nazi racial policies to purify, right, to isolate and other and then get rid of people who were seen as enemies but of course were totally blameless victims in this Nazi system in the context of World War II.

Julia Ault:
Specifically, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was officially declared by the UN General Assembly in 2005, it came out of a push for an international day with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II and the end of the Holocaust and it was officially then celebrated for the first time in January, 2006.

Jana Cunningham:
And so why was it established? I mean, I understand there are multiple purposes obviously of having a remembrance day so what were their specific goals for holding this day?

Julia Ault:
It's at least twofold, if not more than that. On the one hand, rembembrance days are very much about what their name says, remembering survivors, remembering victims, what happened, the horrors of the death camps, of death marches, of the ghettos, all of the different aspects of the genocide. But it's not just to commemorate the past and to never forget, but to move beyond that, to say, what can we learn from the past? How can we avoid policies that lead to violence and ethnic cleansing and genocide, different forms of systematic oppression in our lives today? So I think it was twofold it's to remember, but then also to act on that remembrance in a proactive way.

Jana Cunningham:
And what is the significance of the date of January 27th?

Julia Ault:
Yeah, January 27th is the day that the Red Army or the Soviet Army, which was allied with the US against Nazi Germany during World War II, it was the day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in January of 1945. So the German army of the wehrmacht was retreating to the west and the concentration camp was abandoned with prisoners who were too sick, too weak to be forced on death march. So the Red Army actually came upon some 6,000 survivors in Auschwitz. Yeah, and they were ill, many of them actually died after the fact because their bodies couldn't absorb nutrition anymore. So Auschwitz is important because there are actually these living survivors of the camp, but also Auschwitz is significant because it was the largest concentration and death camp within the Nazi system, so it's sort of important on multiple levels.

Jana Cunningham:
Each year, they have a different theme for international remembrance day. What have some of those themes been since 2005 and how have they been commemorated?

Julia Ault:
I think starting in 2010, they started including various themes. And this speaks again to the two part mission of the day to both remember and to educate. So these themes have looked at different ways in which people experienced the Holocaust. So they've had themes such as women and children, journeys of the Holocaust because many people were moved thousands of miles from their home to ghettos and then ultimately to camps in many cases. So there's a large geographic span to this. They've had themes that looked at discrimination, especially racial discrimination and things of that nature. So it helps to illuminate how these policies affected different types of people in different ways, but also again to connect from the specific instance of the Holocaust to broader trends we've seen in the world since and today.

Jana Cunningham:
Right. And what are some of the different ways the various countries observe the day? Because there are so many different countries that observe International Holocaust Day, how do they observe it differently?

Julia Ault:
Yeah, there's something like 39 countries participate in International Holocaust Remembrance Day and then some countries including the US have a separate remembrance day as well. So there are events that happen on different days around the world. A lot of it originated with an emphasis on survivor testimony and witnesses speaking to their own experiences and to their family's stories. Elie Wiesel who wrote Night very famously spoke about these things. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum also in the US did a lot of this stuff. There's a lot of emphasis now, as we have fewer survivors still alive we're just many years since the end of World War II and the Holocaust that it's more of an educational event now. So lectures, presentation, sometimes showing a film or a documentary and then hosting discussions. University of Utah of course does similar things with U Remembers days on campus.

Julia Ault:
Oh, other places, actually at Auschwitz, they do a really interesting memorial where they walk holding candles from Auschwitz to Birkenau, which it's a very large complex and so I think it's actually like over a kilometer, kilometer and a half walk between the two parts of the camp. And it's sort of supposed to symbolize those who lived, that not everyone, the Nazi policies on some level weren't successful, right? And so this is remembrance which commemorates those who lived, who are still alive and still speak to the experience. Yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
So as you've said, many countries also have their own remembrance day, kind of why is that? And is it different than International Day of Remembrance or how does it differ?

Julia Ault:
Yeah, I think in part because an international day, International Holocaust Remembrance Day came so late, a number of countries had started their own national days before that to remember. And in a lot of cases, those national days relate to somehow that country's involvement in World War II, the Holocaust. So US Holocaust Remembrance Day is at the end of April and Jimmy Carter started this in the late 1970s and it is based on the US's liberation of Dachau, which was one of the Nazi concentration camps in 1945. And similarly in the UK, they celebrated their day of remembrance was the anniversary of the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen, which is yet another concentration camp. And interestingly, in Argentina, Holocaust remembrance day, they picked the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943 as their day to commemorate the Holocaust.

Julia Ault:
Oh, I should say, of course Israel has perhaps the most important Holocaust remembrance day. It is a national holiday there and it actually changed around a bit in the 1950s before they settled on the day, which is now so celebrated one week after the end of Passover or after Passover. And yeah, it changed a couple of times. And coincidentally, then there are a bunch of Holocaust remembrance days that happen to be in April. But one of the really interesting things that they do in Israel is there's a two minute moment of silence at 10:00 AM and sirens go off. And there are actually videos of this on YouTube you can look up, people stop whatever they are doing. If they're on the road, they're driving, they stop on the middle of the highway and get out of their cars and stand for the moment of silence as a sign of respect. It's really powerful to watch.

Jana Cunningham: Oh wow. And the US day of the remembrance is similar, they do kind of the same day as Israel, right? Or they do it kind of just the very end of April.

Julia Ault:
Yeah, so I had actually seen two different origin stories and I checked with a friend of mine who also does Holocaust and German history and yeah, the Holocaust remembrance day in Israel and in the US happen to almost exactly coincide. Yeah, so I've seen that the US's is based on Israel's, I've also seen it that it is based on the US liberation of Dachau. So perhaps fortuitously, these things tend to line up right at the end of April for different reasons, yeah.

Jana Cunningham:
How can we as individuals... Because on campus here at the U when we do U Remembers, there's a lot going on on campus and so I think there's a lot of different ways to get involved in these remembrance activities. However, if you're not a member of campus, how as individuals can we better honor and observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day?

Julia Ault:
We've got really important things here. Of course, remembering the victims, remembering what happened, the horrors that people had to live through or were not able to live through in the camps, in death marches, in various ways. But also I think more broadly to think about the consequences of hatred, of antisemitism, of racism that still exists today, that we should be sympathetic, empathetic people in our lives. What is the pain of isolating a particular group of individuals? What are the potentially dangerous concept consequences of creating this idea of a dangerous other? But beyond that, I think it should inspire us to do better and to try to combat those individual and systemic prejudices that we experience in our own lives, in the US and around the world.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Julia Ault, Assistant Professor of History. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu and don't forget to subscribe.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. And today in honor of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we're discussing some of the lesser known Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust. Maeera Schreiber associate professor of English and chair of the Jewish Studies Initiative is with me to talk about some of the writers beyond those who we are most familiar with.

Jana Cunningham:
So most of us have read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and works by Elie Wiesl, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. Their stories are incredibly important to the understanding of the suffering inflicted by the Holocaust. However, they're lesser known writers whose contributions are just as valuable and impactful and that's what we're going to talk about today. So let start with Art Spiegelman. He's an American cartoonist and author of the graphic novel “Maus,” which is about his relationship with his father who's a Holocaust survivor. I have never have heard of Maus before. So tell us more about this graphic novel and Spiegelman.

Maeera Schreiber:
Okay. Spiegelman. Yes. So, I teach at the University of Utah and I teach a course specifically in Holocaust literature. And I have to say that Spiegelman's work, there's two volumes “Maus” one and two is by far the most impactful and valuable reading that the students do. I have many students who want to write about “Maus.” They come back to me years later, wanting to talk about how the memoir that he lays out in “Maus” has inspired them and helped them think about how to tell stories of their own and stories about their relationships in their families. So it's interesting.

Maeera Schreiber:
I will also tell you that Spiegelman's “Maus”;’ was the first Holocaust nonfiction book I ever read. And the question about whether it's fiction or not is an interesting one, that I sort of stopped in my tracks and said, "I want to teach this material." So it made an impact on me, not just my students. It's as you said, "It's a graphic novel sort of a novel, or certainly a memoir perhaps told and in graphic materials." One of the things that's very interesting about it to start with is, how do you categorize a book like this? When he was first reached the best seller list? When it came out in 1992, the New York Times wanted to put it on the list for a fiction.

Maeera Schreiber:
And he was enormously upset because to put a work about the Holocaust, that's grounded very much in real story about his father's suffering, to say that, that's fiction opens a door to terrible things, specifically Holocaust denial. So it's a controversial text, by now it's become canonical, but it's still a shock because in it, the Jews are represented as if mice and Nazis are represented as if cats. And to some people, readers, they looked at it and said, "This trivializes, the Holocaust, this makes a light of it."

Maeera Schreiber:
And it's taken us a long time to understand that the horrors of the Holocaust are very hard to tell. It's hard to relay them and that it takes multiple strategies and many different kinds of narrative to make the horrors and the long reach of the Holocaust available to really help people understand why we have to keep talking about it and why we have to keep remembering it. So that's just a place to start with Spiegelman.

Jana Cunningham:
So I'm really interested in this aspect of the graphic novel. And so can you talk a little bit about why or how can the graphic novel tell the story in a way that a regular or novel just can't?

Maeera Schreiber:
Well, if you've ever looked at graphic novels and I really hadn't until I started teaching this book, one of the things that you realize is that the whole page makes a difference and the things are happening on the page, not just in the narrative, the words that are happening, but the images that are happening. So there's at least two major ways in which information or the narrative is being told. One page and I feel like that old Bob and Ray comic story about they're on comedy routine about being on the radio and saying, "Wish you could be here." And they're trying to talk about things that you can't see because it's on the radio, that's kind of how I feel right now.

Maeera Schreiber:
But one of the things is, if you look at it and you have to look at it, he's talking about relaying the story of his father and his mother and how they're copped and the way he represents it is by showing them in the middle of the page. And there's a landscape behind them and the landscape is in the shape of a swastika, and it shows how they have no any way they go, any direction. If they turn to the right to the left, they go east, if they go west, it doesn't matter. It's all in hands of the Third Reich.

Maeera Schreiber:
And to teach students who often ask, "Why didn't people escape? Why didn't they just run away?" That picture explains it in just a moment of strong visual recognition, how the gates and the ways out were closed. So that's something that happens on the page. Sometimes pictures are more powerful or differently powerful than words and Spiegelman does both.

Jana Cunningham:
And there's probably not many, I would imagine graphic novels about the Holocaust or any sort of book with pictures.

Maeera Schreiber:
It's interesting. Just about three years ago a graphic novel version, the “The Diary of Anne Frank” came out. Yeah. So perhaps your listeners would be curious pursuing that as well. I think it's worth a look. I don't find it as rewarding and I don't learn as much as I did from “Maus,” but it's certainly an interesting effort. And I think, again, the question about how do you make people understand exactly how small that space was that she... and how that space was hidden behind a door, the visual text speaks volumes.

Jana Cunningham:
Wow. So for the sake of time, I wish we could talk more about all of these writers in depth.

Maeera Schreiber:
Sure.

Jana Cunningham:
Let's move on to Ida Fink. Fink was born in Poland and from what I understand, she and her sister were able to escape the country after the German invasion using forged papers. Unlike we were talking about Spiegelman, she did write in fiction, correct?

Maeera Schreiber:
Yes, she did.

Jana Cunningham:
So she wrote in fiction to describe what life was like under Nazi occupation. So what was her experience like and why did she choose fiction?

Maeera Schreiber:
I think she chose fiction, although I'm careful about even using the word fiction because it's an imaginative inquiry into the question, what happened? Right. And there's always that tension between that enormous question, what happened? How did it happen? And then how we imagine it. So her writing, which is very poetic, I was in anticipation of our conversation, I was looking again at a story that I teach as part of this, it's called “The Tenth Man.” And it's a story about after the war, about what was it like to wait for people to come home and they don't come home, but people wait.

Maeera Schreiber:
And it silences you in very important ways that allow you to imagine what's it like if no one returns. It's interesting, she's kind of late as a writer, she began writing in her 40s and she lived in Israel. And one of the things I think you feel in her writing very much is an effort to find the language to tell the stories, that these are hard stories to tell. And there's almost a searching for words that she does in these stories that are very beautiful.

Jana Cunningham:
So her book, “A Scrap of Time and Other Stories,” a collection of stories from what I understand won the first Anne Frank Prize, what are some of the themes she explores in these stories? You talked about “The Tenth Man,” but what are these other stories?

Maeera Schreiber:
Beyond that, so one of the things, she talks about the world that was lost, the beauty that was lost. It's a place of remembering her stories and grasping at the difficulty of remembering. I think that's another very important thing that comes through in Holocaust fiction is that the memory, the act of remembering is sometimes necessary, but almost always enormously painful. And the pain of remembering really comes through in her writing. I think the other thing that comes through is that one of the reasons I proposed her to you initial was that she's an example of a woman writer and I think we'll get a chance to talk about another one as well.

Maeera Schreiber:
But one of the things that's happening in Holocaust literary studies now is that there were really excavating a space and recognizing that had different experiences in the war and that in during the Holocaust and they had different experiences in the camps and that those stories need to be told. So one of the things also that she really contributes very beautifully to the larger understanding about the Holocaust is how people were sustained by relationships. She had a close relationship with her mother and that relationships informs a lot of the stories as well.

Jana Cunningham:
Lastly, let's talk about Ruth Kluger. She was a Holocaust survivor and wrote about her childhood in Nazi, Germany. Her memoir, “Still Alive,” it doesn't just talk about her time in the concentration camps when she was a child and she was a young child, she also kind of goes much further beyond that and about kind of the difficulties she faced as she just navigated the rest of her life. Can you talk more about this memoir and from what I understand also stirred some controversy.

Maeera Schreiber:
So the question about Kluger, she's a relatively new writer for me. I just started teaching her really just last fall. And I think she's an incredible voice in this whole landscape of Holocaust literature. One of the things that's distinctive about her is that she's very feisty and one, you could even say, flinty cranky. She's not nice, and that's important I think and in that way, it's a little bit like in Art Spiegelman's narrative, her father isn't nice. And I think, especially when we have idealized Anne Frank, for all kinds of legitimate reasons, but we tend to pity and almost turn those who suffered and died in Holocaust or survived, but carried you deep wounds, we tend to be sentimental about them.

Maeera Schreiber:
And we don't realize, first of all, these were incredibly vibrant often in these cases of the writers really smart people who had a lot to say and their lives were really torpedoed by what happened. Right. And there were consequences to that right there. The consequences of these kinds of wounds are not always ones that we want to draw close to quite the opposite. I think Ruth Kluger would probably have been a difficult person to be friends with, frankly. She's difficult. I think though that said, I think one of the things she does is she's very upfront about the privileging of male writers in Holocaust writing. And she's sometimes some of the controversies, I'm not sure this is what you're referring to, but she's almost she errs to a fault when she tries to represent the Third Reich as solely a masculine event. Right.

Maeera Schreiber:
And that she sees an over simplified ways, a gendered war going on as well. It's interesting for purposes of teaching and discussion and for your readers out there, it's certainly worth looking at because it makes you ask, "Okay. What was the experience of women? Where were all of that?" So she's terrific as somebody who really makes a space for it, she's also really different from Ida Fink who's so poetic and has this lovely relationship with her mother where Ruth Kluger does not like her mother at all. And for students, at least it's good for them to see a complicated family relationship. And again, it goes much further than Anne Frank, and such, and really displaying the intricacies. These were real people and they had complicated lives.

Jana Cunningham:
And that's, I think kind of what intrigued me about, I mean, I had never heard of Ruth Kluger, but when I was kind of researching her book made me realize and what I have read about Holocaust survivors, I haven't read much about what happened after the Holocaust and how they went on with their lives and how they immigrated to other countries or in Ruth Kruger's case, I think she came to the US, right?

Maeera Schreiber:
Yes. She did.

Jana Cunningham:
And so I think we don't hear much about how they had this whole rest of their life that they need to deal with all of these horrible years.

Maeera Schreiber:
Right. And the ghosts in Kluger's narrative, she's haunted by her brother's ghost. And she has a really beautiful and heartbreaking narrative of where she talks about being a suburban housewife. And in New Jersey, I think working at Princeton and she writes a poem about Halloween and called Halloween and a Ghost. And she imagines that her brother who had died in the Holocaust and she watched him being snatched, comes to knock at the door too, as part of a Halloween performance. Yeah. And the idea that you can be living a new life and your past is always present.

Jana Cunningham:
Oh, absolutely. And so what class are you teaching these books in?

Maeera Schreiber:
So I teach a class that's called Holocaust Literature and Culture. And yeah, and I teach these books and others as well.

Jana Cunningham:
Okay. And is that an undergraduate course?

Maeera Schreiber:
It's an undergraduate course, but it's open to HB40 people

Jana Cunningham:
Oh, wonderful.

Maeera Schreiber:
So, yeah, and I love having many generations in the room.

Jana Cunningham:
Yeah. I bet that makes for intriguing conversations because these books, they all seem they would target and attract a completely different audience, so to bring everyone together would be very interesting.

Maeera Schreiber:
It is. And I get interesting students. If I may, I had of a student who's a member of a first nation tribe and he will be joining, I hope our graduate program. And he came to the class because he wanted to find language for talking about first generation, first nation genocide. And to have him there and to share his sorting out the consequences of what happened to his tribe and his family and to put it in context of this historical phenomena is exactly the connections that we need to make as we go forward.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Maeera Schreiber, associate professor of English. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. Today in honor of Black History Month, we're discussing the uses and misuses of black history with Brandon Render, a soon to be assistant professor of history here at the U. Professor Render's current research project, Colorblind University, explores the relationship between race and higher education through the lens of race neutral policies, practices, and ideas during the civil rights and black power era.

Jana Cunningham:
Every February we celebrate Black History Month with celebrations and stories that are sometimes just glimpses or highlights of the black experience in this country sometimes aim just to create a specific narrative. What is that narrative?

Brandon Render:
That's a good question. What I've found is that when black history is often included in American history, that it is framed as a progress narrative. What I mean by that is we think about the progression of American history, but then how black history fits within that. We can start with how Abraham Lincoln emancipated the enslaved African and African Americans in the 1860s. Then how after segregation during the civil rights movement, black Americans overcame racial separation through legal and social measures, but that now we no longer have to deal with race and racism and what we typically refer to as a post racial society.

Brandon Render:
Basically this progress narrative, it's become overused, but it also glosses over much of what black history actually is. Black history isn't just a struggle against race and racism, but it could also be about black life and black culture. We could think about this in terms of black art, black music. We can think about it in terms of kinship networks or family. Then we can also think about that alongside activism and black intellectuals, how black Americans have contributed to this overall idea of America.

Jana Cunningham:
How are the history books using and misusing black history?

Brandon Render:
Well I found that the most glaring issue is that black history isn't included at all. In some cases you can argue that it isn't used whatsoever, but then in other cases, you can see how the progress narrative sort of frames black history, but then how this progress narrative leads to the simplification of black history in particular, but American history in general. I think that this simplification process is an overall symptom of how we want history to be viewed and in many ways, black history falls victim to that interpretation that's simplified your simplistic interpretation of American history.

Jana Cunningham:
What is the purpose? What is the purpose of using this narrative and using a misusing black history like this?

Brandon Render:
Well, I think the overall purpose of using or misusing sometimes distorting black history is that it really ignores or glosses over the depths of history, but then it also makes it difficult for us to confront contemporary issues.

Brandon Render:
One example of that, that I always think about is the case of Rosa Parks. It's a popular event or a popular moment in history that we typically think about. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama in December 1955. After that, Rosa Parks was arrested. There was a year long bus boycott that eventually led to the desegregation of buses in the city.

Brandon Render:
What a lot of people choose to ignore is that desegregation was a process and that even after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, we had cases like the Freedom Riders, where another group of people tried to desegregate buses in the south and it almost cost them their lives. They were faced with violence throughout the south. They were beaten. Some of them were almost killed. The buses were bombed. You can actually see the photos of it, where people would wait for them at certain stops where they would wait for them to get off the bus and then they would engage them with violence.

Brandon Render:
But then another thing that this sort of glosses over too, is how after Rosa Parks was arrested, she was released pretty quickly, but that wasn't always the case, especially in the segregated south. If we're thinking about something like police violence, in most cases, black Americans, not just in the south, but the throughout the country, were beaten. Sometimes women were sexually assaulted or raped while in police custody. That's also in addition to other conditions that they faced, like being forced into labor practices, sort of like prison labor camps.

Brandon Render:
What this does whenever we ignore these parts of history is that it prevents us from confronting contemporary issues. Because if we're asking a question, if black Americans were facing violence at the hands of law enforcement officers back during segregation, and then we see the video evidence of the same thing continuing now, how can we commit to this idea the progress narrative, how can we commit to this idea that things have gotten better, but maybe aren't good enough yet.

Brandon Render:
That's part of the purpose of distorting black history is that, and really in a lot of ways, it's an ideological battle to prevent people from really facing what happened in the past and how that connects to what we see today.

Jana Cunningham:
How is this dangerous? How is not misusing these, or I guess, how are these narratives dangerous to the country today to people today? You kind of already went into it a little bit, but if you could expand upon that a bit.

Brandon Render:
No, that's a great question because in addition to police violence and the way that we think of about the history of violence between law enforcement and black communities, we do see that there are real world consequences to how we view history and how our views of history impact the way that we think about contemporary society. But don't want to spend too much time on this because I feel like it's something that a lot of people have heard about.

Brandon Render:
But whenever you think about the critical race theory debate, that's another way in which black history has been misused to really achieve the goals of people who have no connection to black history. In particular, if you go back a couple of years to the summer of 2020, whenever in the wake of George Floyd's murder, there was this rise in anti-racism awareness and education. There were anti-racism workshops and trainings and eventually conservative activists named Christopher Rufo received word of how these trainings were impacting the way that people thought about contemporary race relations.

Brandon Render:
He did a lot of investigating and he found that critical race theory was used to frame a lot of anti-racism trainings and workshops. In addition to the two popular books of the summer of 2020, Ibram Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist and Robin D Angelo's White Fragility. What he found is that by garnering support and opposition to critical race theory, he could use this as a way to eliminate anti-racism education and training. He brought this to the White House, or, well, what happened is he made a series of public appearances, eventually the White House and Donald Trump received word of it. Then that's whenever you have the White House conference on American history in September 2020, in which Martin Luther or sorry, in which Donald Trump explicitly invokes the principles of Martin Luther King, specifically his I Have a Dream speech to argue that what he calls toxic propaganda like antiracism education and critical race theory are poisoning the minds of young children.

Brandon Render:
Not too long after that you have the anti race or the anti critical race theory bills that are passed at the state level throughout the United States, but then how we've also really engaged in this critical race theory debate, which has often been premised on black history and our readings of the black past. It really highlights the distortions of black history, the way that it's used and really the political purposes of how we unlock certain moments or certain ideas within history to achieve contemporary political goals.

Jana Cunningham:
How does this country begin? I know this is a big question, but how does our country begin to rectify the way black history is told?

Brandon Render:
That's a really good question. One of the things that I do this in class with my students is that I challenge them to question or critique the role of history and popular culture. This isn't just black history, but really history in general. If we're thinking about the way that we see history as it's portrayed on TV shows and video games and political speeches, what do we feel like this person, this medium is trying to tell us about history? Are they being thoughtful with their expressions of history? Are they simplifying parts of history to achieve a certain goal? Just to think about it in a little bit more depth.

Brandon Render:
But really whenever it comes to black history, I encourage students to always go back to the source. Instead of believing what someone tells you about Martin Luther King Jr's I Have the Dream speech, why don't you just go ahead and read that speech on your own and then come to your own conclusions about it. Even better yet, don't just read, don't just stop with the I Have a Dream speech, but also contextualize that by Martin Luther King Jr's other writings. Then to go even further than that, try to contextualize that with more writings, more speeches, more ideas that are held by black Americans in the time that Martin Luther King Jr. is giving is I Have a Dream speech and also publishing other books and articles.

Brandon Render:
One of the things that I usually tell students is that they should see this. They should seek out information on their own. Instead of believing what someone tells them, why don't they go ahead and read whatever document, listen to whatever video or audio source it is that they should listen to, to really come to their own conclusions. Because one of the things that I think that we do too much with history is that we wait until someone tells us what we should think about history instead of figuring out what we think about history on our own.

Brandon Render:
Usually what I tell my students is as their instructor, as their professor, it's not my responsibility to teach them what to think about history, but to teach them how to think about history. Giving them the tools that they need to interpret specific events, your ideas that happened in the past so that they can develop their own framework for understanding history.

Jana Cunningham:
What are some of the just blatant emissions of black history that you encourage your students to look into, or just others in general, that you encourage them to look under that are just completely missing from the black experience in our country?

Brandon Render:
Yeah, that's a good question. One of the blatant omissions that I feel like is somewhat recent, occurred I guess over the past six or seven years with the debate around Colin Kaepernick and how he took a knee and how a lot of people saw that as either disrespecting the flag or disrespecting soldiers. I use an example of Attucks [inaudible 00:13:22], who is a free black man that fought in the American Revolution. He's from Massachusetts. He left behind a series of writings that basically explained his decision to join the military during the American Revolution. What it came down to is that he felt like this would be his opportunity as a black man to gain the citizenship rights that should have been guaranteed to him all along.

Brandon Render:
What I found is that a lot of people typically perceive the soldiers that Colin Kaepernick is supposedly disrespecting is usually white American soldiers. But what I try to challenge students to think about, what I try to challenge other people to think about in conversation is that Colin Kaepernick was basically taking a knee for the same reason that black American soldiers in the past have joined the military. There's not much of a there, just in the differences in how they choose to express those beliefs and then how they choose to pursue those goals.

Brandon Render:
But then another blatant omission that I've seen is that black history is still very male-centric and that we haven't done a very good job of incorporating the perspectives of black women. This is not just in academic or institutionalized settings, but really in popular culture as well, too. We usually see Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X's name, sometimes Rosa Parks, but not as often. We usually see MLK and Malcolm X on whatever popular culture, public history project it is that refers to the recent black past.

Brandon Render:
But we know that there are a lot of historians, a lot of black women historians that are doing work to really illuminate black women's contributions throughout American history and not just American history, but really world history as well. You can think about this in terms of, this kind of goes back to question too, about how can interpretations or distortions of black history be dangerous. I think about this in terms of how racial stereotypes, racial and gendered stereotypes against black women have led to black women being at increased risk for sexual assault and rape, especially whenever we think about this in terms of black transgender women as well. There's been a lot of great work from Deborah Gray White to Brenda Stevenson, to one of my mentors, Donna Ray [inaudible 00:16:08] who has done work to illuminate the conditions that black women have faced, how they've responded to this, but then how it still sort of manifests in contemporary society.

Brandon Render:
The two issues that I've seen the most are really engaging with these debates about history, like in the Colin Kaepernick situation, but then also being more inclusive in our historical perspective. It doesn't just end with black women. We can go much further than that, but that's just one example that I've continued to see, not just in my own studies and in my own research, but then also popular conceptions of history as well.

Jana Cunningham:
Professor Render, I saw on just on your Twitter page, you had recommended some readings about black history. Can you just tell our listeners what those are?

Brandon Render:
The book that I recommended was Patrisse Kahn-Cullors When They Call You a Terrorist. This is actually a really interesting book because Patrice Kahn-Cullors is one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. She's of three, along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi who basically turned the social media hashtag into movement.

Brandon Render:
The book itself is great because it gives you a glimpse into the conditions that black Americans face at multiple levels. It's sort of an introduction to the movement for Black Lives policy agenda, the vision for Black Lives. But a lot of Patrisse Kahn-Cullors interpretation is steeped in black history. You can see the specific references that they make to certain figures in the past, like Angela Davis, but then also specific events.

Brandon Render:
For example, Cullors identifies as an abolitionist. She talks about the historical importance of abolition work and how even today a lot of people see abolitionist as idealistic, but in the past, it's worked before with the abolition of slavery, the abolition of segregation. Now those same principles and practices are being applied to other concepts that we face today, like the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex.

Brandon Render:
I usually use Patrisse Kahn-Cullors book towards the end of a course on black intellectuals or black political thought to show students how black history influences contemporary notions and practices of the work that black Americans are doing to promote equity and inclusion, but then also to achieve liberation. But then it also serves as a real world example of what people are doing today to achieve all of those concepts as well.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Brandon Render, assistant professor of history. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. Don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham: Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Janet Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. Today, in honor of Black History Month, we're discussing the representation of Black characters in graphic novels with Andrew Shephard, Assistant Professor of English. Professor Shephard has taught courses on Black Panther here at the U, and is currently developing a monograph project about the character. Since the beginning of comic books, from what I understand, I'm not super familiar with comic books, but from what I understand, Black characters have faced many various racial stereotypes. Can you just explain how Black people were typically portrayed in comic books before any shift in positive representation?

Andrew Shephard: The representation of Black people in comics was complicated. There were negative representations and there were positive ones. You could go back as early as, say, Ebony White in Will Eisner's The Spirit. Will Eisner, he's like the Orson Welles of comics. He's the guy who did things with the medium that really pushed it forward in terms of how you could tell stories specifically with the tools available to you with sequential narrative. The Eisner Awards, which are like the Oscars of comics, are named after him. Eisner created a character called The Spirit, which basically has a noir-ish detective story feel to it. It was a big influence on Frank Miller's Daredevil run, among other things. There was a character who was a little Black kid who was a sidekick to the main character, The Spirit. This character's name was Ebony White. Ebony White became controversial for being ... Essentially, this character was a well-intentioned effort on Eisner's part, but unfortunately, he spoke in a very thick 'Negro' dialect. He was drawn as a Sambo-esque racial caricature.

Andrew Shephard: He was portrayed as a heroic character and actually was portrayed as fairly intelligent, but basically the character rubbed people the wrong way. He was like a figure out of a minstrel show. It contrasted with, say, the relatively mimetic style, or the generally mimetic style, that every other character was rendered with in The Spirit. Basically, that's an example. Eventually, Eisner transitioned the character out because he got such negative feedback for him. Eisner, more or less, apologized for it. I mean, he expressed mixed feelings, basically about what his intentions were versus how it was interpreted. That was an example of one of the ways in which Black characters were not always represented well. In the 1950s, around 1956, there was an incident between the newly established Comics Code Authority, which was basically a regulatory body that was instituted in 1954 following some concerns about basically the content of comics and whether or not it might be corrupting the youth of America. There was a book called the Seduction of the Innocent that was published by a guy named Fredric Werthham. Basically, there was a whole McCarthy-esque Senate subcommittee looking into comics.

Andrew Shephard: The CCA essentially had very strict regulations about what you could and couldn't say in comics, and for many decades afterwards. Basically, there was a story that was being published in the EC Comics line that was owned by William Gaines. This is the line that gave us Tales from the Crypt, and Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear. They also did crime comics, they did science fiction comics. This is back in a period where the American comics industry was actually much more diverse in terms of its genre representation. Part of the reason why it became predominantly superhero oriented was actually because of the CCA. Basically, there was a story that they wanted to publish called Judgment Day. It was actually a reprint from 1953, so it was a pre-code comic story. Basically, I believe it was Al Feldstein wrote it and Joe Orlando illustrated. This story involved an astronaut in the future traveling to an alien world, which is inhabited by two races of robots. They're orange robots and blue robots. They're more or less identical, aside from the differences in their coloring.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, despite being identical, the orange robots are subjugating the blue ones. This astronaut looks at this and he's been tasked with determining the admission of this planet to a galactic republic. By the end, he refuses them admission on the grounds that basically bigotry is a disqualifier. Then he removes his helmet and it reveals that he's a Black man. Basically, Judge Charles Murphy, who was a New York City magistrate who sat on the Comics Code Authority board, he specialized in juvenile delinquency. He was brought in basically as one of the people who got to determine the content that publishers were allowed to put out there. He objected to the astronaut being Black. He basically said, "Change that panel, or we won't approve the story," which basically in 1956 might have actually really caused publishers a lot of trouble. William Gaines, the publisher, and Al Feldstein, the writer, both got on the line with him and basically talked to him about this.

Andrew Shephard: They explained, "It has to be a Black guy. The story is about racial prejudice." Basically, Murphy was going to hold on this position until Gaines basically told him, "I will let the press know what your objection to this story being published is if you don't allow us to publish it." Murphy backed down. He then said something to the effect of, "Well, maybe you should remove the sweat glistening on him, basically." They told him that was stupid. Basically, the story was published, but that was actually the last comic that was published by EC Comics, which was having trouble with the type of content it was producing, which was pretty lured in a lot of instances. Tales from the Crypt, if you've seen the TV show, it's pretty representative of the type of stuff that was going on in their horror comics, but basically Gaines soon transitioned into doing Mad Magazine, which was enormously profitable for him. He basically, because it was a magazine, was not subject to the CCAs regulations.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, so you've got some negative stuff, but you also have ... Some of the earliest representation in the medium was there was a single issue that was published in 1947 called All-Negro Comics. It was founded by an African American journalist named Orrin Evans. It was like an anthology comic. It featured amongst its many stories, it had a lot of shorts. There was a character named Ace Harlem, who was a Black private eye in a pulpy [Chant Larian 00:09:03] tradition. Basically, he fought off zoot-suited thugs and it was like an adventure story. You also had a character named Lion Man, who is arguably the first African superhero, proceeds Black Panther by basically two decades. That book featured Black creators and Black characters and was designed to be a for us, by us type of thing. It was analogous to the pulp fiction that was being published in, say, The Pittsburgh Courier by the likes of George Schuyler. George Schuyler, under several pseudonyms, published a lot of pulp fiction in The Pittsburgh Courier. Basically, similar to that, unfortunately there was no second issue of All-Negro Comics.

Andrew Shephard:
My colleague, John Jennings, who himself is a phenomenal artist, he teaches at the University of California Riverside in their science and TechniCulture program within the English department, he also does comics himself. He's got a really cool series called Black Kirby, which takes silver age Marvel comics imagery, and does them with an Afrocentric spin. I would highly recommend checking out his stuff. It's really cool. Basically, he is also a historian of particularly Black comics. He has argued that all New York comics were blocked from being published as a series by racist distributors, and why don't publishers essentially interfering with their ability to get the materials to do that? Basically, these characters lay fallow. That potential got stymied. In the early days of comics, there was a dearth of representation for a variety of reasons.

Jana Cunningham: When did readers start to see this shift, this change in the way Black characters were portrayed in comic books?

Andrew Shephard: I would say one of the big sea changes was in 1966, Fantastic Four, Volume One Issue 52, a character that we all know quite well, Black Panther, premieres. This is the first Black superhero by a major publisher in the comic book industry, one of the big two. Basically, Black Panther debuts and he gets an interesting introduction. Basically, the first time we meet him there's the what is the convention of the genre, the hero versus hero fight. The Fantastic Four are coming off of a pretty major victory in their own title. Basically, the Galactus trilogy has just happened. Basically, they have just fought off a giant purple alien that eats planets that is older than the current existing universe. They are Marvel's premier superhero team. They, along with Spiderman, are the flagship characters for the line. Then basically, Black Panther single handedly in their own book takes them to school. I mean, he roundly defeats them.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, he does this as a test of their abilities to see if they would be useful allies for him for dealing with what would become a recurring adversary for him, Ulysses Klaw. It's this interesting introduction to this character. He's introduced as this genius polymath scientist, as a gadgeteer. In addition to being the king of his own sovereign nation, you get this introduction to Wakanda as being this hidden enclave within Africa that is technologically advanced. Now, granted in the original version of it, Wakanda reverse engineers its technology from stuff that Westerners have left behind. They store vibranium to do this. That would be re-con, that is to say retroactive continuity. Basically, it's what happens when you go back and rewrite a story to fit with your current storytelling agenda. Basically, that gets changed in the late '90s when Christopher Priest, who is the first Black writer to write The Black Panther title as an ongoing, basically reworks the character's origin story.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, it was a major shift for representation in comics. This was 1966. Soon after, in 1969, Gene Colen, who was the artist on Captain America at the time, expresses an interest in drawing Black characters to Stan Lee. Stan Lee creates a partner for Captain America, The Falcon, Sam Wilson, who is, if you're watching the live action Marvel cinematic universe stuff, is now Captain America. Basically, that character gets introduced in part because Gene Colen's just like, "It would be cool to draw a Black superhero." Then the Comics Code Authority starts to weaken around 1970, following Stan Lee basically essentially protesting some of its more draconian edicts. Long story short, Stan wanted to do an anti-drug story in Amazing Spiderman. The code opposed this on the ground that you can't mention drugs. He said, "That's really dumb," and just basically published it anyway and the sky didn't fall. Basically, that was ... They realized, we're not being strictly regulated by ... Say, no legal body is going to come in and punish us if we don't follow the codes edicts.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, that led to a loosening of the types of content that you could show. You got characters like Luke Cage, hero for hire, who had his own Netflix series basically, which was a response to the blaxploitation movie trend. Movies like Shaft, for example. He was specifically portrayed as almost a private investigator type. I mean, basically he was a hero whose services you can hire. There's a memorable story in which Dr. Doom hires him for a job and then tries to stiff him on payment. He shows up in Latveria, in Doom's home country, and basically famously says, "Where's my money, honey," and fights his way through the Doom stronghold to get paid. There was that. There was a character named Misty Knight, who was a former NYPD detective, who basically she lost her arm in an explosion and received a bionic prosthesis from Tony Stark that basically she uses to fight crime.

Andrew Shephard: She ends up teaming up with Luke and his partner, Danny Rand, The Iron Fist. Basically, you get Black Goliath, who could enlarge himself. Basically, he was the partner to Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, and Giant Man, who uses Pym Particles. He was his lab partner. You had those characters taking off at Marvel. You also had a pretty landmark Black Panther run from a guy named, gosh, Don McGregor, who basically said, "What if we really use this character to comment on political stuff?" Basically, so he's the guy that introduces Erik Killmonger as a villain, really fleshes out the character's rose gallery, develops Wakanda as a setting, and famously does a story where The Black Panther fought the Klan, fought the Ku Klux Klan.

Jana Cunningham: Oh, wow.

Andrew Shephard: He travels back to Georgia with his then girlfriend basically, and they run a foul of the Klan. There is a four issue arc where they do battle with him. I mean, and this is 1974. That arc was actually drawn by Billy Graham, who was the first artist to draw a Black Panther comic. Over at the Distinguished Competition, DC Comics, you have a character named Black Lightning who emerges. He has, as you would imagine, electrically oriented powers. Basically, he starts off, he's created by a writer named Tony Isabella. He starts off in Suicide Slum, which is basically the ghetto of Superman's metropolis, looking out for the community there. Basically, shortly after that you get John Stewart, who is the ... Well, he's often described as the Black Green Lantern, but basically he was introduced during Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams run on Green Lantern and Green Arrow. Basically, he initially has a more militant stance. The idea of having a Black guy with strong opinions on Civil Rights being introduced into this core of space cops is an interesting premise.

Andrew Shephard: He and Hal butt heads for a while before they develop this mutual respect and eventual friendship. You start to see this shift that really starts to happen in the late '60s, early '70s, well into the silver age and the early bronze age, that's due to shifting attitudes on racial politics. The Civil Rights Movement has gone on. I think the fact that the comic book industry, especially the superhero genre, was largely founded and written by Jewish Americans who themselves had a lot of experience dealing with racial prejudice. Basically, I think that's an enormous factor in why comics start to shift in terms of being more positive. I think that's a big deal. I think in the late '70s you see Jim Owsley, also known as Christopher Priest, get hired initially as an editor at Marvel Comics during Jim Shooter's run as editor in chief. Jim Owsley, under his other name, Christopher Priest, becomes the first Black writer at Marvel.

Andrew Shephard: He writes a pretty famous run on Power Man and Iron Fist, which is Luke Cage and Iron Fist teamed up, that really leads into them being the interracial friendship. It was very fondly remembered as definitive take on both of those characters. This was the early '80s when he's doing this. He writes a mini series on The Falcon that was published, I believe, in 1983. Basically, he becomes one of the first big names in comics to be a person of color. In the '90s, he revamps Black Panther as a character. He gets asked to do so by the editor of the company line, a guy named Joe Quesada, who's now the editor in chief of Marvel. Basically, Priest was skeptical because at this point Black Panther's reputation was not ... He wasn't an A-list character at this point. His initial response was, "The guy with the kitty ears? You want me to make him cool?" Then he proceeds to do so.

Andrew Shephard: I mean, when you look at the movie version, a significant amount of the material that you see in that is drawing upon, I would say, Christopher Priest's run and Don McGregor's run. Basically, he really goes back to the idea of this character as this insanely prepared genius polymath Wiz kid engineer, who is a master strategist and has contingency plan upon contingency plan. I used to joke with people before the movie came out. If I wanted to explain Black Panther to people, I would tell them it's like Eddie Murphy's character from Coming to America meets Batman. Christopher Priest really cements that version of him. You start to see that type of shift. Also, another figure starts to emerge in the late '80s, early '90s, initially working as an editor and then graduating to writing chores on books like Death Lock, is Dwayne McDuffie. Dwayne McDuffie is a pretty big deal in terms of Black representation in comics. He's also incidentally the half brother, or was the half brother, of Keegan-Michael Key from Key and Peel, just a random factoid.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, so Dwayne McDuffie, in the late '80s he's looking at the types of representation that's being offered to Black people and how stereotypical a lot of it is. One of the things that you might notice is that with a lot of these early characters, there's always Black such-and-such as part of the name. Black Panther, Black Lightning, Black ... It's like, did you notice that this character is Black? Basically, it's well intentioned, but it stands out as peculiar after a while and falling into some similar tropes. Basically, McDuffie puts out a mock pitch about Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers essentially, basically pointing out the proliferation of Black characters who are teenagers on skateboards that live in urban environments. At a certain point, I was like, there is this rut that people are getting in terms of representation. He does this in this snarky way.

Andrew Shephard: Then basically, he takes that dissatisfaction with the ways in which non-Black characters are represented in comics. He creates his own imprint at DC comics. He creates the Milestone line in 1993, which was a landmark. He invites a bunch of Black creators and people of color, for that matter, there were quite a few sympathetic white creators who came over too, to help him develop this new shared universe. Among them you had Denys Cowan, who was a prominent Black artist at the time. He'd done stuff with Black Panther. He had done a memorable run on The Question with Dennis O'Neill, which is phenomenal for anyone who loves Roshak from Watchman. The Question is the character that he was based upon. They do arguably the definitive take on The Question. I would recommend that. Not related to Milestone, but basically a ton of cool characters emerge out of this. I can go into some of those characters if you'd like to hear about them.

Jana Cunningham: Well, talk a little bit about Milestone Media. I mean, you've talked about how they came in and how they started, but how else did they create some representation change? Maybe that's through the characters that you're about to talk about, and maybe just talk about a couple of them to give an example to the listeners.

Andrew Shephard: Sure. One of the things that they did was there was an interest in creating characters that represented a broad spectrum of Black and minority experiences. You'd have like a character like Hardware, he was a genius engineer named Curtis Metcalf. This was a guy who's their answer to Ironman, but instead of being the owner of his own corporation, he worked for a guy named Edwin Alva. The name Alva seems like a nod to Thomas Alva Edison. Basically, in trying to get more of a stake in ownership in the inventions that he was creating for this corporation, he discovers that his boss is actually secretly a crime lord and supplying technology to the mob. He built himself a mechanical suit of armor to essentially thwart this guy, and basically is fighting crime on the streets of this fictional city, Dakota. Gets into questions of corporate America and how capitalism becomes complicit in certain forms of racism and systemic disadvantage-ment. Basically, you had characters like Blood Syndicate, which was the sort of premier super team at Milestone.

Andrew Shephard: Blood Syndicate was a really interesting concept because in the past you'd had ... Team dynamics are interesting in comics. You had The Fantastic Four, who are family. I mean, basically you had the X-Men, which was an ongoing metaphor for various suppressed groups, basically for ongoing Civil Rights struggles. You had Doom Patrol, which was like a disability metaphor. All of those characters are people who have strange relationships to their own body, and they're as much a support group as they are superhero team. With Blood Syndicate you had two gangs, basically two street gangs, the Paris Island Bloods and the Force Syndicate, who essentially they get exposed to an experimental mutagen while in the middle of this massive gang battle on a bridge that kills a lot of them, but the ones who survive end up with superpowers. They were exposed to this, basically it's a form of tear gas that was distributed by the police. Basically, the police bombard them with this stuff, and basically they wind up with powers.

Andrew Shephard: They decide to combine forces and they say, "Well, look, the police aren't doing a very good job of protecting our communities. What if we stopped fighting each other, banded together and policed our own?" They police Paris Island, they go, they bust crack houses. They deal with threats to this intercity community. Basically, they were a multinational, or a multiethnic, group. You had Black members. One of the main members who takes over as leader is a guy named Wise Son, who's a Black Muslim. You had a guy named Tech 9, who is Puerto Rican. You had characters from a variety of ethnicities being represented here. It was doing its own political slant on things. A character that I think listeners would probably know best of any of these was a character named Static, who got his own cartoon in the early aughts called Static Shock. You can still find it on HBO Max, I think. Basically, he was their Spiderman archetype, the team hero. He had electro powers too.

Andrew Shephard: Basically, he dealt with a lot of the usual, like girl troubles and bullies and balancing school and superhero life the way Spiderman did, but also basically it dealt explicitly with racial issues. Basically, his best friend and eventual love interest was a girl named Frida, who is Jewish. Around issue seven or so, Static, Virgil, he's starting to get interested in Black nationalism. He globs onto some, frankly, anti-Semitic stereotypes. This is our hero. He repeats some of this, basically not really thinking about how offensive it is, and she calls him out on it. Then basically an interesting thing happens in the comic. They go home after having this argument, and their parents talk to them about historical misconceptions between Black people and Jewish people, and the interaction between the two. Then they actually talk about it and come to an understanding. He's pretty apologetic about it. It's interesting because you actually see these conversations being played out, that basically there's this effort to educate people as much as there is to entertain.

Andrew Shephard: There's another character named Icon, who's interesting. He was basically like if Superman was a Black Republican. Basically, there's this alien, he crash lands on Earth in 1838. For people who are comic book nerds, you might note that's a hundred years before 1938, when Action Comics number one debuts, which is the first appearance of Superman. Basically, in his normal form, Icon looks basically like a giant muscle bound version of Kermit the Frog. He does not look Black, but basically he lands in this birthing matrix that changes him to look like the indigenous population of whatever world he lands on. Because an enslaved black woman finds him in 1838, it changes the baby in the matrix to a little Black baby. She raises him basically, and he's raised in slavery. He ends up fighting in the American Civil War. He goes by the name Augustus Freeman. Then because his species is very long lived, he has to reinvent himself several times as his own descendant. He becomes Augustus Freeman Jr, and then Augustus Freeman the third. Then by the 1990s, when the book starts, he's Augustus Freeman the fourth, and he's working as a lawyer.

Andrew Shephard: At this point, he lived through multiple iterations of the Civil Rights Movement. In particular, he's responded to Booker T Washington, more like pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, Atlanta compromised model of Civil Rights advancement. Basically, he lives in his mansion. He's very wealthy. He makes a good living as a lawyer. A bunch of Black teenagers break into his mansion to steal some stuff. One of them is a teenage girl who will eventually become his sidekick, Rocket. Basically, in the process of warding them off, she notices that he basically flies at them to ... He displays his powers in this way. She comes back and she asks him about his history and finds out that he's an alien. Then she says, "Well, you can do all this stuff, and you talk about basically how Black youth today basically aren't living up to their potential. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is and why don't you be a role model, put yourself out there? If you can do all these things and you can help our community and you don't, then basically, how are you complicit in all of this?"

Andrew Shephard: He takes that admonishment to heart. He reinvents himself as Icon and goes out there and has his views challenged basically, and tries to contribute to making the better world that he feels should exist. A number of these characters, that line ... Dwayne McDuffie was instrumental in developing that shared universe, much in the way that Stan Lee, along with his collaborators, helped shape the Marvel Universe in the 1960s. McDuffie has unfortunately passed since. I think that was one of the significant obstacles to getting it restarted for a long time, but the good thing is that Milestone Comics, as an imprint, has recently relaunched a number of Black creators, including Reginald Hudlin. Some of the original participants in Milestone have come back to bring back those characters. I mean, basically DC Comics is producing a lot of that stuff. Hopefully, it continues and basically the line flourishes and people go out and buy it.

Jana Cunningham: Oh, that's very cool. There is a lot to this topic that I feel like we could just go on and on about. You seem to know all of it and I find it very interesting. Especially, I don't think maybe a lot of people realize the vast history of comic books, and especially how Black people were represented throughout the beginning of comic books. I really appreciate this conversation. Tell our listeners what classes you are teaching, so if they want to learn more, they want to explore these topics a little bit. What are you teaching?

Andrew Shephard: Right now I'm on sabbatical, but I have taught a course on Black Panther, the long history of the character, starting with that initial Fantastic Four appearance through multiple iterations over the past 50 plus years up to, and including, the current film incarnation. That's English 2265. I've done that. I've taught a course on African American literature too, which is a course on what I'm calling the Afro speculative tradition, which is to say Black people's engagement with science fiction, fantasy and horror. There is some comic stuff in that, but also film in prose fiction, basically. That starts with W.E.B. Du Bois' science fiction offerings from 1920 in the form of The Comet, to stuff like Get Out by Jordan Peele, and Sorry to Bother You by Boots Riley. Basically, in that case, a century's worth of Black speculative fiction. Basically, I tend to focus on essentially the representation of Blackness in popular culture, as well as how people of color engage with these genres and use them to speak to their own concerns. In the past, I've taught on H.P. Lovecraft, who is not Black and actually infamously held some kind of anti-Black views.

Andrew Shephard: Not kind of, he just straight up did. Basically, talking about his legacy as a horror writer. He's enormously influential. If you read Stephen King or Clive Barker, or you've seen Ghostbusters, for example, you've seen something influenced by Lovecraft. Basically, talking about not only his legacy as an author, but the people who followed him and people who took some of his concepts, including people from historically marginalized groups like racial minorities, like people on the LGBTQ spectrum, and used his ideas to speak back against those prejudices. Basically, I've taught a course on steam punk that I might want to offer again, this time to undergrads, that deals with that genre's relationship to the age of empire and the potentially romantic notions of it that it might be celebrating, and how that starts to shift when the people who were historically oppressed during that era, racial minorities and women, basically start writing steampunk stories and start repurposing that subgenre to their own ends.

Jana Cunningham: That was Andrew Shephard, Assistant Professor of English. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu, and don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham: Thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. In this month, in honor of Women's History Month, I'll be talking to two women professors who are doing incredible work. First up is Sarah Yeo, Associate Professor of Communication. She specializes in science communication, specifically how emotions and humor affect attitudes towards science and technology.

Jana Cunningham: So, we talked last year shortly after you had received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how humor affects attitudes towards science, kind of focusing on social media. Do you want to give us an update on that study, and how it's going?

Sara Yeo: Yeah. That study is going really well, actually. There were two parts to that particular study. We were doing a survey experiment on public audiences, and we're done with that. We currently have a paper under review with those results, and we continue to work on the data analysis. The second part of that project is sampling scientists, getting scientists' attitudes and perceptions on using humor to communicate, and in general, how they communicate their science. So, we're currently working on that, and we actually are in the process of fielding that survey. We expect that to go out sometime in the next two weeks, so it's pretty exciting.

Jana Cunningham: Exciting. Yeah. That's great. So, let's talk a little bit about one of your most recent projects. You recently started your own podcast, [Planet SciComm 00:01:48]. Tell me a little bit about this podcast and what prompted you to start it.

Sara Yeo: So, the podcast, I have to say, was inspired by a data science podcast that I occasionally listen to called [Not So Standard Deviations 00:02:05], and it is two data scientists, one at an academic institution and the other in industry, kind of just having conversations about life as a data scientist in general and so this podcast Planet SciComm is a collaboration between myself, a scientist, a computational biologist at Pacific Northwest National Labs, Jason [McDermott 00:02:30], and a scientist at [Bayer 00:02:32], Patrick [Vido 00:02:33], and we met, I want to say, two years ago now, when Patrick invited us to serve on a panel at a very large microbiology conference. It was a joint conference at the [World Microbe Forum 00:02:49] and the American Society for Microbiology, and we had a really great time preparing for the panel and then we had a really great time during the conference, and as these things usually do, it sparked more questions and kind of this want for continuing conversation.

Sara Yeo: And so we just decided, "Well, let's try this podcast," and I had this idea of, "Well, let's try this kind of podcast where there is a researcher in science communication and we're all sort of related to science communication." I mentioned that Jason is a computational biologist but he is also a comic artist. He is the artist behind the Twitter account [Red Pen, Black Pen 00:03:33], and he draws comics about science, and he has publications actually that include his comics, so scientific publications that include his comics. So, he's a practitioner of science communication as well as being a researcher in computational biology. So, we just sort of get together, usually on Sunday mornings where I lock myself in my closet, because it is the quietest room in the house, and have conversations about science communication. And part of it is, "What is it like to be a researcher in science communication? What is it like to be someone who is doing science communication?"

Jana Cunningham: So, is your audience scientists, or to kind of help them with communicating their own science, or who are you talking to?

Sara Yeo: Yeah. I think I'm talking to scientists who maybe are interested in communication. I'm talking to science communication trainers, science communication practitioners, in a lot of ways, anyone who is sort of interested in science communication, which is just a very broad audience. And I think the idea about this is, "It is a casual conversation. Some of it is, "Get to know us as people and what we do." It's a little bit of opening the doors behind what it's like to be a science communicator, or somebody interested in science communication.

Jana Cunningham: And what is your hope, or where do you hope this podcast goes, or just what are your hopes for Planet SciComm?

Sara Yeo: There's a lot of intrinsic gratification, I think, for this, in that I get to think out loud, essentially, with somebody who might use my research, and I get to think out loud about the kind of challenges, big challenges that we face in science communication, and I just get to talk about them, maybe not necessarily come up with any solutions, but I have already found that it has influenced kind of my thinking process in my research. And I would hope that we really just continue to do this, partly because it's really fun but also that it helps us progress toward kind of working on some of these grand challenges that we have [inaudible 00:06:09].

Jana Cunningham: And so when is your next episode going to be released?

Sara Yeo: I've been trying to... Sometimes when you set up podcast [crosstalk 00:06:20], you have to check the box on how often you release each episode, and it's like, "Is it monthly?" I think it'll probably be semimonthly. We've done about one month apart so far, and we have a good slate of guests who are lined up and excited to come talk, and they consist of researchers and other science communication practitioners to other science communicators, and we're pretty excited just to have these conversations with a lot of people. One of the things, one of the grand challenges is that sometimes research and practice don't talk all that much in science communication. So, probably another one of these goals is to get that to happen more as well.

Jana Cunningham: And I think this is one of the great things with podcasts, just from having done a podcast for a few years, is that you don't have to basically adhere to any specific guidelines. You can kind of change it as you go. You can release one a month, two a month. You can have your guests on. You don't have to have your guests on. I mean, you can kind of change it as you see fit as you go along.

Sara Yeo: Yeah. And I really appreciate that. And I don't really have that much... I don't have any experience podcasting. This is a new endeavor for me and so it's also a learning process, and that's fun too.

Jana Cunningham: So, one thing I am interested in from hearing from you is, as someone who researches science communication, how do you yourself communicate your research to scientists? I mean, I think this podcast is a great idea, but I know you're doing a million other things. So, how do you yourself communicate what you are doing about communication in science, and how do you communicate that to scientists?

Sara Yeo: One of the things... And it's not just scientists, I think. It's also other science communicators who are not maybe at an academic institution... I try as much as possible to go to the places, to the conferences, or the events where there are going to be more science communicators. So, I am a faculty member in communication, but I don't just go to communication conferences. Recently, I just went to the AAAS Annual Conference, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I try to go to the spaces and get involved in kind of the discussions that involve broader groups, so not just communication scholars, the scientists who are interested. And this is how I've met my co-hosts on the podcast. I am involved in a Department of Energy and [Kavley F oundation 00:09:17] initiative around public engagement of basic science and so these types of conversations, I think, allow me to speak with other scientists who might be interested and don't know where to turn.

Sara Yeo: The other thing I found is that for communicators who are not in an academic institution, one of the barriers that I hear quite often to sort of obtaining and reading the research is that it's simply not available. It's just behind a pay wall. Journal articles are behind paywalls, and that's kind of where most of my work gets published.

Sara Yeo: And so, with our humor project, this National Science Foundation Funded one, we are going to create some more kind of easily disseminated materials in the form of infographics and things like that, white papers, things that are more easily accessible than journal articles, but the other thing I do is... And this is kind of a small drop in the bucket of this challenge... Is to say to any communicator who I interact with... And most of these interactions have been online because of COVID... I just tell them, "Hey, if you need an article, or... It doesn't even have to be my article... If there is some research that you think is going to help your practice, please feel free to just email me. Tweet at me and I will try to get it for you, or maybe I already have it."

Jana Cunningham: How do scientists respond, especially to when you're talking about using humor and social media? How do scientists respond to that? Is that something they want to do? Is it something they're hesitant of doing? Is it something they are completely unaware that they should be doing?

Sara Yeo: This is really a great question, and I think this is the point of our upcoming survey is we don't really have empirical evidence, or a lot of large scale kind of empirical evidence around how scientists feel about this. In my sort of anecdotal experience, and in conversations with scientists, they seem pretty excited about doing that. Trust is, as you know, a big, important part of being a communicator. It's to be a trusted source, and one of the dimensions of trust is this idea of warmth, of benevolence, and scientists score pretty high on other dimensions like competence and integrity, but they don't score particularly high on warmth. I mean, I think we've all heard, or we all, at some point, have had this vision of a scientist being sort of an objective, rational, kind of cold profession.

Sara Yeo: And so I think humor is one of those really easy ways. Humor is so ubiquitous. We use it all of the time. It's one of those easy ways to convey some sense of warmth as an individual, and of course, the details around that matter. So, there are questions around what happens if you use a certain type of humor like sarcasm. Maybe that doesn't play as well with certain audiences. What happens if you use a lot of self deprecating humor as a scientist? One of the things you hang your hat on is your credentials and your expertise, but does self deprecation undermine that? So, these are all open questions that are very exciting and I think will be really fun to investigate.

Jana Cunningham: Great. And so let's back up a little, or a lot. What led you to the field of science communication, because when I was listening to your podcast, I found out that necessarily wasn't your original goal as a graduate student. So, how did you get into science communication?

Sara Yeo: Thank you for listening. I mean, I'm still in the phase where I really don't expect anyone except my parents maybe to listen to this podcast, but thank you for listening. My first stint in grad school was as an Oceanography graduate student. I studied microbes in surface water. So, I got my Masters at the University of Hawaii, in Oceanography, and I moved to the University of Wisconsin then to get a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering, and kind of while I was at Wisconsin and in the Engineering Department, I had some sense that something was missing, which sounds so cliche, but there was something about the work that I was doing that had to do with microbe cycling carbon that didn't interest people that much, surprisingly.

Jana Cunningham: Weird.

Sara Yeo: Weird. And so I was thinking, "Well, this is so important. They're so important to our ecosystem and climate change, yet nobody seems to be as interested." And so I actually ended up taking an Engineering Professional Development course in outreach and public engagement, and that led me to science communication and then I ended up switching to life sciences communication, and I got a second Masters and eventually my Ph.D. in math communication, because I realized this is what was interesting and important to me, that people cared about the science I was doing, that it would hopefully make a difference.

Jana Cunningham: So, you have your NSF grant. You have this new, big project of your podcast. What next? What else are you doing, cause I know those aren't the only two things that are on your "to do" list?

Sara Yeo: Yeah. There are a lot of things on my "to do" list. And now I'm thinking maybe we talked before last year, because last year, I got a new NSF award, and I now have a collaboration with PBS Digital Studios.

Jana Cunningham: That's right, yes.

Sara Yeo: So, that is a thing that is on my "to do" list, this collaboration with PBS Digital Studios, where we're thinking about how scientists' identities and who they are as individuals might affect their communication. And so it's sort of like [AB Testing 00:15:38] for scientists in science shows... That will be on YouTube... And trying to expand the audience for science, so right now PBS Digital Studios, so they have content on YouTube primarily, and it's a whole series of different types of science shows, and they know that their audience is sort of what you might expect, very young, very male, very White and so thinking about, "How do we expand those audiences?" What are other groups of people in the population looking for when they go online and look for science information," and then testing with different hosts, what the different hosts look like, what else they might do in their communication strategies.

Sara Yeo: So, that's a big "to do" on my list. The other "to do" I've recently been interested in is reproducible research, so thinking about how we might replicate or reproduce some of the studies in social science in general, but communication in particular, for more robust findings.

Jana Cunningham: Awesome. Well, I know that you're very busy, very, very busy. So, I appreciate you taking this time to talk to me about all of your projects and specifically your podcast, which people can find on pretty much the big podcast platforms. Correct?

Sara Yeo: Yes.

Jana Cunningham: And it's Planet SciComm, S-C-I-C-O-M-M, for anyone who wants to go out there and find it.

Sara Yeo: Thank you so much.

Jana Cunningham: That was Sara Yeo, Associate Professor of Communication. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu, and don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham: Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Janet Cunningham with The University of Utah, college of humanities. And this month, in honor of women's history month, I'm talking to two women professors who are doing incredible work. First up with Sarah Young, associate professor of communication. And today I'm talking to Kim Kaphingst, professor of communication. Professor Kaphingst is a health communication researcher and the director of cancer communication research at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. She is currently conducting a study comparing two models of delivering cancer genetic services to primary care patients.

Jana Cunningham: Before we discuss your current study, talk a little bit about your research and what led you to health communication.

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, so most of my work is in communication of cancer information and cancer genetic information specifically, and I had a little bit of an unusual path. I actually have a degree in molecular and cellular biology, but then realized that I did not want to focus in bench science, but I loved science and I loved genetics. And this allows need to combine all of my different interests in how we communicate about cancer genetic information.

Jana Cunningham: You're currently conducting a study funded by the cancer moonshot initiative, comparing two models of delivering cancer genetic services to primary care patients. Tell me a little bit about this study.

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah. So this is a really interesting study that is allowing us to do two things. So working within two large healthcare systems to identify primary care patients who are eligible for genetic evaluation, but have never received cancer genetic services, and then comparing a standard care model, which is based on the normal model of genetic counseling to a more automated approach where we can reach more people outside of normal business hours and have some of the education done automatically rather than by a person and see which patients prefer as well as what the outcomes are with those two different approaches.

Jana Cunningham: So before we get into those different models, just a little bit of background information. So what are the barriers of providing genetic testing to those with a family history, but are unaffected?

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, it's a great question. There are a couple. So one is the usual model that has been used up until now, is that a member of the family who has had cancer themselves, so has been affected by cancer is the first person in the family tested. And then others who are unaffected and have not had cancer themselves are tested after that, which works great. If there is a living member of the family who is available for testing, but doesn't work as well, if there is not a living member of the family who has had cancer, if families just live far apart, which happens. And so what we're doing is trying to expand to people who have not had cancer themselves, but have a family history that suggests they might have a genetic risk.

Jana Cunningham: And so for the purposes of the study, how are you identifying those people?

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, so we are using, what's called a clinical decision support algorithm, which is a computer algorithm that searches the family history information that people already have in their electronic health records. So we're not actually even collecting new information. We're just looking at family history information that people have already given their doctor and is in their electronic health record. And the algorithm searches for people who based on family history, meet criteria for a cancer genetic evaluation. So that might be someone who had a family member, a mom, or a sister who had ovarian cancer and then would be eligible for testing themselves.

Jana Cunningham: Okay. And you're looking at two separate healthcare systems. And so tell me a little bit about... So first tell me which healthcare systems those are and why you've chosen those two.

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, so we have two pretty different healthcare systems. So we have here the U health system, The University of Utah's healthcare system. And we partnered with the NYU Langone healthcare system in New York. And that partnership was for a couple reasons. One, the systems are pretty different in structure, the degree of centralization, but they have a common electronic health record system. So the [inaudible 00:05:04] system. So it allowed us to use a similar algorithm for both sites, but with a really different healthcare system structure and patient population. So combined the best of both worlds, a common system, but really different characteristics.

Jana Cunningham: So now let's talk about the methods. So what are the two methods? So give us more information. You kind of touched on it earlier, but give us some specific details about the two methods you're using to compare delivering these genetic services, or as you deliver these genetic services.

Kim Kaphingst: Sure, yeah. So our control arm or the standard of care arm, is based on how we deliver cancer genetic counseling now. So that is usually a two appointment structure where someone would come in for what's called a pretest appointment, discuss their family history with a certified genetic counselor and learn more about genetic testing and what they could get out of testing and then make a decision about testing normally at that appointment. And then there's a second appointment where results are returned. And again, that's by a genetic counselor. That is a great model, except there are not enough genetic counselors to maintain that kind of model as we expand to different patients.

Kim Kaphingst: So we are comparing it to an automated, conversational agent or a chat-bot, an [auditing 00:06:32] information for the pretest deployment primarily. So going through some of this standard information about genetic testing and what information people could get out of genetic testing, to see if we could replace some of those more standard educational components with a computer, that can converse with, to some extent converse with patients.

Kim Kaphingst: And then I should say the result, so if we have a genetic finding, so if there's a positive result or an uncertain result, even in the chat-bot [inaudible 00:07:06], those are still delivered by a genetic counselor, but a lot of the automated education or the education is automated.

Jana Cunningham: Okay. So what sort of outcome are you looking for after the services have been delivered?

Kim Kaphingst: We have a few outcomes. So one of the primary outcomes for the study is, do people have genetic services? So what is the uptake of genetic services in these two arms? And we're looking that in a couple different ways. So first is, did people do the pretest, either the pretest education with the chat-bot, or a pretest appointment, just to see if they even did the pretest part, and then we're looking at whether or not they decided to test because not everyone who gets pretest counseling decides to test. And so we're looking for differences in both of those. And then after they get results back, we're looking to see if there are changes in the cancer screenings that people receive, and if those are different with the two approaches as well.

Jana Cunningham: Okay. And how long have you been doing this study or working on this study?

Kim Kaphingst: So we are in our fourth year, it is funded for five years, and we're just about midway through the fourth year. We were funded of course, during the COVID pandemic, but despite that, the study has gone really well. And we're almost back on timeline, even with the delays with COVID.

Jana Cunningham: Well, congratulations on that part.

Kim Kaphingst: Yes. It was a monumental team effort, I will say.

Jana Cunningham: So what have you found so far, or what part of what you have found so far, do you want to talk about? Or can you talk about, I should say.

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, we haven't looked at the main trial outcomes, but I think one of the things that was really surprising to me, was just how many patients there are in these two healthcare systems that are eligible for cancer genetic evaluation, without even collecting additional family history information. So we have found just under about 6,000 patients in the U health system, who are at least eligible for consideration for genetic counseling, and in about 16,000 in NYU. So a huge cohort of about 20,000 patients. And so I think it has showed us there's a real need for a way to reach those patients and deliver services.

Jana Cunningham: The one thing when I was reading about your study that I found interesting was, it also looks at how closely, or how race, ethnicity, and geographic location affect genetic services. How is that, talk a little bit about that side.

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, that was really important to us, because one of the things the prior literature has shown us is that individuals from minority racial ethnic groups and people who live in rural or frontier areas are right now less likely to have genetic services. They may not have access, or they may choose not to use those services even if they have access. And so we wanted to test the two different models, our standard of care model and our chat-bot model to see if the models operate the same or differently across these different groups. So we've addressed this in a few ways. We translated our chat-bots into Spanish language, for instance, so that patients who speak other languages could take advantage of it. But in the analysis, we'll be looking to see if our outcomes are different by race, ethnicity, and then where people live geographically.

Jana Cunningham: And so, is there anything else about this study that I'm missing or that you would like people to know?

Kim Kaphingst: I think that the main thing about this study is, it's a large team of people at the two institutions. And I think it's been a really unique opportunity for me as a communication professor, to work with people from the department of biomedical informatics, from our fantastic cancer genetics group or our genetic counselors. So it's been really fun to work on this large interdisciplinary team and bring communication expertise and work with people who have so many other areas of expertise.

Jana Cunningham: And before we close, are you currently teaching courses? And if so, what are they?

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah, so this semester, I'm teaching COMM 5117, which is a class on how you design health communication campaigns. And I also, not this semester, but most semesters teach COMM 5118, which is health literacy. So I have been able to teach a lot of really fun health communication classes, which I enjoy very much.

Jana Cunningham: And probably right now with communicating COVID, that's probably some interesting conversations that happen in your classes.

Kim Kaphingst: Yes, it's been very interesting. I teach COMM 3115, which is communicating science health and environment. And as you can imagine, a lot of those conversations are about COVID what's gone well and what hasn't gone so well in communication about COVID.

Jana Cunningham: Yeah. What an interesting time for health communication. I mean, it probably always is, but especially now.

Kim Kaphingst: Yeah. If anything, I think it is highlighted how important it is.

Jana Cunningham: Right, absolutely.

Kim Kaphingst: Yep, yep, absolutely.

Jana Cunningham: That was Kim Kaphingst, professor of communication. For more information about The University of Utah, college of humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. And this month in recognition of Earth Day on April 22nd, I'm talking with Maximilian Werner, Associate Professor and lecturer of writing and rhetoric studies about his recent book Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death and Coexistence in the American West. Professor Warner teaches professional writing, environmental writing, and writing about war. He's an award-winning teacher, an author of seven books.

Jana Cunningham:
So in your book, you document your two and a half years of studying and following a Wolf pack in Centennial Valley, Montana, and reflect on what you kind of discovered and the people you encountered along the way. So before we launch into any other questions, I am really eager to hear about your experience tracking this wolf pack. How you settled on this specific pack and just what that experience was like.

Maximilian Werner:
Well, it might help your audience to, first of all, be able to imagine where the Centennial Valley is in relationship to Yellowstone national park, because it's actually considered part of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. And it's also directly relatable to why it is that wolves are sometimes found in this particular area.

Maximilian Werner:
So if you go basically due west from the farthest most point of Yellowstone National Park, you then enter the Centennial Valley of Montana. And one of the things that's important about the Centennial Valley, other places like it, although I guess there really are no other places like it ultimately, is that it serves as a corridor, a dispersal corridor for not only wolves, but also other animals, including grizzly bears as well.

Maximilian Werner:
But to answer your question specifically, I first learned out the possibility of a wolf pack in that area from my friend and I guess teacher, I guess you would call him Bill West. And Bill West, who I talk about at length in the book at the time was the project leader for the Red Rock Lakes Wildlife Refuge.

Maximilian Werner:
And Bill, because he's basically the eyes and ears of the Centennial Valley community he had heard of some Wolf sightings in that area. And so basically on that information alone, I went up in I think it was sort of late 2016 and just wandered out into the general area where he had said that there were some wolf sighting and that was pretty much the beginning of that story.

Jana Cunningham:
And so how do you go about tracking a wolf pack?

Maximilian Werner:
Well, so it was quite an affair because I think part of Bill West's teaching style was giving me absolutely the minimal amount of information so as to allow for the greatest learning opportunity. And so, as I indicated, he basically just gave me the sort of general area and then really all I came down to was me just getting out there and listening and looking for tracks and smelling and looking for scat. And so over the months I gradually began to put together the pieces and figured out where sort of the general area of where the wolves were denning. But it was only after I had encountered things like hair that might have been caught on a strand of barbed wire, for instance, and then later tracks. And then sort of the culmination of the process I think was when I figured out where they were traveling.

Maximilian Werner:
And I set up a camera trap, the only one I had and managed to capture the entire pack on camera track moving through around midnight at night, presumably on their way over into Idaho. So it was a long process and it really just started with the rumor. And then I heard them. And then I didn't realize it until many months later after I figured out where the den was, that the first night I was in the Centennial Mountains, I had actually seen them too crossing the road, this logging road where I was, but I didn't realize it until much later when I was looking at a map and realized that the spot where they crossed the road was actually just directly above, a quarter mile above their den site. So it was very interesting, just the process of discovery and putting all these pieces together with very little put from anyone other than my own agency and my own curiosity really is what led to it.

Jana Cunningham:
And you had never tracked a Wolf pack before, you were just kind of there doing it, learning as you went.

Maximilian Werner:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had done a writing residency in the Centennial Valley as part of the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Education Center back in, I think that was 2013. I think it was 2013 or 2014. And had learned a little bit about the Valley at that time, but had very little conversation with anyone about the presence of wolves and grizzlies. But then of course, as the years went on and I spent more and more time in the Valley, I became more interested. And then Bill West knew of my interest and that's ultimately why he alerted me to the possibility of the presence of these wolves.

Maximilian Werner:
And I should add though, too, that was a pretty big deal because one of the things you learn very quickly in places like Centennial Valley, places where animals don't have protections from hunters and trappers and so on, is that the information about the whereabouts of wolf packs and therefore wolf dens, it's confidential. Technically, it's confidential information because if that information were to get into the wrong hands, I guess wrong is a matter of perspective, obviously. But it could very well end in the extermination of the entire pack. So he was really trusting me, I think when he alerted me to the possibility of wolves.

Jana Cunningham:
Wow. And so you had mentioned grizzlies is obviously part of your book, so you've encountered... So what other animals did you encounter and learn about throughout researching and following this wolf pack?

Maximilian Werner:
Well, so as the title indicates, I mean, probably the star of the show really was the grizzly bear. Actually, I had a grizzly bear encounter when I was in the Valley and that was special for multiple reasons. But one of which was because I'd never seen a grizzly in the wild obviously, and that was a pretty big deal. And the other part is that it was done safely from a safe distance and there was nothing negative about it. It was just had the opportunity to watch a grizzly, a sub-adult male grizzly kill in a meadow below my camp for about 25 minutes. And then he flanked my camp and then went off into the woods. And that was the end of it. But as a result of that, and also as a result of conflict with grizzly bears and wolves alike, I spent a good deal of my time focusing on and learning about them, but not just them.

Maximilian Werner:
I also spent some time observing and doing research on sheep and cows. Really I think most people would agree are sort of the source of the conflict in that valley and other places throughout Montana and Idaho. But then also skunks and deer and mountains bluebirds. I mean, basically any animal that I came across that gave me reason to ask questions and I guess that's a pretty common thing to happen when you're in a place like that. So it was neat. It was a neat experience. And I was continually amazed by all the different things that not only did these animals do, but how much those things had been studied and explained by scientists working in the field. Information that I don't really think finds its way to perhaps the people that need it most.

Jana Cunningham:
In the description of your book it says, "How animals are treated depends on the stories people tell about them." So who are these people that you met, or the people you met, and what are their stories?

Maximilian Werner:
Well, so as part of my process, I made it a point at every turn to engage as many people as I possibly could. So as to get the completest picture of life in the Valley and the many different ways of characterizing wildlife conflict, which was basically my focus. I was looking at how it was that people in the Valley were attempting to coexist with these apex predators. And so, as a result of that, I already mentioned a little bit about Bill. Bill though, I think, deserves a little bit more time if only because as the project leader, he really represented the views of pretty much everybody living within that valley.

Maximilian Werner:
And then also visitors to the Valley as well, or to the Red Rock Lakes Wildlife Refuge. And so that was sort of my first opportunity to work with a biologist who was actively working in the field, but then also negotiating the demands of that humans put on places like that. So that was really instructive for me. I learned a tremendous amount from him. But then there were others too, who I think were more... If we think of the apex predator, wildlife conflict as a kind of continuum, where on one end you have the self-professed wolf haters. And then on the other hand you have of the wildlife lovers.

Maximilian Werner:
I would place Marcy a self described cattleman in her entire life, somewhere sort of in between that. Her views, I think were more sympathetic with the agricultural community's interests. But at the same time, she was extremely gracious with her input and her feedback on questions, conversations that we had had in person. But then also texting and really just helped me to better understand why it is that the agricultural community looks at... Not that the agricultural community is a monolith, because it's not, I mean, there are lots of different mentalities that are represented by the ranching community. But she helped me to understand at least that community, that she was most closely associated with.

Maximilian Werner:
But then another interesting character to have come along was Carter Niemeyer and Carter Niemeyer is really quite famous, I would say in the context of wolf management in general, but then also sort of wildlife management as well. And Carter he was a member of the embattled Wildlife Services Agency before it actually became Wildlife Services.

Maximilian Werner:
And Wildlife Services is the entity responsible for removing problem animals from the landscape. And so they are often viewed as basically the tool of the agricultural community. And so Carter was a member of that agency for many, many years, and then he later retired and then notably became a wolf advocate. So he's kind of an interesting story in that case, but we actually brought him to the Taft-Nicholson Center. So that was really cool because a lot of people got to hear from him. And a lot of people in the audience had never, I think had had the pleasure to hear his ideas and so on. But then there are other people as well. I don't know how much time we have, there were a lot of... Do you want me to wrap that answer up?

Jana Cunningham:
Well, I mean, we'll let people read the book and then they can kind of meet some of these characters.

Maximilian Werner:
There's a lot of other characters, including ranch managers and law enforcement. So there are many different perspectives represented.

Jana Cunningham:
I definitely want to get to this question of how some of these stories contribute to the extinction of large predators and how some of them create protection and value. Can you go over that a little bit?

Maximilian Werner:
Yeah, sure. Well, so I think the wolf is a perfect example of an animal, a species really, that has suffered its fair share of destructive storytelling. And so as I suggested earlier in our time together there's a continuum I think of wolf opponents, I guess you could say. And sort of at the extreme end of that are the people that hate wolves and basically want them wiped away from the landscape. And part of how they signal that perspective is by describing them as these sort of mindless land sharks that oftentimes just kill for the fun of it. And as evidence of that, they'll cite the fact that sometimes when wolves get into sheep they'll kill far more than what they could ever pop eat in a single sitting.

Maximilian Werner:
But we also know that... And that by the way, is what's described or known as surplus killing the idea that wolves just kill for the fun of it. But we know that that's simply just not what's happening. And that really what's happening is a number of things are going on. An alternative story would be to point out how part of what is happening when wolves engage in that activity is that they are perhaps showing their younger members of their pack how to kill. That's one thing that's going on. But research has also indicated that oftentimes the wolves will be scared off these kills before they can actually finish feeding on them. And not only that, but as we know, wolves and other predators will return to kills over and over and over again.

Maximilian Werner:
So the idea that they're just doing it for the fun of it, I think, is absurd. But for whatever reason, it's continued to appeal to a certain faction of people who are looking for reasons to, again, exterminate wolves from the landscape. But bears, grizzly bears suffer a similar sort of mentality. And one of the things that I heard when I was up there is reference to what are called so-called bad bears, and then also good bears. And bad bears are bears who get into chicken coops and who eat grain out of silos or who kill sheep or whatever. Things that are contrary to human interests and good bears of course, are the ones that stay out of those troubles. Or stay out of those problems.

Maximilian Werner:
But the irony of course of that is that bad bears are simply responding to the conditions that humans have created. And so whether that's leaving out attractants on the landscape, something, by the way that Centennial Valley is very good at not doing. Or leaving dog food out or not checking on animals adequately, these are all opportunities for bears and for domestic livestock to get into trouble. So lots of different way of talking about it, but those to be two of the more salient.

Maximilian Werner:
Well I know for instance, that at the time Lewis and Clark came west, that grizzly bears were here in Utah and throughout the west. Their range was here. And of course, many other animals as well. But of course, we also know that shortly thereafter began an extermination campaign. And so I mean, I would like to think that... An extermination campaign of the early 19th century, mid 19th century and on. But I would like to think that conditions have improved for predators, apex predators in that time, or up until the present. And I suppose in many ways they have, because at the time, for instance, that grizzly bears were re-listed, I think there were something like 50 the park, in Yellowstone National Park, and now there are several hundred.

Maximilian Werner:
And it's sort of from the point of view of many, I think working in the opposite direction where we've got a lot of bears and not enough space to accommodate them. So they're ending up in places, all points from there, west and north, and of course south in Idaho and so on. But at the same time, although those numbers have increased with the grizzly bear there are active and ongoing attempts on behalf of states like Wyoming and Idaho to begin a grizzly bear hunt.

Maximilian Werner:
And then, and of course, I mean, since I published this book in 2019, or whenever it was, the bottom has just completely fallen out on the wolf situation. And that's because states like Montana and Idaho have both started moving in a direction that's more akin to the practices of their Eastern neighbor, Wyoming. And Wyoming is notorious as being a black hole for wildlife. So it's been disheartening to see how that has happened over the last few years. And as a result, I mean, I really don't know how things are going to turn out for these apex predators.

Jana Cunningham:
So one thing your book explores is how humans should reevaluate their place in the natural order to maybe kind of help with this. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it can place a greater value on the rights of these animals?

Maximilian Werner:
Well sure. So I think that the first thing that... I mean, I'm just speaking for myself. The first thing that I found useful is the process of thinking of myself as a species. I know that that sort of goes without saying among, among many people. But my sense is that too few of us perhaps even recognize ourself as a species. Because the moment you do that, the moment you think of yourself as a species and not as something separate from, or other than the larger community of common descent, then that creates a whole new set of responsibilities and questions and things that we might do in an effort, not so much to emphasize our differences. I mean, I think it was Darwin who had said that were special animals.

Maximilian Werner:
And by that, he meant that we can reason. So we're not driven solely by instinct. But at the same time, I think that we have a responsibility as the species that finds itself in charge to recognize the ways in which we share many of our, not necessarily our desires, but many of our values and our habits, our tendencies with other animals as well. And the moment you begin to broaden and enlargen that story, it comes with added difficulty and responsibility, but then it also allows for a world that is much more... I mean, we always talk about inclusivity. I mean, this really, I think, goes to the heart of that whole idea that that's how you achieve inclusivity is by recognizing the way in which all things are connected. And perhaps not spending as much time emphasizing their differences.

Jana Cunningham:
Before we end, before we close, I just wanted to give our listeners a chance to know that if they're interested in learning more about your book, reading your book, they can come to an actual live book launch on Friday, May 27th at Sam Weller Books at 6:00 PM, correct. And you'll be there.

Maximilian Werner:
Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to seeing people, if they can make it out, that would be great.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Maximilian Werner Associate Professor and Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, his book Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death and Coexistence in the American West can be found on Amazon. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.

Jana Cunningham:
Hello, thank you for joining me on Humanities Radio. I'm Jana Cunningham with the University of Utah College of Humanities. And this month, in recognition of Earth Day, I'm talking with Carlos Gray Santana, Associate Professor of Philosophy, about the next proposed geologic time unit, the Anthropocene, which means human new epoch. Recently, professor Santana has been researching and teaching the two-way interaction between how science classifies the world and how we as a species, see ourselves in relation to non-human nature. The current epoch is called the Holocene, which began more than 11,000 years ago. Now a panel of scientists have proposed, and even declared a new epoch or geologic time unit, the Anthropocene. What does the Anthropocene mean and why the proposed move?

Carlos Gray Santana:
Yeah, so the term Anthropocene has become really popular in a lot of context, and it's used to mean a bunch of different things. In a lot of places, just in public discourse, it's used just as a synonym with the environmental crisis or climate change. And it's interesting questions about why it is that people would want to use this funny sounding word. It's not typically what it means for those things, rather than just talking about the environmental crisis of climate change. But what I'm particularly interested in as a philosopher of science is, not so much the broad use of the concept or the term, but instead, the way it's being debated and used, specifically within the science of geology. So geologists have this consensus, single recognized, officially designated way of carving up Earth's history called the geologic timescale.

And it's based on identifiable changes in the layers of rock that represent the history of the earth. And there is a formal process that goes through various professional organizations of geologists by which proposed new units of the geologic timescale get officially recognized. Now, the Anthropocene is a proposal that we are no longer living in that geologic epoch, the Holocene, which began, to put it in layman's terms, at the end of the last Ice Age. Instead, we've entered a point of geologic history when the layers of sediment and rock that are forming right now, are going to look very different because of things that humans are doing. Hence, the idea of this human epoch. This is controversial. For over a decade now, there has been a group of scientists officially designated by what's called the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

The people who approve any changes to the geological time scale, they've put together a working group on the Anthropocene. And the working group on the Anthropocene has come out overwhelmingly in favor of recommending that we adopt this and designate that this new epoch has begun, but there's two kinds of controversy surrounding this proposal, which hasn't become an official part of the time scale yet. One controversy is, exactly when the Anthropocene would've started. So what geologists are particularly interested and is not a question like, when did climate change begin to accelerate, or when did the environmental crisis begin in modern times?

What they're interested in is particularly the question of, when is there going to be a marker in the Earth's history, as recorded in those layers of sedimentary rock? So one proposal is that we mark the beginning of the Anthropocene in 1945, when the first atomic bombs were detonated, because the signature of the radioactive isotopes that were spread across all the world through the atmosphere, by atomic and later nuclear explosions, that signature will be detectable to geologists for millions and millions of years in the future, and be a clear boundary line in the rock.

Other people think that we should look for signatures that have to do with the beginning of the industrial revolution, or even the beginning of the exchange between the Old World and the New World in 1492. The idea there is something like, chickens are an Old World animal that, after 1492, you're going to start seeing their fossils in New World sediments. And corn is a New World plant, and after 1492, you're going to start finding fossilized corn in sediments that formed after 1492, in the Old World. So, one thing that geologists are debating is, what sort of geologic marker should we be looking for? And according to that marker, when does the Anthropocene start?

But the other part of that debate and the part I'm even more interested in, is whether or not we should actually recognize the Anthropocene as a new epoch. Some geologists are skeptical that the types of effects that humans are having on the planet right now are geologically significant enough to justify designating a new epoch, and a lot of researchers including myself, don't actually think that what we're seeing is some nice, hard break with the Holocene, that the Holocene begins more than 11,000 years ago, around the same time that humans begin practicing agriculture. And to a lot of us, it looks to us as if the mark that humans are leaving on the geologic record actually begins back then. And so, the Anthropocene is really the same thing as the Holocene. No need to designate a new epoch.

Jana Cunningham:
So what does the Anthropocene say about how humans see their relationship to nature?

Carlos Gray Santana:
Yeah, that's a good question. This is another important area of debate about this, and one where a lot of social scientists and humanities researchers have planted a stake in what could have been a debate internal to the earth sciences. So when you hear Anthropocene, you get this idea that, what that word means is, the point in the Earth's history when humans become the dominant, driving force in the Earth's ecological and geologic processes. And as I mentioned, whether or not that's actually the case is already a little bit debatable, but it's certainly true that a lot of us, meaning the people in general, do see the planet as having been put under humanities thumb, that we are now the overlords of everything, for better or for worse, and designating our current time period, the Anthropocene, suggests that and reinforces that idea.

Some of us think that this is problematic for a number of reasons. One common idea that's increasingly popular in the environmental humanities for instance, is that there's something really misleading about the focus on humanity in general, in the term Anthropocene. That this relationship of domination towards nature that is leading to all of these earth system changes, is not driven by humanity as a species, it's driven by a subset of humanity. It's driven by, depending on who you ask, industrialists or capitalists or colonialists, or the 1%. And the right way of seeing the breakdown of our productive relationship with nature, is not to say it's a species wide problem. But instead to say, "Oh, no, this is actually driven by a small subset of humanity." But for me, one of my reservations about the term Anthropocene is, I don't like how it de-centers what you might call the agency of the non-human world, and centers just humanities, power and control over nature.

It's true that we, as humans, are having massive planet-wide, geologic level effects on the world, but this doesn't mean that the world is under our management. The non-human world is still doing its own thing and it's responding in, often surprising and interesting and powerful ways, to the things that our species is doing. So I worry about using a label that might get people thinking that we're more in the driver's seat, than we actually are. We're definitely making a mess, but that doesn't mean that we're in control of the direction we're going. There is a subset of people who have embraced the idea of the Anthropocene and who even identify themselves as, in favor of what they call a good Anthropocene, where they take this idea that we're in the driver's seat very seriously, and just say, "So now, all we need to do is drive well." That the solution to the environmental crisis is just to micromanage the planet in an intelligent way.

Jana Cunningham:
How does this new geologic timescale impact science communication and how topics such as climate change are communicated?

Carlos Gray Santana:
Like everything else in this area, the answer to that question is controversial. Certainly a lot of researchers, both in the sciences and the humanities think that it's really important that theologists sufficiently recognized the Anthropocene, precisely because it will give the backing of this group of scientists to, in a way that pushes against climate change, skepticism and denialism. And for example, a few years ago, there was an editorial in the leading science journal, Nature, that more or less made this case, in the type of statement that I think it's very rare to see from leading scientists. So some of these leading scientists said, whether or not the geologic facts really bear out that were in a new epoch, we should still recognize the Anthropocene, just as a way of encouraging people to take climate change and the environmental crisis seriously.

Now, I'm skeptical about this because there's already a well publicized consensus among scientists about climate change. If it were possible to reach climate skeptics and denialists, just by letting them know that the scientists all agreed that climate change is real and caused by humans, that we would've reached them a long time ago. And I don't think having a funny, sounding hard to understand word being endorsed by a slightly less relevant set of scientists is going to improve anything. I think this is an example of an understandable, but common misconception of what good science communication looks like. So we all understand that science communication fails a lot of the time. We look around at climate skeptics and anti-vaxxers in just broad ignorance of the scientific facts and think, "Oh, there's some failure of communication between the scientific results and translating those results and getting them out to the people, in general."

And I'm not saying there isn't some failures on that account, but that's, I think the wrong focus for us when we're trying understand why people don't trust and understand science. I think the reason where people don't trust or understand science, that they don't do so, is the same reason why people don't trust or understand anything. What is it that we trust and understand? We trust and understand things that we ourselves, are familiar with and are involved in. And what good science communication looks like to me, is having a scientific process that the people are involved in, that the failures of science communication we have, are because we have created and this varies a bit from society to society. I think it's particularly with that in the United States, we've created a set of scientific institutions that are almost utterly inaccessible to lay people.

That we expect that everything that happens internal to science, just happens internal to science and all the public gets to see is the results. The public doesn't decide which scientific projects get funded. They have very little say in what questions scientists are asking or think are important. We're experimenting in a few domains with a little bit of citizen science, where citizens actually participate in some of the production of scientific knowledge, but even in those domains, oftentimes the so-called citizen scientists are really just treated as free labor, than actual expert contributors through the scientific questions.

And so, I don't think you improve a deficit in the scientist communication just by slapping down a new, long word, and then hoping people are of a sudden, are convinced. I think we actually have to think about changing the institutions of science and getting the broader public involved in everything from science funding to designing experiments, to evaluating and publish results. And there are people here and there who are experimenting with models for doing this. And this is where I, as a philosopher of science, where I'm really excited about the potential to improve, not just science communication, but I think just improve science in general.

Jana Cunningham:
Right. So do you think the term itself, Anthropocene, could be detrimental to the public in the way that they view the environment, possibly making them complacent? Or how do you feel about that?

Carlos Gray Santana:
Yeah, so I have two things to say about this. One is, and this is something I've argued in print, is that while we might be living in the Anthropocene, we're better off not officially recognizing it yet. And this is because I think the Anthropocene works better as a threat than a promise, that it's still possible for us... Even while we're making it harder and harder for ourselves, but it's still possible for us to pull back on a lot of the massive environmental changes that we're causing. It's still possible for us to, for instance, restrict the amount of warming from climate change to a couple degrees, centigrade. And if we do this, the scope of the geologic changes we cause might not be epoch making.

And I think that should still be our goal. And we shouldn't just go around telling people that, to make a bad pun, that drastic changes that the Anthropocene would be designating are set in stone. I have a second reason too, for worrying that this might make people complacent or at least shift their focus in the wrong way is, and I get back to what I was mentioning earlier about the Anthropocene convincing people that were just in the driver's seat, that all the power in Earth's systems lies with humans is, I actually think it's really important for us to recognize the power that continues to exist in non-human nature, to recognize that even as we tear down the wilderness, wildness is still all around us.

One way I sometimes talk about this with my students is, and in some ways what the environmental crisis represents is, it represents the decay of our relationship with non-human nature and where we have become abusive for its non-human nature. But in a situation of abuse, the thing to do is not to de-emphasize the agency of the abuse party and emphasize the power of the abuser. If you really want to fight against the abuse, it's important to recognize the agency of, in this case, nonhuman nature, and to emphasize it's power to adapt and respond to us. And a lot of what I'm excited about in my work right now, is where scientists are identifying the ways in which nature is adapting and responding to us in ways that can provide us with hope, and that I think it's important that, as we communicate to the public, that we communicate to the public that overcoming the environmental crisis is just about us wielding our power more benevolently, it's about relearning how to work with nature, rather than just extracting from it.

Jana Cunningham:
So do you think there's a chance that the next epoch might possibly not be the Anthropocene, far in the future?

Carlos Gray Santana:
Yeah, so there's a famous paper by the science study scholar, Donna Haraway, where she suggests that the Anthropocene isn't actually going to be an epoch, that it's going to be just a short term disaster, a geologic flip, just that either we get our act together and we relearn how to have that healthy relationship with non-human nature, or we don't, and we really screw ourselves over. And either way, the Anthropocene is not going to last very long, and it's going to look some something more like, in the geologic record, it's going to look like something that just happened briefly and caused a lot of damage, like a major asteroid impact or a big volcanic eruption, that humanity might be an acute disease on the face of the planet and not a long term one.

And that's quite possible, if that's the case, the Anthropocene just ends up looking, in the theologic record, like just a weird stripe that happened in the Holocene and the Holocene will continue for a long time. And I can't predict the long term future. I try to be optimistic about the environmental crisis and think we're not going to all drive ourselves extinct in the next couple hundred years, but that's certainly possible. And if that happens, I don't think there's an Anthropocene, I think Haraway is right, and we just have this stripe of disaster.

Jana Cunningham:
That was Carlos Gray Santana, associate Professor of Philosophy. For more information about the University of Utah College of Humanities, please visit humanities.utah.edu. And don't forget to subscribe to Humanities Radio.