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Alison Saar named Jo Hockenhull Distinguished Lecturer for 2022

Printmaker and sculptor Alison Saar will deliver the distinguished lecture for the Jo Hockenhull Lecture series at 4:30 p.m., Thursday Feb. 10.

Saar will discuss the connections between art and social justice as she provides an overview of her work in sculpture and printmaking for the event, organized by the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), the Fine Arts Department, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU.

The Hockenhull lecture series was launched in 1996 by the Women’s Studies Department in collaboration with the Department of Fine Arts to honor Jo Hockenhull, a WSU emeritus professor of Fine Arts who served as director of Women’s Studies for more than a decade. At WSU, Hockenhull focused on building programs and initiatives supporting diversity, the liberal arts, free speech, and critical thinking. Past lecturers have been visual artists, poets, and performance artists who have emphasized the important connections between art, social justice, and political practice. They have included artists such as Arshia Fatima Haq, Marie Watt, Alma Lopez, Faith Ringgold, Octavia Butler, and the Guerilla Girls, to name a few.

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WSU announces Visiting Writers schedule for spring 2022

Washington State University announces this spring’s virtual Visiting Writers Series, a collaboration between WSU’s Pullman and Vancouver campuses.

Each presentation below will take place at 6 p.m. on the date listed via YouTube Live. For more information on series presenters, including the YouTube links to upcoming readings, visit the WSU Visiting Writers Series website.

The WSU Visiting Writers Series brings noted poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction to campus for creative readings, class visits, workshops, and collaborative exchanges across intellectual and artistic disciplines. All talks in the series are free and open to students, faculty, staff, and the broader community.

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WSU cannabis research innovations at Science Pub Feb. 8

Carrie Cuttler.
Cuttler

From vapor self-administering-rodents to personal apps and Zoom smoke sessions, Ryan McLaughlin and Carrie Cuttler have had to get creative to study cannabis. The Washington State University researchers will discuss the legal challenges and the novel workarounds they’ve developed in a Science Pub talk at 6 p.m. on Feb. 8 at Paradise Creek Brewery and on Zoom.

“We need this research urgently because these high potency products are being sold, and they’re very popular,” said Cuttler, an assistant professor of psychology. “As researchers, we have our hands tied and can’t really touch these products. It’s important to find workarounds, so that we can start to better understand their acute effects because there’s really been no research on them.”

Cuttler takes her studies out into the “wild” to better understand the effects of cannabis people actually use. She’s analyzed user-reported data from the Strainprint app and recently used Zoom to track and test psychological effects of cannabis on the users.

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‘Work is the most important way of proving your worth,’ and it’s making Americans miserable: professor

Jennifer Sherman.
Sherman

In the early 2000s, Jennifer Sherman, a professor of sociology at Washington State University, went to study a poverty-stricken mountain town in Northern California for her thesis.

What she found upon meeting folks on the ground was that “every interview, people just talked about their own work ethic, somebody else lacking work ethic, or the value of hard work,” she tells Grow. Even in the absence of jobs, work remained key in measuring human value. With whatever external proof they could find, “people really, really did make the big show of letting me know that, ‘I’m a worker,’” she says.

Researchers and psychologists point to 3 pillars of messaging in American culture that hugely shape this thinking: the Protestant work ethic, the emphasis on individualism, and what gives one status in the States.

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WSU’s nuclear reactor pool gets a new coat

The tank that holds WSU’s research nuclear reactor will soon be coated with a new, flexible epoxy lining without the reactor ever having to leave its watery home.

The university’s Nuclear Science Center has a unique reactor pool: a relatively large, rectangular concrete-walled tank about 25-feet deep and filled with 65,000 gallons of water. Near the bottom, the glowing blue reactor core rests in a square box. It’s hooked to a bridge on a track so it can be moved to one side of the pool while work is done on the other, keeping it constantly under several feet of protective, highly deionized water.

The work, which started last week at the Dodgen Research Facility on the Pullman campus, should take about five weeks, but it’s the result of a much longer process.

Xiaofeng Guo.
Guo
Liane Moreau.
Moreau

The Center has also expanded lab space, and two WSU faculty, Xiofeng Guo and Liane Moreau, who work in chemistry and materials development, are setting up work there.

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